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.

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Bloody Mary

Informant: Female/23/Korean-Portuguese ancestry

Location: Kaimuki, Oahu

It was a children’s game; something that you played at slumber parties, or birthday parties. In fact, that’s exactly where I read it. In the “games to play at a slumber party” section of The Daring Book for Girls that I got for Christmas. My friends were recalling things we enjoyed doing as kids, and I suddenly remembered. 

“Did you guys ever play Bloody Mary?” Everyone was silent in thought for a second, but the general consensus was, yes, but nothing ever happened. 

There were different variations of the game, depending on who you played with or where you were from, I guess. Some people said to say her name three times, some said 10. The book that I had said 13 times. The instructions said to go into a dark room with a mirror, like a bathroom, and hold a flashlight up to your face and say “Bloody Mary” into the mirror 13 times, and she would appear. 

We were a bunch of 20 somethings who no longer believed in these silly children’s tales, but we were feeling nostalgic for our childhoods, and were excited to try this game. Maybe this time it would work, who knows? 

Me, my friend, my roommate, and my boyfriend shuffled into the bathroom. We elected my boyfriend as the one to stand in the mirror and summon Bloody Mary, mostly because we know that weird shit has happened to him in the past, and he would be most likely to illicit a response from the dead. He stood in front of the mirror with the flashlight, while the three of us sat at the edge of the bathtub, facing the door, and facing him. 

The light from the hallway outside glowed under the bathroom door. I focused on it while my boyfriend chanted “Bloody Mary” into the mirror as my roommate counted them off dramatically. When he got to 13, he put the flashlight under his chin and yelled to scare us, and of course nothing happened. But then my roommate said, “Wait. just wait. Shhh…”

We all fell silent. And then, as I looked at the light under the bathroom door, it went black. 

BOOM

I’d never seen my boyfriend move so fast. In the blink of an eye he was in the corner of the bathtub behind me, clutching the flashlight like he just won his first Oscar. 

We all heard it. We all heard the banging on the door. I clutched my friend's arm so hard I was certain I drew blood with my fingernails. The light under the door went black, but not like a black out. It went black as if someone was walking in front of it, but someone wearing a long dress, because there was one long stretch of black that passed across the door. In my mind, it was someone in a gown. Queen’s wear gowns. 

My roommate locked the bathroom door and turned on the light. We sat there in utter shock, trying to digest what had just happened. Naturally, our first reaction was to hiss accusations at my boyfriend, screaming that he hit the door on purpose to scare us. He sat in the tub, barely able to get a word out, still clutching the flashlight, shaking his head vigorously denying it. But then we realized, even if he had banged on the door, that doesn’t explain how the light outside went out. 

Finally we realized that we couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever, and we opted to leave. I unlocked the door, and my roommate held the flashlight behind me like a bat. 

We checked the entire apartment, but nothing was there. We checked closets, under the beds, cabinets, even the fridge. But there was nothing there. Nobody else was in the apartment at the time. We just could not explain what happened. 

After a while my boyfriend decided to walk back to the dorms. He was fine before he left, and it was only about a five minute walk from my apartment. He called me after he got there and said, “Hey, so, I don’t want to freak you out but...there’s a mark on my arm that wasn’t there when I left your apartment.” He snapped me a blurry picture, and I saw shallow red scratches. He said, “I don’t know, it kind of looks like a W.” 

But I knew that it was really an M.

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