Eng. 311 (Autobiographical Writing) Final Project
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If given the choice, I would rather hear a ghost story more than anything else. This affliction, this obsession, this complete waste of time fills my thoughts and follows my footsteps. And the funny this is, I’m not alone. My entire family loves a good ghost story, and at the drop of a hat will tell you one of their own. Many a night has been spent sitting around the living room, or out on the porch, or even at some poor unfortunate’s house, telling tales of spirits and spooks. But the one criteria that we all insist on is that the story must be true. Or as true as a second or third hand account, we’re not that picky. True enough to shiver the audience in the telling.

The very first ghost I can remember is the Boom Boom Lady. Years ago, my family and I lived in an old, broken down house on Hakimo road. Hakimo road is a fright all by itself, with ancient houses and overgrown yards and fields following a winding road into the depths of the valley. Weeds grow in profusion near the cracked asphalt with hard packed dirt paths strewn with empty beer bottles and faded soda cans, cutting through the clumps of dead grass, trailing alongside the road in lieu of a sidewalk. The dark humor of the area suggests that if you ever have a body to get rid of, ditch in on Hakimo–nobody will notice. This may have more truth in it than not, considering the strange, half glimpsed things I’ve see alongside Hakimo at night.

And this brings me right back to the Broken House. It was small and shabby, but all my parents could afford at the time. Peeling faded gray paint with dull white trim covered the outside walls, the front yard an oven of burning hot dirt and brown cracking grass. It was surrounded by keawe trees, and located halfway up a dirt road leading to an old water tank nestled in the mountains. Our landlord lived in the same lot, as well as some other tenets that I have no memory of. Perhaps the first clue that something was amiss with the area was the complaints the landlord had over previous tenets of the last house on the lot, where he believed that they were trying to put a curse on him. He came to this conclusion from the salt they would always throw around their place. Too bad no one told him that throwing salt is a traditional Hawaiian method of blessing places as well as for the removal of bad influences. Or maybe someone did tell him, and he didn’t want to believe it. He was certain they had cursed him, however, because sometimes he would wake in the night with invisible hands squeezing his neck. Not a good sign.

During the day, my brother and I would play like any normal children, but when night fell on the Broken House things would change. I described over and over again the terror that came to my room at night to my mom and dad, but they always dismissed it as childish fancy. I don’t think that my brother ever saw the Boom Boom Lady, or at least he’s never admitted it. I saw her. To this day I can close my eyes and relive the most frightening nights of my childhood.

I would lie in bed, covers held tight to my chin, eyes fixed on the window over my bed. My heart would pound in my ears and my throat until I fell asleep, or until she came. Within one moment and the next, the empty window would be filled with the shape of a woman standing right outside. Her hair was long and gray, hanging in stringy clumps and tangles that moved as if they were alive and searching for me. Her clothes were a shapeless mass of thin fabric, nearly the same gray as her hair, and moving in the same unfelt breeze. Her face was like a peeling skull, the pale, leathery skin tight to the bone, her eyeless sockets glaring down at me. She radiated anger, I could feel it pouring off her, from her, into my room. I would lay petrified as a long bony arm reached up and began to pound on the windowsill. Each time her fist hit the wooden frame, the room would fill with the boom of impact, shaking tears from my eyes. At this point, I would either hide under my covers until she went away, or run for it. It was on a night where I employed the second option that my mother finally learned of the truth of my stories.

In this tiny house, it wasn‘t surprising that my parent’s bed was definitely not king sized, so when my brother and I climbed in with them for comfort and security, accommodations would get rather cramped. On one night when us kids clamored in, mom had enough. She couldn’t sleep, and decided to bunk down in my room where she could enjoy an uninterrupted sleep. As she got settled down, she became abruptly aware that she couldn’t move. The sudden paralysis frightened her, but nothing could have prepared her for the shock of the shapeless presence that entered the room through a wall. No one could accuse my mom of being a chicken, and the emotion that coursed through her at that time was excitement, not fear. She wanted to call out to my dad, “Hey, Keith! Come and look at this!� but was unable to make a sound in her frozen vocal cords. The presence drifted across the room and finally into the opposite wall. Once it disappeared completely from the room, mom found she could move again. Needless to say, she never doubted the existence of the Boom Boom Lady again. To this day, she recounts the story with an excited gleam in her eye, eagerly recalling details of the experience. Sometimes I wonder sourly if she would be quite so fond of that memory if the Boom Boom Lady had arrived in all her skeletal glory, instead of as some wussy fog.

