MOEHAU
A large hairy humanoid creature with bony fingers, similar to Bigfoot and the Yeti but native to New Zealand. According to the Maori people, these creatures arrived at a time before recorded history. They lived on the South Island in the mountain regions where they were known as the Moeroero, while those that lived in the interior of the island were known as Maero. The combination of these two names produced Moehau and this gave rise to a spate of legends. Sightings of the creature were reported from the 1850s onwards, but belief in the creature seems to have diminished after reports of an escaped gorilla from a ship moored off the coast in the 1920s. In more recent times, the story has become complicated by the addition of rumours of a red-haired people living in a cave on Mount Moehau, known locally as the Coromandel Man, though actual bones or traces of this creature have not as yet been produced. As with the Yeti and Bigfoot, evidence to support the existence of this creature remains speculative.
Text from The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures by John and Caitlin Matthews (HarperElement, 2005)
