Wellington  - A German woman who flew to New Zealand to meet a man who wooed her on the internet with eloquent emails and poetry told a newspaper Tuesday of her time in a "horror house" with a stranger who was nothing like her online friend.

"He was quite intellectual and he knew the way to my heart," the 36-year-old musician and drama teacher from Leipzig, who identified herself only as Maja, told the Otago Daily Times.

She said she realized her mistake as soon as she landed at Dunedin airport to meet the man she had formed an internet relationship with in October through his MySpace page. He was not the 33-year-old PhD student he had pretended to be, but an unkempt, unemployed man of 54 years.

"He had such a creepy aura," she said. "I was in shock."

Not knowing what to do, and having spent all her money on the fare to New Zealand, she went with him to his house.

"His home was really a horror house, I would say," she told the paper. "Little roosters, cats and chickens lived in the house. There were a lot of cartons and dust and rubbish. You could not walk up the stairs and there was an ugly smell, a dead animal smell, and an ugly smell of old clothes."

Maja said she stayed at the house because the man would not allow her to take her passport when they went out and she became more afraid as he listened in on her telephone calls and shouted at her.

She was rescued by police on Saturday after she had phoned a man she met on the plane and said she was not well. She said she couldn't speak too much because her online pal was listening, but the man she called contacted police when she failed to meet him in the city on Thursday as arranged.

"I put much energy in keeping him calm to make him not nervous," she said of her internet romancer. "He was really afraid that someone would come in and that I'd tell someone I was not okay.

"He was really out of reality. He lived in a complete fantasy world. I was totally afraid because he said there was no electricity there so we only had the candles at night."

She said at night he took off his clothes and lay down in the same bed with her. "I had all my clothes on and these dirty sheets around me - I realised in that moment it was too much." (dpa)