Malediction - The Curse of the Bay View Hotel

Melodrama is "excitement, exaltation of virtue and poetic justice …. spiced with a little pathetic humanitarianism and a dash of ghostliness". Allardyce Nicoll (1966)

On 18 July 1874, Mrs Charlotte Boseley, landlady of the Bay View Hotel, Wakapuka, was found dead on a sofa at the hotel, under suspicious circumstances. A Coroner's Inquest was held at the hotel the next day and her husband, Newman Boseley, was charged with her wilful murder. William Millyard, the barman, as an accessory.

The trial was held on 20 August 1874. Boseley professed his innocence but was found guilty and the sentence passed the next day was for 15 years imprisonment. The Bay View Hotel was placed in Trust for Boseley and a lease drawn up, to be let by public tender, in October 1874.

A succession of tenants attempted to drag the Hotel into profit and respectability. The Bay View Hotel was destroyed by fire on 31 July 1882, the same year that Newman Boseley was released from prison. He had served only eight years.

Newman and Charlotte Boseley are buried next to each to each other at Wakapuaka cemetery, Nelson.