Local supernatural tales alive and well in the islands

By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

Lopaka Kapanui, storyteller and leader of the Ghosthunters Bus Tour, peers at the burned-out tree in Manoa Chinese Cemetery. The site is said to be a porthole for spirits, and there have been reports of fireballs exploding from the tree. Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

Minutes turn to hours as the sleepy girl waits patiently in the car. The road is isolated, and the only sounds the girl hears as she falls asleep is the slow, even pit-pat of rain and the gentle brush of a low-hanging branch across the roof of the car. Back and forth. Back and forth.

The girl wakes suddenly to an urgent tapping on the window. She sees a police officer holding a flashlight; he's gesturing for her to get out of the car. Now.

The girl opens the door. The officer puts his arm around her, asks her if she's all right, and hurries her away. "Don't look back," he says. "Don't look back."

The girl is confused, scared. What's wrong? What's happened? Where is her boyfriend?

She looks back, and she screams. The boyfriend is hanging upside down just above the car, his throat slashed wide open.

Through the girl's shock and horror, a realization emerges. The slow dripping she heard was the boy's blood spilling onto the car; the gentle scrape of the tree branch was his fingertips brushing against the roof as his body rocked in the breeze. Back and forth. Back and forth.

"I love that one," says Angie Matsui, 44, of Salt Lake. "I remember hearing that story when I was growing up in the '70s. It always gave me the heebies — even now."

Densely populated and culturally diverse, O'ahu is a prime breeding ground for ghost stories. And when it comes to creepy Halloween tales, there are few better than the local legend of Morgan's Corner.

The cautionary tale of teenage hanky-panky and gruesome murder is indeed well known and — in a very strange way — well loved on O'ahu. Through the years, generations of local teens have made the pilgrimage to Kionaole Road to creep out their dates and, often, themselves.

"It was one of those things to do when you're cruising around with your friends," Matsui said. "Sooner or later, someone goes, 'Hey, who wants to check out Morgan's Corner?' "

There are different versions of the tale. Some say the couple parked under the tree to make out, others says they were merely driving by when the car stalled. One version has the boyfriend being decapitated.

A few versions have also incorporated features of other stories involving Kionaole Road.

"I've heard that the rope he was hanging on is still in the tree," Matsui said. "I also heard that if you hug the tree and look up, you might see some kind of creature. And if you do, you'll be stuck to the tree."

Ghost stories galore

Hawai'i may not have a strong connection to the historic origins of All Hallow's Eve, but the local mix of Hawaiian, Asian and other storytelling traditions does tie in nicely with Halloween's modern associations. That is, we have a lot of ghost stories.

Dean Shimonishi, 36, was another one of those local teens who used to cruise Hawai'i's haunted spots as a teenager.

He recalls an incident several years ago when he and a couple of friends were driving around Waialua. They pulled off the main road and onto a dirt road in a cane field to smoke a cigarette and hang out.

It was 2 a.m., too late for the mill to be operating, yet as they sat and talked, Shimonishi and his friends noticed a pair of headlights approaching quickly from behind.

The lights were high off the ground, indicating that the vehicle was a cane-haul truck. The friends tore down the dirt path and back onto the main road to avoid getting hit.

When they went back to investigate, they saw that the stop light used to indicate when a cane hauler was being operated wasn't blinking. Even stranger, the two roads that connected to the dirt path — the only two roads the cane hauler could have come from — were chained and locked.

The group drove down to the sugar mill to see if, for some reason, it was operating. It wasn't.

"That was really weird," he said. "I'm not really sure what that was. It's one of those unexplainable things you see sometimes."

Shimonishi created a Web site called Supernatural Hawaii (www.geocities.com/wahiawaboy/ghost.htm) to catalog the various tales of ghostly goings-on that he's come across. The site includes his personal experiences as well as reports from people statewide.

Shimonishi's site has accounts

of several famous and not-so-famous supernatural sites, including the house in Hale'iwa that refuses to be painted; the wooded area around Wahiawa where the scaly, seaweed-haired Green Lady is supposed to live; and Mililani Cemetery where, legend has it, if you drive around a certain statue backward 13 times, the statue will follow you.

Terrifying experiences

In Hawai'i, traditional tales of night marchers co-mingle with obake stories from Japan. Many local families claim to have first- or second-hand accounts of calling spirits, faceless women, footless travelers, even ghostly fireballs.

Matsui said she used to wait in the car while her friends went down to a haunted site near Makapu'u, where a calling ghost is said to exist.

According to one version of the tale, if you go to the beach during a full moon, you'll hear weeping coming from the ocean. If you look out, you'll see a woman and a child calling for help. But it's a trap.

If you swim out to try and rescue them, you'll find that the mother and child keep floating farther from shore.

"Before you know it, you've gone out so far out you can't get back," said Lopaka Kapanui, a storyteller and leader of the Ghosthunters Bus Tour. "And you drown."

Storytellers seek truth

Kapanui has been doing ghost tours since 1994, when he first hooked up with the late chicken-skin storyteller Glen Grant.

Like Grant, Kapanui researches many of the stories he tells, following strands of historical fact in search of that golden ghost story quality: the germ of truth.

The Morgan's Corner tale, he said, is little more than an urban legend. It originated on the Mainland in the 1940s or '50s as a way to dissuade teenagers from romancing in parked cars.

Other tales are harder to discount.

One of Kapanui's favorite supernatural spots is the burned-out tree in the Manoa Chinese Cemetery. The site is said to be a porthole for spirits, and there have been reports of fireballs emanating from the tree, even before the site was a cemetery, Kapanui said.

Some say that if you enter the tree, you will be able to put a curse on someone. But, of course, if you aren't filled with good, positive energy, the curse could come back to haunt you.

Kapanui said firefighters, police officers and others have told him different stories about the tree.

One said that a man had set himself on fire at the tree, hence the scorched wood.

Kapanui and a group of ghost-tour customers were at the graveyard when they saw a group of teenagers dressed in robes goofing around near the tree. The next thing they new, the teens were running from the cemetery as though they'd seen a ghost. Or something along those lines.

"We saw them at McDonald's later, and I asked them if they saw something," Kapanui said. "They said they saw the fireballs."

Reach Michael Tsai at 535-2461 or mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.