Knock, Knock

Informant: Male/19/Portuguese Ancestry

Location: Honakaa, Big Island

One of the more popular camping sites on the Big Island is Kalopa State Park, where many people can use the cabins for overnight activities. I've spent many nights in the cabins without any thing out of the ordinary happening.

During high school, I was part of a college prep program that would go out on learning excursions every school year. This particular year, we spent the weekend at the Cabins at Kalopa State Park.

Everything went off great. Everybody was having a good time. It seemed like it was going to be a fun weekend.

Then night fell.

Everybody went to bed at around 10:00 p.m. Everything seemed fine. The girls went into their separate cabin while the boys went to theirs.

Then as soon as everybody got settled into their sleeping bags, we heard a knock on the door. I went to answer it, only to find nobody there. I fell victim to ding dong ditch, or so I thought.

Not more than two minutes later, everybody in the cabin hears the door knock again. This time my friend answered it to find that again, no one was there. We began to laugh at how it must be the girls trying to scare us. The door knocks again about five or six more times before we begin to get annoyed.

Finally we decide to keep the door open so that we can see who is knocking on our door. To our horror, something begins slamming on the wall behind us. Immediately we all rush out of our sleeping bags in the hopes to catch whoever it is slamming on our walls. As soon as we reach the back of the cabin, there is nothing there.

At this point we are convinced that the girls are just messing with our minds. We initiate a plan of attack. We all surround the girls cabin and start banging on the girls walls like maniacs. A very angry girls' cabin adult supervisor walks out to yell at us. It turns out all of the girls have been sleeping and we just woke them up.

We figure, the girls' supervisor is either in on it, or maybe it's our own supervisor messing with us. This whole time the boys' cabin adult supervisor was in his own cabin. So we wake him up to tell him about the banging on our walls. He walks into our cabin and we all wait to see if the banging will start up again. Nothing happens. We wait some more, and still nothing happens.

"You guys seriously need to get to bed, the girls' cabins supervisor called my cell phone to complain about you guys after you folks woke me up," our supervisor begins. Then the banging comes. This time, it is more intense. It seems that with each new wave of banging, the slamming on the wall intensifies.

Our supervisor, just laughs. "Who is outside?" he shouts. Of course there is no answer. So he counts all of the boys in the cabin to discover that all of the boys are accounted for. Now, he is convinced that the girls cabin supervisor is also in it. Unfortunately for him, he wakes her up only to find out that all of the girls have not left the cabin. And for the rest of the weekend, the girls' cabin supervisor is in a bad mood due to her lack of sleep.

And so we all wait in the cabin for the slamming on the walls to start again. As soon as it starts, our supervisor just runs out the door in an effort to catch whatever it is that is causing all the ruckus. He comes back into the cabin, gasping for air and obviously physically spent.

"There's nothing!" he shouted in bewilderment.

We all begin searching around our cabin with flashlights. There are no pipes or gutters with water rushing through it. There are no trees next to the cabin. And there is no wind. There was a slight drizzle, but that was about it.

Then we decide that the entire group will split up into four smaller groups. Each group will stake out a wall of our cabin and see what happens. The next thing you know, there is something on top of the roof of our cabin, slamming the roof with something. We can't see the roof, but we can hear it running and just going crazy slamming what sounds like a piece of wood against the roof.

After that, everybody sprinted into the cabin. All of us were far too terrified to stay outside any longer. Our supervisor, decided to just stay in our cabin for the rest of the night. None of us fell could fall asleep and so we all just started telling dirty jokes, to try and lighten the mood. However, it didn't work much.

The banging continued. It would switch walls. It would knock on the door. Every once in a while we could hear it on the roof again. The banging didn't stop until dawn.