Astonishing Story Behind the Unusual Honking Sequence of CrossTown Buses

A gruesome murder was not on dignitaries’ minds at the opening of the Mount Victoria Tunnel in 1931, Wellington, New Zealand. Photograph: WCC/ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY

It won’t make any lists of the world’s spookiest places, though it is arguably one of the noisiest. Inside the bare, concrete tunnel that takes Wellington’s commuters into the city centre, a path is littered with abandoned rental scooters and the air is thick with exhaust fumes and the deafening, incessant honking of car horns.

But the tradition of motorists beeping their horns as they drive through the Mount Victoria tunnel has become a city-wide superstition – and has also proved divisive. Many residents believe a jaunty toot – or, for some, blasting their horns for the tunnel’s entire 623-metre length – either wards off evil spirits, or acknowledges the memory of a teenage girl who was murdered and her body buried at the site a year before the tunnel was opened in 1931.

There Is No Reason To Cross The U.s. By Train. But I Did It Anyway.

Others think the sound is obnoxious. In January, Chris Calvi-Freeman, a then-Wellington city councillor, suggested signs should be placed on either side of the tunnel advising motorists not to sound their horns to avoid annoying pedestrians, who have to share the passage. The councillor’s attempted honking ban (which has so far proved unsuccessful) sparked a backlash, with one Wellingtonian attempting to organise local drivers into a world record attempt for tunnel tooting (also, so far, without success).

“I hate it when I’m walking through, ” said Saxon Bruce, who was skateboarding to work down the tunnel’s pedestrian path on Thursday, armed with noise-cancelling headphones. “But every time I’m driving through, I always toot because it’s so fun.”

The etiquette of tunnel tooting and the story behind it has spawned depictions in popular culture; August saw the publication of a historical novel about the murdered teenager, and on Thursday, motorists’ honking was the subject of Wellington Paranormal

Demand For Volkswagen Buses Is Soaring

– a television mockumentary series created by Taika Waititi and Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement about police officers investigating supernatural crime.

In the latest instalment, the efforts of two hapless officers to prevent motorists tooting their horns inadvertently unleash a vengeful spirit of a constable who had died there years earlier.

The story is far-fetched – but based on a real-life tragedy. Phyllis Avis Symons, 17, was pregnant when she was killed and her body left in soil at the tunnel’s earthworks site in 1930. According to research by the Mount Victoria Historical Society, there was evidence Symons was buried while still alive. Her boyfriend, George Errol Coats, was later hanged for her murder.

Common Car Noises And Their Causes

The memory of Symons is supposedly what inspired the tooting tradition, although Joanna Newman, the historical society’s convenor, said there was no proof of that.

James Gilberd, a Wellington man who investigates paranormal events with the New Zealand Strange Occurrences Society, said the Wellington Paranormal episode was likely to revive interest in the Symons story. He had never conducted an investigation of the Mount Victoria tunnel because the heavy traffic would make it unsafe, he said, but he doubted one would be fruitful.

“So far on when everything’s different, there’s hardly likely to be any resonance or echo or remnant of the event, ” he said. “All that we know is that it was at the south end of the tunnel, and it’s kind of spooky going in that end because you’re always in the shade when you drive in.”Car culture has given the greater culture a lot of important things: metaphors about grinding gears, tire swings, lyrical inspiration for Meatloaf, the achingly beautiful mystery of the Cars movie series, and so much more. There are also aspects of car culture that only serve to baffle and confuse human culture, cultural automotive artifacts that somehow remain part of the collective consciousness without providing anything beneficial or worthwhile. One such artifact is the infamous “Honk if You’re Horny” bumper sticker, which for some reason has been weighing heavily on my mind, so I’m going to exorcise it here, with apologies in advance. I discussed this in depth with my wife, and she agreed there’s something

Ana On The Edge By A. J. Sass

[┴p- ¡ʎʞsuᴉɥɔɹo┴ ‘noʎ uɯɐp ˙uɹnʇǝɹ I ǝɯᴉʇ ǝɥʇ ʎq sǝɥsɐ pǝɹɹɐɥɔ ʇnq ƃuᴉɥʇou ǝq llᴉʍ uɐᴉdoʇn∀ ǝɥ┴ ǝqʎɐɯ ʇɐɥʇ uɹǝɔuoɔ ʎɯ ǝʇɐɔᴉunɯɯoɔ oʇ puɐ ‘sᴉ ǝlɔᴉʇɹɐ sᴉɥʇ pɹnsqɐ ʍoɥ ʇsnɾ ʇno ʇuᴉod oʇ ǝɯᴉʇ sᴉɥʇ ǝʞɐʇ oʇ pɐɥ I ʇnq ‘uoᴉʇdǝɔǝɹ llǝɔ ǝlʇʇᴉl ʎɹǝʌ ɥʇᴉʍ ɐᴉlɐɹʇsn∀ lɐɹnɹ uᴉ uɹɐq ɐ uᴉ ɯ, I ˙ʎɔɐɹ┴ pᴉʌɐp sᴉ sᴉɥ┴ :ǝʇoN s, ɹoʇᴉpƎ]

