Honolulu Weekly

Darkness falls across the land. The midnight hour is close at hand. Grisly ghouls from every tomb crawl out of Manoa Cemetery–wha?!?

No seriously, this city is a veritable urban sprawl of horror. Live here long enough and practically everyone you know offers up a ghost story of some sort. Your cousin woke up in the middle of the night to feel an intense pressure on his chest, your aunty would see balls of fire while visiting her husband’s grave, and your coworker saw a white, ethereal form floating at the side of a lonely stretch of the Pali Highway.

Here are a few true (enough) tales of terror experienced by ordinary citizens who shared their creepy tales with the Weekly. Names and addresses have been withheld to protect the haunted, but be assured that these incidents were very real–at least to the unlucky to whom they occurred.

[Editor’s Note: Our sources swear by these tales. We don’t. Hey, it’s Halloween--just go with it.]

The lizard king

Sharon, a local Japanese woman in her late 20s, lived with roommates in a house in Manoa along Oahu Avenue. She had a predilection for poetry and was very much involved with libraries. A grad student in Library Sciences at the nearby university, Sharon worked as a library assistant at another institution of higher learning. The most dangerous thing about Sharon was her books.

The house she lived in was an older one, its only distinguishing feature a slight lean due to ground-shifting. Or so it seemed from the outside.

One night, as she was talking with a friend in the living room, Sharon suddenly saw a headless surfer in hibiscus-print board shorts walk through her kitchen. Even more perplexing, the surfer had a companion–he was following what Sharon can only describe as a “lizard man.” The reptile was the size of the surfer, and walked upright on its hind legs. Though their forms were see-through, “almost like clouds,” Sharon could tell it was a lizard or gecko of some sort, complete with tail, webby digits and a belly area paler than the rest of its body. The ghostly pair walked through the kitchen into the laundry room and disappeared.

One of the roommates was the girl’s best friend and reported mysteriously losing objects. She’d go into the laundry room and the hangers she brought in would disappear before surfacing once again in her bedroom. Or she’d lose a ring, only to have it appear in someone else’s lap on the lanai.

Still, these occurrences weren’t enough to make them run screaming from the place in an Amityville-like horror. Granted, seeing a decapitated surfer and a lizard man would freak anyone out, but somehow, she thought that the house felt “really good.” It had a good feeling, she didn’t get a bad vibe. In Hawaiian creation lore, the moo (gecko) is a guardian spirit of sorts, so perhaps this is what she saw. How the headless surfer, obviously a spirit of modern times, is related to the moo is harder to explain since no one seemed to know the house’s history.

Sharon now lives in San Francisco and, yes, she has experienced something paranormal in her apartment. Perhaps some people genuinely do act as a magnet for these types of spirits.

Dead man’s party

As communications director for the state House of Representatives, Georgette Deemer knows her ghost stories. After all, what building is as creepy as the State Capitol? And sometimes this inherent spookiness is caused not by elected officials but by paranormal activity.

Deemer’s well-read political blog is also a virtual Area 51 warehouse of capitol-related hauntings that includes well-known accounts involving sightings of Queen Liliuokalani’s spirit and the mysterious smell of tobacco smoke linked to former Gov. John Burns. But here is a tale that hasn’t been posted to her Web site yet. It comes from Rep. Jon Riki Karamatsu and concerns his close friend and colleague Rep. Bob Nakasone, who died of lung cancer last December.

In addition to being one of the most influential lawmakers in the state’s history, Nakasone was known for hosting lively gatherings in his fourth floor office. All were welcome–staff, family, friends, fellow legislators. At the time, smoking was still allowed in public buildings and the party often spilled out of the back of Rep. Nakasone’s office, through the sliding glass doors and onto the balcony overlooking the grounds of ‘Iolani Palace.

One evening, only days after Nakasone passed, Karamatsu joined a friend and her daughter walking to Honolulu Hale to check out the decorative Christmas lights. As they walked down the steps near the ‘Iolani Palace gates, they heard the loud noise of laughter and people carousing, having a good time. The noise seemed to be coming from Rep. Nakasone’s lanai. The trio looked up and the noise stopped. Everything was silent. The windows to the late Representative’s office were closed and dark. It then began to rain and they ran for cover. They never made it to Honolulu Hale that night.

A couple of months later, Rep. Karamatsu asked for a moment of silence in honor of Rep. Nakasone during the House’s floor session. One of his more spiritually intuitive friends was in attendance, and she was convinced she felt the late legislator’s presence. She ran upstairs to the fourth floor and, walking down the hallway, she says she saw the form of Nakasone. The two actually spoke, and while it is unclear exactly how the conversation went, something about Rep. Karamatsu and Hilo was mentioned.

That summer, Rep. Karamatsu would launch his neighbor island campaign for Lt. Governor in Hilo.

A doll’s life

Supernatural beings don’t manifest themselves in ghostly appearances alone. They can also inhabit physical objects, which is especially distressing for collectors of antiques, old objects of arts and crafts or any other items with what can be referred to as “a history.”

One such collector was another young professional in her late 20s. Mari’s antiquing hobby led her to the art piece at the center of this tale, which was found at a Maui swap meet in Kahului.

One of the vendors was selling a doll. It was, Mari says, almost like one of those figurines sold during Girls Day at Shirokiya–almost. It stood on a stand, dressed in a kimono, standing with feet planted outward in a warrior stance of sorts. Most female dolls of this nature have coy, geisha-like smiles but this one smiled widely, with teeth. Mari describes it as “creepy.”

Her shopping companion tried to convince her to not purchase the figurine, but something drew her to it. She somehow felt sorry for it, so she bought it.

As Mari and her friend continued to browse the meet, a woman approached and offered to buy the doll. Again, an odd offer, especially for so unattractive an heirloom, but the new owner refused to part with her purchase. Back to Honolulu she flew and displayed the doll in the living room of her apartment near UH Manoa (what’s with Manoa, anyway? Sheesh).

One night, Mari’s cousin came over. He spoke and read more Japanese than she did and she asked him to help her translate some of the inscriptions written in barely legible kanji on the stand and, they soon discovered, underneath the doll’s kimono. The cousin couldn’t figure out the odd scribblings, but only got a sense of the creeps from the figurine. The examination stopped when a bobby pin suddenly and literally flew out from the doll’s wardrobe.

After that, no one wanted to be alone with it–not Mari, not her cousin, not her boyfriend. The trio ate dinner, trying not to pay the doll much attention even though everyone in the room definitely felt its presence.

The boyfriend’s father was a Buddhist priest–healthy and strong–and as soon as the minister saw the doll, he began to have trouble breathing. Images of the previous owner rushed through his head–he said he saw a mentally disturbed girl who was now deceased. Her spirit was somehow attached to the doll. With a fine brush, he painted Buddhist sutras all over the doll, chanting the sutras, then wrapping the doll in newspaper, and brushing more sutras over that covering as well. He warned that anyone who was around the doll for too long could become a receptacle for the spirit. It was not to be burned since that action would release the spirit who would then find another host. They decided to throw it in a dumpster with the hopes that the final resting place would be a landfill.

This story remains unfinished though. There are questions that cannot be answered. Who sold it to her and did they know of the doll’s history? Who was the woman at the swap meet who wanted to buy the doll from Mari? Most troubling though, is the disposal of the doll in a dumpster. What if the contents of that dumpster wasn’t going to a landfill, but H-Power? What if it was incinerated? If that’s the case, the doll’s spirit is either still somewhere out there, or may currently reside in something, or someone, else.