My brother may not have seen the Boom Boom Lady, but he had his own scares in that house. He claims he saw something one day in our parent’s room. He and I were jumping on mom and dad’s bed, a forbidden activity which is probably why I hopped down and left the room before I got caught. I don’t remember. My brother continued to bounce, no doubt giving into that joyous abandon that jumping on the bed can engineer. Any pleasure he derived from the activity abruptly ceased when two floating eyeballs appeared in the room, moving past the guitar dad had leaning up against the wall. He scrambled off the bed and out of the room, seeking the safety of the living room.

During this time, dad was hard at work building our new house a ways up the street. Grandma had loaned him the money to buy the land with the stipulation that my uncles could build their houses and live on the same lot as well. When we finally got to move in, we breathed a sigh of relief. A new house with no strange history was certainly what the doctor ordered. But while we left the spirits of the Broken House behind, the new house had a fresh set of residents. Aside from us.

We have a long driveway up the side of the mountain, with my uncle Mark’s art studio closest to the road, the building up from that is his house, and at the top of the property is my house with my uncle Johnny’s house next door to ours. He has since moved out, but when he lived there strange things would happen. He told us that at night he could hear someone walking around his house, but when he investigated, no one was there, and the doors and windows were secure.

My bedroom was located on the side closest to his house, and one night I heard someone stomping up his steps, as if they were terribly angry, putting down each foot with all of their might. I wondered if maybe uncle Johnny was drunk, pissed, or both, but dismissed it and went back to sleep. The next day my dad and I talked to him on his front steps. He loved to chat, but this time he had a worried expression and kept glancing around. Finally he told us that last night as he lay in bed he had heard something pounding up his steps and into his house. He said the noise marched right up to his bed where it suddenly stopped. He said that the whole time this was going on, he was completely alone with his lights on. With someone else I would have suspected this as a cover story for some more prosaic, possibly embarrassing explanation, but I believed him. He never had any shame about being drunk, even boasting about his antics, and would joke about his temper tantrums once he cooled down. There was no reason for him to be making it up. He was also terrified of ghosts, yet had the same love of ghost stories as the rest of my family, and had to tell them when he had ‘em.

The strange occurrences did not isolate itself to one house. Sometimes at night, I would hear a voice waver out of the shadows of my room, whispering my name. This may just be an auditory hallucination, but if it is, others in my home have experienced it also. But weird sounds are the least of it. For some reason, doors will open throughout the house for no apparent reason. Even locked doors. One memorable night I got up to pee, and as I sat on the toilet, the bathroom door began to open. I had made sure that the door was secure before getting down to business, so I was shocked when it swung in. The door had gotten about halfway open, and by that time I could see that there was no one on the other side. Without thinking I shouted, “Close the fucking door!� and damned if it didn’t slam shut. So I sat there shaking, and it took me a minute to realize that I was more pissed off than scared. This is the bathroom for crying out loud, the most private room in the house. I felt angry and violated, but once that wore off it took quite a while to gather up the courage to get back to my room.

