College Experience

Informant: Male/19 years old/Portuguese Ancestry
Location: University of Hawaii at Hilo Dorms, Big Island

During high school, I spent my summers in an academic college prep program at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Part of the programs goals was to simulate life in college, and so this included living in the dorms for about six weeks.

My first summer in the program, I was a little apprehensive about living in the dorms. The day I moved in, I felt uncomfortable in my dorm room. However, I just chalked it up to being away from home and shyness. As soon as I came out of my shell and got to make friends, I didn't feel uncomfortable in my room anymore.

Since my first day in the dorms, there has always been ghost stories surrounding the particular dorm we lived in. Students would often spread rumors of ghostly children playing the halls or that the dorm was in the path of a Night Marchers' trail. I was very skeptical about it.

Then one day, I experienced something that I cannot find an explanation for.

I was lying in my bed, alone in my dorm room, just relaxing from studying. I was just lying down, and listening to some music, nothing else. Then, I began to feel a hand behind my head. I was scared, because the door was closed and I knew that I was alone. Then the hand began to move around, underneath my head, as if it was playing with my hair. I tried my best to remain calm, I didn't want to make any sudden movements. I slowly began to move away from my bed. As soon I moved my head, my pillow which my head had been on, went flying across the room and hit the wall across from my bed with tremendous force. At the moment, I felt like I was threatened, and I just ran like the building was on fire.

I found the program director, and of course I brought it up with her. She just laughed at me and blamed the whole experience on me being scared about living away from home for so long. However, she did let me move into another room, and since then I've never been into that room again.

After that summer, I've spent later summers in that dorm, and have never experienced anything like that in the dorms again.

Phantom Customer

Informant: Male/26/Japanese ancestry
Location: Halawa, Oahu

So back in 2006, I had an online business with a business partner. We moved the company to his warehouse in Halawa, which had a small office room in the back, positioned far away from the bay doors. The office had a glass paned door so we could look out from the office into the bay to see if anyone came in. My business partner told me that when he was creating some of the rooms in the warehouse, the contractor said he experienced some weird things while putting the walls up. Little things, like he would turn around and his tools would be moved, etc.

So one day I brought my friend to the office to work on a design project with me. I didn't tell him anything about what my business partner told me because I never experienced anything. We had installed a door chime on the front door of the warehouse so if we were working, we could hear if someone walked in.

After we were there for about an hour, I saw that my friend was staring out the door into the warehouse bay. So I asked him, "Eh, are you zoning or what?" and he says, "I thought I saw a guy walk through the front door, but the door chime didn't go..."

So I went out into the bay, but nobody was there. I asked him where he saw the guy walk to, and he said he walked toward the stairs. There was a set of stairs that went up to a recording studio. I went outside to look if there were any cars parked; maybe someone wanted to use the studio. But there wasn't anyone there. Then I told him about what my business partner told me, and he promptly freaked out.

girl in the red dress

Informant: Male/55/Chinese ancestry
Location: Downtown, Oahu

My dad works at a downtown hotel that has a long history. In the late 1800's, the daughter of the owner tragically died. They say her spirit hangs around the building.

He told me one night that he saw a little blond girl walking around during his work shift. He thought, oh well, probably one of the guests' kids or something. He asked her what her name was, but she just smiled and ran off.

Thing is...there's nobody on the premises after 8. Nobody's allowed there except personnel.

He said the little girl wore a red dress, in an old fashioned style, like Victorian style. She looked completely solid, and would laugh. She looked completely human. In fact, he caught her jumping on top of the tables.

My dad's boss is well aware of this phenomenon going on. He tells him employee's not to freak out about it, but that's easier said than done. A secretary was working one night, and someone started taking papers off of a stack on her desk one by one. She turned around to see the little girl in the red dress, stacking the papers nicely on top. She smiled and ran away. The secretary quit the very next day.

Learning how to throw

Informant: Male/39/Portuguse ancestry
Location: Hilo, Big Island

As a child, I used to constantly play outside with a ball. One particular day, I'm playing outside when these two men came up to me.

The two men were old and dressed in stiff, black suits. Something about them seemed like they had come out of the past, like they had come straight out of the 50's.

Oddly enough, they knew my name. They called my name and started to motion for me. I went up to them. They started to talk to me about how to throw the ball. They pretty much taught me how to throw a ball that day.

Sometime later, I was sitting with my mom going through an old family photo album. To my surprise, I found a picture of the two men that taught me how to throw a ball. I was telling my mom about how the two men, when she interrupted me.

"That's impossible. That's my brother and his friend. They died years before you were even born."

The Imaginary Friend

Informant: Male/19/Portuguese Ancestry
Location: Hilo, Big Island

The beginning of this story takes place about 6 months before I was even born. My parents lived in a small house in a small neighborhood next to a small cemetery. Someone wanted to turn the small neighborhood into a big neighborhood, and so they decided to bulldoze over the cemetery to make way for more houses. The man responsible for the bulldozing, dies of no apparent reason.

And now flash forward about 5 years.

Most children grew up with a beloved imaginary friend. Someone special, that only they could see. I was no different, or so my parents thought.

First it began with talking to people who weren't there. My parents would hear me having conversations with people in my room. They would take a peek into my room only to discover that I was alone. At first it was cute, their baby boy had an imaginary friend.

