Māori mythical creatures: taniwha to patupaiarehe

The best-known Māori mythical creatures are the taniwha ‘water monster, guardian’, a creature of rivers, lakes and the sea that could be a deadly monster or a guardian of its people, and the patupaiarehe ‘fairy folk’, pale, red- or fair-haired people of the misty hilltops and deep forest who feared sunlight and fire. Around them stand the tūrehu ‘fairy folk’ (another name for the patupaiarehe), the ponaturi or sea fairies, the ngārara ‘monster, reptile’ or giant reptiles, the kēhua ‘ghost’, the forest-dwelling māeroero, the giant bird pouākai and the bird-woman Kurangaituku. Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, tells their stories in separate places; this guide brings them together, with each word’s meaning from Te Aka Māori Dictionary, where each creature was said to live, the named taniwha and their places, and how the words are used today.

Updated 22 October 2026 · 14 min read

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The creatures at a glance

Māori	Te Aka’s meaning	What the stories say	Where
taniwha	water spirit, monster, dangerous water creature, powerful creature; also chief, powerful leader	Creatures of many forms, male or female, often like reptiles, sharks, whales or logs; some ate people, others were kaitiaki ‘guardians’ of a tribe.	Deep pools, caves, rivers, lakes and the sea
patupaiarehe	fairy folk: fair-skinned mythical people who live in the bush on mountains	Light-skinned, red- or fair-haired, never tattooed; ate raw food, played flutes, lured people away, feared light, fire and cooked food.	Misty hilltops and deep forest
tūrehu	fairy folk: mythical being of human form with light skin and fair hair; also pale skinned	Another name for the patupaiarehe, as is pakepakehā.	As the patupaiarehe
ponaturi	no entry in Te Aka	Sea fairies with red hair, white skin and long clawed fingers, who feared sunlight and fire.	Under the sea by day; on land at night
ngārara	insect, creepy-crawly, reptile; germ; monster	Giant reptiles, a kind of taniwha, like lizards or tuatara; less often called kumi ‘huge fabulous monster’.	Caves; one guarded a pā
kēhua	ghost: spirits that linger on earth after death and haunt the living; to haunt	A ghost that haunts a place or a house.	On earth, among the living
māeroero	beings that were supposed to inhabit the depths of the forest	Forest beings; Te Aka’s example names one, Tamaiwaho, who blocked a traveller’s path.	The depths of the forest
pouākai	a gigantic extinct bird similar to a kārearea ‘New Zealand falcon’	A huge bird of prey of South Island legend that carried off people.	The South Island
Kurangaituku	a name; Te Aka has no entry	A fearsome bird-woman who took the adventurer Hatupatu prisoner.	Near Rotorua and Tokoroa
tipua, tupua	strange, supernatural; goblin, demon, object of fear, strange being	Anything uncanny: a log, rock, fish or tree that behaves as nothing natural should.	Anywhere

Taniwha: guardians and monsters

Te Aka defines taniwha as a water spirit, monster or dangerous water creature, and adds that taniwha take many forms, from logs to reptiles and whales, often live in lakes, rivers or the sea, and are often regarded as guardians by the people who live in their territory, “but may also have a malign influence on human beings.” Te Ara’s story on taniwha says the same from the other side: their forms and characteristics vary from one tribal tradition to another, and though supernatural, in the Māori world view they were part of the natural environment. They were male or female, and some could change shape.

A taniwha’s lair, the rua taniwha, was a deep pool, a cave or a dangerous stretch of water, a place people avoided. Some taniwha were terrifying: they captured and ate people, and sometimes carried off women as wives. Others were kaitiaki ‘guardians’ of an iwi ‘tribe’ or hapū ‘sub-tribe’, and people passing their dens said the proper karakia ‘chant, charm’ and left an offering, often a green twig. An example sentence in Te Aka, from the Journal of the Polynesian Society in 1946, draws the same line: Ureia, of Tīkapa, the sea of Hauraki, was not a taniwha that killed or drowned people but a tupua ‘strange being’ and a symbol of the mana of the people of that sea, and even man-eating taniwha drowned people only for an offence, such as trespassing on a sacred place.

Named taniwha and where they lived

Te Ara records these by name, with the form each took. The list is a sample: almost every district has its own.

