8.02.2009

The Strange Occurrence in Room 406

Informant: Male/age unknown/ethnicity unknown
Location: University of Hawaii at Manoa, Hale Aloha

I had just moved from Kauai in the summer of 1996, to Oahu, where I was to begin my freshman year at UH Manoa.

Through student housing, I was placed in one of the round dorm towers, in the Hale Aloha complex -- Hale Aloha Lehu, to be exact, room 406. My roommate, whom I had never met before, was from Kailua and we hit it off pretty quickly.

Things went well for the first two weeks. School was school, and dorm life was interesting. It was like living in a zoo filled with cartoon characters: People from all over the place smooshed into these small living spaces, away from whatever small towns and homes they had been trapped in. Exciting times.

Saturday rolls around and my roommate, being from Kailua, decides to go home for the weekend, leaving me to fend for myself in the dorm. With no car and nowhere to go, I figured I'd hit the sack early. I take a shower, come back to the room, get ready for bed.

I clean the top of my desk off and put some trash into the wastebasket under my desk, sitting next to my chair. I look across the room, and see my roommate has a wastebasket and a chair just like mine, under his desk.

Our windows face the parking lot of the Lehua dorm, and just as I go to turn out the lights, a gang of moped bikers decide to roll up into the area, and begin revving out someone in the dorm -- the irritating sound of unsuppressed two-stroke gas engines fill the night air. I hope they don't stick around for long. Eventually they leave, and I fall asleep.

Then, a huge BANG. And then a CRASH!

I wake up, startled, sitting straight up in bed. It's dark, and except for the street lamps outside, and the light seeping in from under the front door (from the hallway), I can't see anything.

What was that? What time is it?

I check my wrist watch. It's only 12:00a.m. I've been sleeping for two hours. I get up and walk to the light switch near the front door. I flip it up, and the fluorescents flicker on.Then I see something strange.

There's my wastebasket in the middle of the floor, and it's fallen on its side, the contents spilled out.

I can remember thinking, "What the hell is that doing there? I left that under my desk.”

Okay, so maybe I did leave it in the center of the room. Maybe I'm just drowsy. But how did it fall over? The wind?

No, the wastebasket had fallen TOWARDS the window. The wind blows from the outside in. If the wind blew it over, it would have fallen towards the door, on the opposite side of the room, away from the window.

Curious. But that wasn't the strange thing.

The strange thing was -- sitting right next to the fallen wastebasket, in the very middle of the room, was a CHAIR, with a WASTEBASKET STACKED ON TOP OF IT.

Now, I KNOW I didn't do that.

And now I'm scared because of those ghost stories you hear about UH: the screaming spirits in the Biomed building, the poltergeists of Hamilton Library, and not to mention the ghosts in the dorms! They all come rushing to my mind, and I'm worried. Should I be? I don't know, but I am!

Hold on, wait. Maybe my roommate is screwing with me. Maybe he came in when I was sleeping and did that to scare me. Maybe not.

In any case, I put everything back where it should be, and grab my flashlight, and take it with me to bed...I settle in and try to fall asleep.

I lay alert and awake for the next 45 minutes, until -- a sound at the door. The knob is being jostled. The lock turns, the door swings open, and....my roommate walks in.

I sit up in bed, the Mag-lite in my hands. My roommate looks at me funny, and I ask him if he's been back at any time tonight.

"No, we were in Waiks", he says. "All night. Just came back right now. Forgot my knife."
He goes to his desk, pulls open a drawer and rummages through. Not where he thought it was. Then he goes to his closet and looks through. Not there either.

He checks the shelf above his bed and it's there.

"Found it," he says. I pause, and think -- is he screwing with me?

"Something happened..." I say. "What?" He sees the Mag-lite in my hand.
"Some weird s!@# just happened in here..."

"What you mean? Like ghosts?"

"Yeah, kind of like that."

My roommate laughs -- thinks I'm being funny. But the look on my face says otherwise.

"Are you serious? No way..." he says, not convinced.

But he would be. Because a week later, he would have his own episode of weird s!@# go down in the dorm.

And that was just the beginning.