Then it escalated to feeding people who weren't there. This quickly turned from cute to annoying as the wasted food began to pile up. My parents would ask me why I was taking extra plates of food to my room. "To feed my friends," I would reply. When my parents would prevent me from taking extra plates of food, I would share my food and hold my spoon up to feed my friends.

Then it went even further with sleepwalking. And it wasn't just any kind of sleepwalking, I'd be sleepwalking and holding hands with people that no one else could see. Every night I would get up and start walking with my hand raised up as if someone taller than me was holding it. I would walk from my bed all the way to the front door until I would bump into it and then wake up. This quickly went from minor annoyance to scaring my parents.

Then everything just stopped. I no longer talked to people. I stopped feeding my food to people who weren't there. And my sleepwalking had ceased. Around the time that all of this stopped, the discovery was made that the bodies in the cemetery that had been bulldozed, were not removed, they were still under the house that had been built over it.

I'm not quite sure what happened to the bodies, I would like to think that they were removed and put into some place they could rest peacefully. However, I do know that creepy things are still lurking in the neighborhood. Old neighbors speak of loud noises coming from an old empty house that was next door to mines. A house that is constantly off and on the market. As soon as it's sold, it seems that it's being sold within a matter of months. That same house will open its windows while you walk past, even though no one is living in it.There's even rumors of a telephone pole that bleeds (not sure how serious one should take that, I'm sure it's just tar or some other dark substance that oozes, yet some people actually feel that it is an ominous sign that warns them that something bad is going to happen).

Now, I live in much quieter neighborhood that has no history of cemeteries, ghosts, or bleeding telephone poles.

Skateboarder spirit on campus

Informant: Male/20/Mexican-European ancestry
Location: Chaminade University, Oahu

There is a legend at my school about a student who was killed and now haunts the campus. He was a skater who was hit by a car and killed.

One night around 2am my friend was walking back to her dorm from mine when she noticed a guy with longish hair holding a skateboard was staring at her. She started to walk a little faster and turned around to look at him, and he was still staring at her intently. So she started to walk really fast, and she turned around one more time...but he was gone. Nowhere to be seen.

She looked up some old newspaper articles and discovered who he was and the day he died. The day she saw him was the anniversary of his death.

The Tale of Whistling Shirley

Informant: Female/61/Portuguese-mixed ancestry
Location: Kapaa, Kauai

This story comes from my mother. I've heard it enough to tell it to you properly, I feel.

When my mother was a little girl, there was a terrible accident in her community. A little boy had drowned in a nearby reservoir. Shortly after his death, they started to hear rumors that his younger sister was able to communicate with him in the afterlife through whistling. She would speak, and he would whistle back.

It wasn't just a whistle the sister could hear, everyone nearby could also hear the whistling. People started to go to the house to see this "miracle" as they called it. My grandma forbade my grandpa from going to see it because she did not believe it was a miracle like everyone else believed (she was a very staunch Catholic). But my grandpa went anyway with my mom in tow.

When they got there, he told my mom and her cousin (who was also with them) to stay in the car while he went to the house. Not only did my grandpa hear the whistling in the house, my mother also heard it in the car.

My grandpa realized that something was not right and quickly returned to the car. They started to drive away and could still hear the whistling. They drove a few houses away and could still hear the whistling. They could hear the whistling all the way back home, as if it was in the car with them.

Needless to say my grandma was furious, and I think it's safe to say that my grandpa learned his lesson.

Hinotama

Informant: Female/23/Korean-Portuguese ancestry
Location: Fuji Beach, Kaua'i

"Hinotama" is the Japanese name for what we would call fireballs, or what the Hawaiian's call "akualele." These fireballs are the spirits of dead people who often lead the living to their remains in this form. I recall one of my favorite ghost stories from Glen Grant's Obake Files called "The Hinotama of a Murdered Man." Every night a family would see a fireball shoot over to the mountains. They finally followed it one day and found the head of a murdered man. The head was returned to the body and the fireball was never seen again.

I never thought that I would have ever seen something like this in my life. I am certainly a believer in ghosts and spirits (Lord knows I've experienced enough in my lifetime), but this seemed like such a novelty to me...until I saw it with my own eyes.

The entire east side of Kaua'i (where I am from) is ancient battle ground. This particular spot that my friends and I like to hang out at is right on the beach, and we like to park and jump in the back of my truck and play music. This night was just like any other: late night jam sessions at the beach. While we were sitting in the back of my truck, I noticed my friend who was playing guitar was starting out over the ocean. When I looked up to see what he was looking at, I was stunned to see a fireball floating across the sky. It was clearly fire; you could see the flames swirling. There was no fiery tail, but instead a tail of smoke.

I asked my friend, "What is that??" and he said "I don't know, I've been staring at it for the past few minutes." By the time my other friend turned around to look at it, it had fizzled out into a puff of smoke.

What struck me about this fireball was that it was floating. It was floating very slowly and silently across the sky. It was not falling in any way. My dad said it was methane gas released by a decomposing body, but I don't buy that because I'm pretty confident that it would not be floating across the sky like that. I really am glad that I was not the only one to see it or else I would have doubted myself. It was not scary in any way, just shocking and perplexing. But I wouldn't mind if I never saw something like that again.