Taniwha	Form	Where	The story
Tuhirangi	sea creature; later a dolphin	Cook Strait	Placed there by the navigator Kupe to guide and protect canoes. Some Māori believed he returned as Pelorus Jack, the dolphin that escorted ships near French Pass in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Āraiteuru	sea creature	Hokianga Harbour	Escorted a voyaging canoe from Hawaiki; her eleven sons dug the branches of the harbour. She lived at its south head.
Ngake and Whātaitai	sea creatures	Wellington Harbour	The harbour was a lake; Ngake smashed through to Cook Strait, and Whātaitai was stranded trying another way out.
Hine-kōrako	female taniwha	Te Rēinga waterfall, Wairoa	Married a man, left after an insult from his relatives, and later pushed a canoe back upstream from the falls in a flood.
Tāminamina	lives in a waterhole	Waipapa waterhole	Blamed for a girl’s death in 1876, as an elder of Ngāti Porou reported to a Māori newspaper.
Ngārara Huarau	giant reptile	Waimārama, then the Wairarapa	Ate travellers until he was lured out and killed (see below).
Takere-piripiri	giant spiky-tailed tuatara	Ōtautahanga pā (Ngāti Raukawa)	A guardian who turned man-eater when the people ate the eels meant for him.
Moremore	shark	Ahuriri, Napier	The son of Pānia of the Reef; a guardian patrolling the coast while his people fished.
Tūtaeporoporo	shark turned monster	Mouth of the Whanganui River	Swallowed canoes whole until the taniwha slayer Ao-kehu let himself be swallowed in a hollow log and cut his way out.
Humuhumu	tōtara log	Kaipara (Ngāti Whātua)	A guardian, known because he drifted against the current.
Kaiwhare	sea creature	The Gap, south of Piha, Manukau	Killed by Tāmure with a club that had the power to destroy taniwha.
Hine Te Ariki	a guardian	Waipāoa River	The writer Witi Ihimaera says she is his own kaitiaki.

Taniwha took other shapes too. Sharks gave their name to Mangōnui, “great shark”, after the giant shark that came into the harbour with a canoe; whale-shaped taniwha escorted voyaging canoes and rescued Paikea from drowning; and a log that moved against the current was a rākau tipua ‘enchanted log’, usually thought to be a taniwha. Many stories end with a slayer: Pitaka snared Hotupuku on the Kāingaroa Plains with a noose of cabbage-tree leaves, and Pōtoru killed Te Kaiwhakaruaki near Collingwood by attacking from two flanks in turn.

Every bend a taniwha

Taniwha were also a figure for great chiefs. Te Ara quotes the Waikato proverb Waikato taniwha rau, he piko he taniwha ‘Waikato of a hundred taniwha, every bend a taniwha’, which some take to mean the river’s many taniwha and others its many chiefs; the place name behind it is in Māori place names. Laments for chiefs use the same image: “Withdrawn now is the dragon from his lair.”

Patupaiarehe and tūrehu: the fairy folk

Te Aka defines patupaiarehe as fairy folk, fair-skinned mythical people who live in the bush on mountains, like humans in appearance but believed not to eat cooked food and to be afraid of fires. Tūrehu is another name for them, and Te Aka gives it a plain sense as well, “pale skinned”. Te Ara’s story, by Martin Wikaira, says that although they had some human attributes they were regarded as supernatural beings rather than people. What it records about them:

Looks. Light skin and red or fair hair, never tattooed; Mohi Tūrei of Ngāti Porou described their skin as white, albino or the colour of red ochre, and their eyes ranged from light blue to black. Their height is disputed: Tūhoe records them as small, others as human-sized, and Whanganui stories as giants over two metres tall.
Home. Mist-covered hilltops and deep forest, in houses and forts built of mist in some stories and of supplejack vine in others. In the North Island, mainly the Waikato–Waipā basin, the Cape Colville–Te Aroha range, the hills about Rotorua, the Urewera ranges and Wairoa, and the Waitākere ranges; in the South Island, the hills around Lyttelton Harbour, Akaroa and the Tākitimu range, and between the Arahura River and Lake Brunner.
Life. A kin-based society like Māori society, of hunters and gatherers who ate raw forest food and found cooked food foul. Albino birds and eels, red flax and red eels were theirs, and taking them brought trouble.
Habits. Fearing the light, they came out at twilight, at night or in heavy mist, and played the kōauau and pūtōrino, two kinds of flute. With the music of the flute a patupaiarehe could lure a young woman away.
Protection. Smearing a house with kōkōwai ‘red ochre’ (Te Ara: iron oxide mixed with shark oil) and lighting the cooking ovens kept them away, because they hated the smell of both, and a glowing fire kept a camp safe through the night.