Granted, you don’t see these bumper stickers out in the wild that much anymore, at least not to the degree they were seen in their mid-’70s heyday, but somehow this bumper sticker is still part of the cultural landscape. It was referenced in The Simpsons even:

What really makes this reference so good is the cast of the movie: Pauly Shore and Faye Dunaway. Why has cruel reality kept this magical pairing away from us?

Is Honking A Crisis? How One Simple Safety Measure Has Grown Into An Audible Scourge For The Urban Dweller

More recently, in 2021, the Netflix sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave referenced the bumper sticker, and I think this sketch starts to capture the inherent madness of the bumper sticker itself:

Like it or not, this ridiculous bumper sticker is well-embedded into our culture. And, if you give this sticker any sort of thought, its inherent madness becomes painfully clear: Just

Is the desired result of this bumper sticker? The driver with the sticker seems to be interested in the level of sexual arousal of the people driving around them, to the point that the sticker specifically requests that the driver be alerted, via sounding one’s car horn, if one has a level of sexual arousal significant enough to be considered if not medically, at least socially, horny.

Blast From The Past: Wellington Drivers Beep Horns To Dispel Ghostly Tunnel Vision

With this information? Wave, and jot an entry in their notebook? If they’re feeling horny as well, are they going to attempt to communicate with the other car to try to negotiate some sort of sexual encounter? That’s a tricky thing to do, car-to-car, but I’m sure it’s possible. Is it a means of helping the driver to assess who may be

“Hello everyone! I’m curious to know who is currently sexually aroused! Please call out to me if this is a condition you’re currently experiencing! Thank you!”

For some reason, I tried re-imagining the sticker as if Rene Descartes said it, but I don’t think the Cartesian version works any better, really:

Clipping From The Times Record

Now, none of this is the bombshell I promised in the headline. Well, let’s be honest here: overpromised. But I do have a realization that, somehow, never occurred to me before: This bumper sticker is simply based on

Yes, simple, silly wordplay. I’m guessing a lot of you knew this, but from what I found online, a lot of people were like me, blissfully ignorant of the fact that the whole point of the stupid thing is that horns are things that honk, so if you’re 

The reason the goose-based sticker doesn’t exist, despite a goose’s equal claim on the act of honking, is that the word “goose” is not also a slang term for something dirty in the same way “horny” is. And this got me thinking as well: How the hell did the word “horny” come to mean being sexually aroused?

Five Summer Stories (associated Screen Arts, 1972). Window Card

Not to. Instead, I’ll reveal to you what the etymological history of “horny” seems to be, according to famed Nixon speechwriter and lexicographer William Safire:

First, to the roots. Horn can be traced to the Latin cornu. The proto-Germanic horna bloomed in Old English, in “Beowulf, ” around the year 725. (This scholarly material is being larded in to reassure nervous editors.) The original meaning referred to the hard protuberances growing from the head of ungulate mammals or mythic creatures like the satyr, a bestial being combining a goat (undeservedly vilified as a lecherous beast) and a human.

Now to the point. A horn is hard; it is shaft-shaped; since the 15th century, it has been used as a symbol for the male’s erect sex organ. “No horn could be stiffer, ” John Cleland wrote in “Fanny Hill” in 1749; earlier, Shakespeare used the term horn-mad in “Much Ado About Nothing” and other plays to mean both “lecherous” and “cuckolded.” The nose “horn” of the rhinoceros has long been believed to possess aphrodisiac qualities, which led to the endangerment of the species. “Hornie is an 18th-century Scottish term for ‘devil, ’ ” reports Alan Richter, author of the 1993 Dictionary of Sexual Slang, “which itself is another old term for penis, dating back to Boccaccio. Robert Burns refers to auld hornie, meaning the devil, and old horny is also a 19th-century term for penis. But plain old horny, meaning ‘sexually aroused, ’ only makes its debut at the end of the 19th century, originally applied exclusively to males.” Henry Miller, in his 1949 “Sexus, ” turned it into an equal-opportunity word with “Her thick, gurgling voice saying . . . [ raunchy bit deleted ] ‘I’m horny.’ “

Honk For Jesus, Save Your Soul' To Go Day & Date On Peacock, In Theaters

So, most simply, the word “horny” seems to have found the use that we know it best for today because of an animal horn’s superficial similarity to an engorged, erect penis. And, it seems we may

Share :