My dad thinks that there are several different entities that move through our house. The only one I’ve seen clearly is the woman in the red dress. I met her one night when I sat in the kitchen reading a paperback. I glanced up and found myself staring at a young woman with long dark hair and a short-sleeved red dress. She looked at me steadily without moving a muscle. I blinked and she was gone. I was still looking stupidly at the same spot when my dad came out of the shower, breaking the mood. The next evening during dinner, I told my brother that I had seen the ghost of a woman. He cut in before I could describe her and said, “Was she wearing a red dress?�

It turned out that she had appeared to both my brother and his friend. Several nights before, John-boy had been sitting in the living room waiting for my brother. The couch is set up so that whoever sits in it can see right out the front screen door to the porch steps. Poor John-boy is a bit of a coward, and when he saw a woman in a red dress walk up the front steps and right to the door before disappearing, he nearly lost it. He babbled the story to my brother before getting the hell out of there, and hasn‘t visited since. My brother shrugged it off until he took a nap on the couch the next day. He woke up to find a woman in a red dress standing in the living room staring down at him. Neither me nor my brother felt particularly threatened by her presence, and pegged the woman in a red dress as just a curious visitor.

My other uncle was not so lucky with his selection of anomalies. I, personally, am creeped out by his house. The feeling has gotten steadily worse over the years, and now I won’t go down there without some salt somewhere on my person. The first time I can remember something weird at his place was when my brother and I were about twelve and nine, respectively. The tale of “Bloody Mary� was making its rounds in our schools, and we were eager to try it (outside of our own house, of course.) So there we were, chanting “Bloody Mary� in his bathroom, with the door wide open in broad daylight.

He stood in the doorway and started to tell us to cut it out, when we heard an enormous crash in the bedroom. When we got there we found his folding door closet wide open with the main shelf torn out and its contents strewn about the room. We stood there dumbfounded, because his boyfriend was out of town, and there was no one home but us. We examined the shelf and the wall it was attached to in order to see if maybe the weight of the shelf had toppled it, though how it could have landed in the middle of the room is anyone’s guess. The screws were still straight, and the holes they were in had no signs of tearing along the edges. The only way that could have happened is if someone had torn the shelf straight out of the wall.

I don’t know if that particular entity still lurks in his house, but there is something under the coconut tree that shades part of his house that bothers me. I get a really bad vibe from the area, and now I refuse to walk past uncle Mark’s house at night because every time I do, I can feel something staring at me from under the tree. I’m not alone in this, because my dad says he gets the same heebie-jeebie feelings in that same spot.

I think that all of this ghost fascination comes from dad’s side of the family. When grandma was still alive, she would visit us from the mainland and tell us stories. My clearest memories of grandma was when she would sit down and put on her storyteller face. She would lean forward in her chair, hands resting on the head of her cane, eyes sparkling deep within the nest of wrinkles of her plump face. Each emphasis punctuated with a slight bow and tap of the cane. She told really neat stories about her youth, but her very best ones were about ghosts.

When she was a young girl, she started having these odd dreams. She would be in a locked room, alone and frightened. Then would come the unmistakable feeling of another presence, the itch on the back of the neck, the urge to look behind you. Something in the room was coming closer. And then she would wake up. She had this same dream well into her adulthood, sometimes seeing a man in the room, sometimes not. Finally, one night she burst out, “What do you want?� The man stepped forward and said that he was murdered and his body was buried under the floor of a certain library. If she told the authorities about it, he would leave her alone. She promised.

I asked her if she had actually told the police. “No,� she said, “But I never had that dream again.� She grinned widely, her dentures slightly too big for her face. All I can say, if that was an actual haunting, I hope that ghost never finds out she crapped out on the deal, and comes after her descendants.

I wish I could have met my dad’s cousin Cris. According to every family member I’ve spoken with, he was an interesting guy. The less polite or PC ones called him the freak. From what I’ve gathered, he was the quintessential ghost magnet. Everywhere he went, whatever he did, he was constantly harassed by voices and images. While he may arguably have had some sort of mental illness, and that is what his immediate family felt, strange things would happen around him that no one could explain. My auntie Marian told me that once she was sitting at the kitchen table with him when he began to freak out and say something was in the room. Then the hanging light fixtures began to swing back and forth violently. She said that he was just as frightened as she was, and ran away just as readily. My dad said that one day Cris was walking with some friends late one night past a cemetery. Suddenly he cried out, “Do you see her?� They just turned to look when the transformer attached to a telephone pole exploded. When they asked how the hell he knew that was going to happen, he explained that he saw this woman sitting in the tree by the cemetery. She looked at him then pointed at the telephone pole. He kept asking them if they saw her. They looked everywhere, but couldn’t find anyone hiding, man or woman.