Red-haired and albino Māori, urukehu ‘red-haired person’, were said to descend from patupaiarehe and the women they lured away. The fairy folk also gave things to people: the chief Kahukura learned to make a fishing net by joining a patupaiarehe catch at night and tying knots that came undone until the sun rose and they fled, leaving the net behind; and the patupaiarehe Miru passed on sacred knowledge, string games and stick games. Two mountains are named from their stories: Ngongotahā at Rotorua, where a patupaiarehe woman gave the explorer Īhenga a drink from a calabash, and Mauao at Tauranga, “caught at dawn” when the patupaiarehe dragging it to the sea fled the sunrise.

One of their names, pakepakehā, may have given English its best-known Māori word for a European. That story, and the others, are in what does Pākehā mean.

Ponaturi: the sea fairies

Te Ara describes the ponaturi as sometimes called sea fairies: red-haired and white-skinned, with long, evil claws on their fingers. They spent the day under the sea and came ashore only at night, and like the patupaiarehe they feared sunlight and fire. In one tradition the hero Tāwhaki avenged his father’s death by keeping the ponaturi in his house past dawn and then opening the doors and windows to let the light in. Te Aka has no entry for the word.

Ngārara: the giant reptiles

In Te Aka, ngārara is first of all an insect, creepy-crawly or reptile, then a germ, and third a monster. Te Ara’s reptiles story explains the link: Māori believed in giant reptiles, simply called ngārara, which were a kind of taniwha and looked like lizards or tuatara. Te Ara’s taniwha story adds that they were sometimes called kumi, which Te Aka defines as a huge fabulous monster. Reptiles were said to descend from Punga, a son of the sea atua Tangaroa, whose offspring were all repulsive, and lizards were seen as representatives of Whiro, the atua of darkness and death. Yet lizards and tuatara could also be guardians, released near burial caves to watch over the dead. The everyday reptile names are in Māori birds and animals.

The best known is Ngārara Huarau, a taniwha known to tribes throughout the country and pictured on a New Zealand Post stamp in 2000. Another, Te Whakaruaki, took a woman as his bride by force and was trapped and burnt in a house by her family; his tail broke off and escaped, which is why, the story says, lizards shed their tails in danger.

Where the accounts of Ngārara Huarau differ

	Te Ara, “Taniwha”	Te Ara, “Ngārara – reptiles”
How he died	Lured along a path of half-cut trees by a dog under a spell, he struck them and was crushed when they fell	He burned to death
What came of him	The scales he left in his cave at Waimārama became tuatara	His scales escaped and turned into lizards

Te Ara’s caption for the stamp adds that there are varying tribal traditions about him, and that in one he was killed in the Wairarapa while visiting his sister Parikawhiti. The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand records that people kept reporting kumi long after: in 1898 a bushman on an East Coast station said he had seen a lizard some five feet long, and the encyclopaedia notes the scepticism of the Gisborne press at the time.

Kēhua: ghosts

A kēhua is a ghost, in Te Aka’s words a spirit “that linger[s] on earth after death and haunt[s] the living”. The same word is a verb, “to haunt”: Te Aka’s example tells of a house that was haunted, kēhuatia, until a tohunga ‘expert, priest’ cleared it with ritual chants. A 1901 writer quoted in Te Aka held that a kēhua is separate from a person and has a body of its own, shaped like yours or mine. The kēhua is not the same as the wairua, the spirit of a person that exists beyond death; the kēhua is the one that stays and haunts.

Māeroero: beings of the deep forest

Te Aka defines māeroero as “beings that were supposed to inhabit the depths of the forest”, and its example names one: a traveller on his way home found his path blocked by a māeroero called Tamaiwaho. The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand speaks of “weird ‘hairy men’ who devoured unwary travellers and waylaid hunting parties”, without giving them a name. If you were looking for maero: Te Aka’s entries under that spelling mean “listless, weak” and “channel, race (of water)”, and its word for the beings of the forest is māeroero.

Pouākai, hōkioi and the bird-woman Kurangaituku

The pouākai is, in Te Aka, a gigantic extinct bird similar to a falcon, Harpagornis moorei: Haast’s eagle. Te Aka’s example sentence says that in Māori stories the pouākai was a huge bird, and the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand calls it a bird of prey of South Island legend that “carried off its human victims with ease.” The eagle itself was real: Te Ara’s story on extinctions counts Haast’s eagle among the species whose extinction began with the arrival of people, most likely between 1250 and 1300 AD.

