Back in 1992, Fiji was still a place where people believed deeply in the unseen.
It wasn’t just old stories or village talk, it was part of every day life for both iTaukei and Indo-Fijian families.
Even as Christianity and modern life were spreading fast across the islands, those older beliefs held strong the idea that spirits, curses, or witchcraft could shape what happened in your home or your health.
Everyone had heard the stories, the tevoro (ghosts), the kalou yalo (traditional gods), and most people knew someone who’d been touched by something they couldn’t quite explain.
For outsiders it might’ve sounded like superstition, but for the people who lived it, these weren’t just tales.
One man who saw all of this up close was Columban priest Fr Frank Hoare. We’ve followed Fr Hoare through Vanua Levu and navigating community drama. But this year, he captured something rare, that uneasy space where faith, fear, and folklore all met.
The case of Kate
It began on May 6, 1992 where we meet Kate, a mother from a long-standing Catholic family whose quiet life was about to be shaken by something she couldn’t explain.
“Kate came from an old Catholic family,” Fr Hoare said.
“Her younger brother had left his wife, Mona, for another woman. Mona blamed Kate.”
Not long after, Kate’s 12-year-old daughter returned home with a chilling story. She claimed to have seen Mona and her mother performing a ritual “cracking their fingers over their heads with sorcery materials laid out in front and bidding evil on her husband’s family.”
From that moment, a series of misfortunes followed the family.
Rebellious daughters, pregnancies before marriage, a husband dismissed unfairly from work, and a son, Sonny, spiraling into drug use and mental health struggles.
By 1992, Kate had grown convinced that her family was cursed.
“She called me.
“To let me know that God had shown her the source of her troubles.”
Sonny, hospitalised several times at St. Giles’ Mental Hospital, was showing signs of distress again.
“He slept irregularly, stared at the walls, shouted and swore at her, unscrewed the plug sockets from the wall,” Fr Hoare said.
“It then occurred to Kate, for the first time, that Sonny might be possessed by a devil.”
Soon after, Sonny told his mother in a trembling voice that “the black power was leaving him.”
For Fr Hoare, the moment was both pastoral and psychological.
“I tried to show Kate the danger of believing in sorcery.
“Sonny might discontinue his medicine believing that sorcery was the cause of his problems. Her faith could be weakened. And worse, they could wrongly accuse others, destroying their good name.”
Kate listened but remained unconvinced.
“She said she would not speak of this to many people.”
Reflections from afar
That same year in August, far from Fiji’s humid air and haunted nights, Fr Hoare found himself back in Ireland.
It was a dreary summer, one of “constant rain,” he wrote, “catastrophic for farmers who needed dry sunny weather to save the hay for winter.”
At Sunday Mass in Skibbereen, he felt a different kind of spiritual weight, one born not from demons, but disconnection.
“The parish priest said the Mass,” he said.
“There was no singing. No one went up to read the scripture readings, so the celebrant read all three.
“Not very many people around me answered the responses. I was disheartened by those things, but the homily was the worst of all.”
The priest had chastised farmers for working on a Sunday, quoting the third commandment.
“Not much sympathy there for the poor farmers trying to rescue something from a rotten summer,” Fr. Hoare lamented.
After Mass, he shared his frustration with a local friend.
“How does anyone continue to come to Mass here to listen to homilies like that?”
The friend smiled knowingly “Yerra, half the people from this parish go to the next parish for Mass because of him.
“But the fellow over there is just as bad. So, half of his parish comes here for Sunday Mass!”
It was a lighter moment amid heavier themes.
The Black figure
When Fr Hoare returned to Fiji the following year in March, the shadows of belief awaited him once more.
“One evening, returning in darkness from the shop to my rented house, I hoped that none of my neighbours would see me.”
But a child’s voice pierced the night “There’s Father passing by!”
The invitation from his neighbour, Mareta, could not be refused.
Inside, Mareta’s niece, Anna, was visiting and deeply troubled.
“She was unwell. Some nights she used to see a black figure approach her bed to choke her. On those nights Anna could not sleep at all.”
He began to ask questions.
“When did the black figure last appear to you?” “Two nights ago.”
“Did anything out of the ordinary happen the day before?”
Before Anna could reply, Mareta interjected: “She had her tubes tied. I told her it was wrong, but her husband signed for the operation.”
The priest sensed that Anna’s torment might be tied to guilt.
As he probed gently, her past came to light.
“I gave birth to twins at that time,” she said through tears. “But one died some months later without baptism.”
Fr Hoare read aloud from the Gospel of Luke, the story of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears.
“Her many sins must have been forgiven, or she would not have shown such great love,” he read. “Jesus speaks these words now to you.”
He explained to her the Catholic belief in baptism by desire, that her wish for her child’s baptism was itself an act of faith.
“Anna held the lighted candle. Her aunt Mareta laid hands on her and prayed for her. I sprinkled her with holy water, and we prayed the Our Father together.”
When he left that night, he felt the weight lift. “Somehow the tiredness was gone,” he wrote. “Anna was not troubled again.”
Lessons from the black
You know, when you think about it, Fiji in 2025 really is standing at a crossroads. We’re still that same country rooted in faith, family, and the vanua but now we’re also living faster, talking about mental health, climate change, and chasing jobs in Suva or overseas.
And yet, those stories from 1992 don’t feel that far away. The fear of the tevoro, the talk of curses, they still echo today. Maybe we’ve just changed the words.
What people once called possession, we might now call trauma or anxiety. What used to be sorcery might be family conflict or stress. But that feeling of something bigger moving in our lives, it’s still there.
Maybe “superstition” was never foolishness, just another way of understanding pain, loss, or change. Maybe our ancestors knew that life isn’t only about what we see, but what we feel and can’t explain.
The difference now is that we’re starting to talk, about mental health, faith, and fear. Young people are asking questions, and that’s a good thing. Because we don’t have to choose between belief and reason, tradition and modern life.
In the end, our stories still matter. They remind us who we are, and how we keep trying to make sense of this world.