Cris could find no relief from his situation, and his own family treated him like a shameful problem. One day he took matters in his own hands, and jumped from a bridge. While I have on occasion seen and heard strange things, I am deeply grateful that I don’t have to live with the torment he did. I love ghost stories–seeing them kind of sucks though.

My brother has seen and experienced a lot of weird shit. He and his friends would drive to all the haunted places on the island to look for ghost, but mainly to try and out-scare each other. One night they decided to drive through the back roads in Makaha valley to try and find the place where a young man had been beaten to death. They figured that if any place was haunted it would be there. When they parked, they decided to walk out off road for awhile, since the man had supposedly crawled off into the bushes before he died. They were walking for a short while when they came to a piece of ground that had heat radiating off of it. My brother and one of his friends walked around, while the other two stood silently, arms crossed tightly. They urged the rest of them to go already and they agreed. But when they got back to the cars, the heat had followed them and now surrounded the two vehicles. It rose of the asphalt like a waver on a hot day, but it was the middle of the night, and cold enough that all four guys wore jackets. They decided to drive away fast, and leave the hot road behind.

They planned to sleep over at one of the guy’s house, but my brother came home. That night, when his friends turned off the light to go to sleep, the shadows of three large men entered the room. They turned the light back on in fright, and the shadows disappeared. They figured that they had been seeing things, and turned the light off again. The three shadows walked back into the room.

The entire household spent the whole night awake and praying. My brother showed up the next day to hang out and got met in the front yard by his friends with the story of the night before. My brother, not the most sensitive guy at the best of times, laughed at them. He walked into their house, where the front door promptly broke and fell on his head. He was fine, and didn’t laugh again.

Out of my entire family, my dad is the most fun to talk with about strange and supernatural happenings. When he lived in California, he lived in a haunted house, and brought back quite a few stories, the best souvenirs. The place he lived at was called the old Upson Road house, and was surrounded by a grove of lemon trees. It was big and ramshackle with wooden floors that creaked with every step. After living there for a few weeks, my dad could isolate where a person was walking in the house from the volume of the creaking. He lived there with a friend of his that slept in the room next to his. One night dad woke up to hear footsteps moving through the hallway and right past his room. He lay in bed and listened to their progress across the house when they abruptly stopped in what he figured to be the middle of the kitchen. He stayed awake for ages, straining his ears but never heard another sound. The next morning, his friend walked into dad’s room and asked if his radio was on too loud or something last night. It turns out that his friend liked to go to sleep with the radio playing, and woke in the middle of the night to hear footsteps enter his room and turn the radio off before walking out again. It was dark, so his friend never saw who it was, and assumed it was dad since no one else was staying over. My dad told him he had been in his room all night, and they never found out for sure what had happened.

Some of dad’s cousins decided to investigate this so-called haunted house, and brought a ouija board along as part of their scientific paraphernalia. True professionals. The board managed to give up one word, the name “Harper.� An interesting postscript to the experience occurred some years later. After dad had already moved out from the old house, he found out from his auntie Aichi that the previous owner of the Upson place was a man named Mr. Harper, and he had killed himself in one of the rooms. And the house still had a problem with keeping tenets.

A few years ago, I read about a Japanese ghost game as part of the introduction of a collection of tales. The players sit in a darkened room, and tell stories that sends a chill through the listeners. With each story, a candle is lit. If, by midnight, one hundred of such stories were told, and a hundred candles lit, a ghost would appear. I have no idea if this is a real game or if it has any chance of working, but my family and I play it all the time, whether we know it or not. The lit candles exist only in my head, but the chills I get are very real. And I’ll play with anyone who is game, as long as the stories are true.