The hōkioi is harder. The sources do not agree on what it was, and this page shows them side by side rather than choose:

Source	What the hōkioi is
Te Ara, “Ngā manu – birds” (Rāwiri Taonui)	Haast’s eagle, known only through oral tradition, seldom seen, its cry a bad omen; named for its call, “Hōkioi, hōkioi, hu!”; in the south called Te Pouākai
The 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand	A legendary bird said to live in the heavens, never seen, coming near the earth only at night, when its flight could be heard
Te Aka Māori Dictionary	An extinct nocturnal bird, the New Zealand snipe; its example sentence, from 1924, calls it the only bird that calls its own name

The 1966 encyclopaedia names one more bird of omen, Hine-Ruarangi, which haunted the Whirinaki Gorge and was seen by the discerning before the death of a chief.

Kurangaituku is a bird-woman of Te Arawa tradition. Te Ara’s Te Arawa story says the adventurer Hatupatu defeated “the gruesome bird-woman Kurangaituku” at Whakarewarewa. Its Roadside Story on Hatupatu’s Rock tells the escape: she took him prisoner, he got away from her lair, and when she gave chase a rock beside what is now State Highway 1, near Tokoroa, opened to shelter him. Some say her claw marks are still on it.

Tipua and tupua: anything uncanny

Tipua and tupua are two forms that Te Aka lists as synonyms, with the same meanings: as a description, strange, supernatural or abnormal; as a noun, a goblin, demon, object of fear or strange being. Te Ara explains that a log, a fish, a dog, a stone, a tree or a mountain could be called tipua. An enchanted log was a rākau tipua and usually taken for a taniwha; an enchanted rock was a kōhatu tipua; and in 1900 a writer in a Māori-language newspaper called Pelorus Jack an ika tipua ‘supernatural fish’. Te Aka’s example of the modifier is a whale that is tipua, unlike the humpbacks and sperm whales being hunted. The same word was one of the early names for Europeans, as what the word Māori means explains.

Taniwha in modern New Zealand

Taniwha made national news in 2002. According to TVNZ’s reports that November, work on a section of State Highway 1 between Mercer and Long Swamp in northern Waikato stopped after local Māori said it would disturb a taniwha in swampland near Meremere, and Transit New Zealand ordered workers off the area. TVNZ named three taniwha there, Karutahi, Waiwai and Te Iaroa, and reported that Transit was talking with Ngāti Naho. On 12 November TVNZ reported a deal under which “concessions have been put in place to ensure that the taniwha are respected”, with work continuing from a point that did not touch the site; Te Ara says Transit New Zealand agreed to partially reroute the highway, and that the concern was that it would destroy Karutahi’s lair.

In the same years a prison planned for Ngāwhā in Northland was opposed because of Takauere, a taniwha in the form of a log, said to have been created by the Ngāpuhi ancestress Kareariki and to live mainly at Lake Ōmāpere; local hapū were concerned the prison would block his travel. It was built. Te Ara records that both cases were controversial: some suggested the objections were a bid for compensation, and even among Māori there was disagreement over whether the concerns were genuine. It concludes that, while the debate goes on, taniwha continue to play an important role in the cultural identity of many tribal groups.

How the words are used today

taniwha still means a chief or powerful leader, or, in Te Aka’s words, “something or someone awesome”. The national kapa haka festival in 2027 is Te Matatini o Ngā Taniwha, at Hopuhopu near Ngāruawāhia; see kapa haka explained.
kaitiaki, the role a guardian taniwha played, is Te Aka’s everyday word for a guardian, custodian, trustee or caregiver, and the idea of guardianship behind it is in Māori words for nature.
kēhua is also, in Te Aka, the Joker in a pack of cards. Te Ara’s Māori-language title for the 2011 “ghost chips” road-safety advertisement uses it too: Ngā maramara rīwai kēhua.
urukehu, which the patupaiarehe stories connect with red hair, is an ordinary word for a red-, sandy- or fair-haired person.
ngārara is the everyday word for a creepy-crawly or a germ as well as a monster.
The carved manaia is not a creature of these stories but a figure in carving that some accounts call a guardian; it is explained in Māori symbols and their meanings.

Going further

Most of the words on this page appear in Māori proverbs, songs and place names rather than in a first lesson. Our free te reo Māori course starts with the words people use every day, with every example recorded by Papa Reo.