Hawaii -- The Real The Surreal -- `Chicken Skin' Experiences -- Ancient Spirits Live On In Beliefs, Traditions

If you go to Hawaii, you must be careful . . . They're out there. Watching. You almost always can feel their presence. Sometimes, you may even see them.

Night marchers still walk ancient paths to conduct rituals and ceremonies. Kahunas (priests) talk to rocks and the rocks talk back. You can be "prayed" to death.

More than a century and a half after the demise of idolatry and human sacrifice and despite the work of zealous Christian missionaries, Hawaii is alive with mystery. Some may call it devil's work, but in Hawaii where people live in both past and present, it's the old Hawaiian way.

The ancient ways are there just beneath the surface of modern island life. Hawaii is alive with ancestral spirits, animism (nature-centered belief), primal fears, and both old and new kapu (taboos); around the edges lie myth and legend, plus religions introduced from Japan, China and America.

Some places are still kapu, off limits. Secret caves contain old canoes and feathered capes of long dead Ali`i (chiefs, nobles). There are signs to heed, rules to obey. Or else . . .

Or else inexplicable things happen. Houses shake. Freeways collapse. Cars leave the road. And bulldozers fly.

(It happened just this summer on a Honolulu freeway construction job, suggesting to some that angry ancestral Hawaiians haunt the project.)

All this gives me chicken skin. That's the local pidgin expression for goose bumps, that eerie sensation you get when you encounter the inexplicable.

In Hawaii, chicken skin grows as easily as palm trees.

Developers, beware

Ghosts of angry ancestral Hawaiians, it seems, regularly halt construction projects, especially golf courses where developers turn Hawaiian temples into hazards.

On Maui, the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua had to move its multimillion-dollar beachfront hotel off the beach when bulldozers uncovered a mass grave in coastal sand dunes. The Ritz avoided the wrath of displaced spirits by dedicating the graveyard as a memorial.

Not so lucky are Kieweit Pacific Co. crews now completing Honolulu's so-called H-3 interstate freeway, a ribbon of concrete snaking through the Halawa Valley in the majestic 3,000-foot-high Koolau mountain range on Oahu. Strange mishaps keep stalling construction of what now is the world's most expensive freeway - a 16.1-mile stretch of road begun the 1960s with a $1.6 billion price tag.

Hawaiians consider the valley to be sacred: the home of Papahanumoku, a female god of the native religion. Six years ago, a curse was placed on the project when construction violated an ancient heiau (altar or temple) where Hawaiian women once observed rites.

On July 27, four carpenters stepped out on the freeway's elevated ramp and it collapsed for no apparent reason. The incident, in which four 120-foot-long, 40-ton concrete girders fell, was the latest in a series of mysterious accidents. To date, two workers have died and eight have been injured on the job.

"Troubles on H-3 Strengthen Beliefs in Power of Supernatural Wrath," said a Page One headline in the Honolulu Advertiser.

"I get so angry when I see the desecration of our sacred grounds," said Lilikala Kame`eleihiwa, an associate professor for the Center of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, who had issued the curse on the H-3. "Every time I hear about someone dying in connection with it, I am happy."

Some things you just don't fool with.

Not in tourist brochures

Chicken skin doesn't get talked about much by the people who want you to spend your vacation in Hawaii. You seldom read about such things in travel magazines or guide books.

Until now these strange encounters were written on the wind, remnants of Hawaii's oral tradition. Or they were whispered in confidence to friends. Seldom were such stories published except in scholarly works.

With the revival of the hula and the Hawaiian language, and new ethnic pride fostered by the sovereignty movement, Hawaiians once reluctant to "talk story" for publication now are speaking up. The spirits, or wailua, must be rejoicing.

After I moved to Hawaii more than a dozen years ago, new friends and total strangers - by way of introducing me to the islands and as a kind of gentle initiation, I suppose - told me stories about supernatural, mysterious, inexplicable things:

Like night marchers in Olomana who passed though a house one night and caused one of the occupants to be temporarily paralyzed. Or centipedes, like something out of Disney's "Fantasia," that exploded into a hundred tiny centipedes when slashed by a machete.

Some stories sounded so much like Boy Scout campfire tales I dismissed them with a laugh. Others, obviously folkloric, reminded me of stories by people who live close to nature. Still others were so haunting, I never forgot them.

Feeling the power

Hawaii's sensational nature often causes chicken skin, too. I personally have experienced it while seeing a night rainbow on Maui at Maalaea Bay; wandering, alone, in the half-light of Wao Kele O Puna rain forest; hearing chants at sundown at Pohukaina Mound near Iolani Palace.

The mound, in downtown Honolulu, is surrounded by a fence with kapu signs, and it positively radiates chicken skin.

Pohu`kaina Mound served as the temporary burial site of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu who died in 1824 in London, of measles. They are now entombed at the Royal Mausoleum, on Nuuanu Ave. in north Honolulu.

"It is not known for certain if any human remains exist at the site," notes archaeologist Dr. Paul Christiaan Klieger, "but due to the mana (power) of prior association, at least, the spot is considered worthy of respect."

That means that even the soil that once held the royal remains of kings and queens is kapu.

And kapu is backed by a state law which makes it a crime to violate sacred places. There's a $10,000-a-day fine if you disturb Hawaiian burials.

Since Hawaii became a state in 1959, heavy development has obscured many kapu places. But the spirits endure, and sometimes act up.

Hauntings

Ancestral Hawaiian ghosts still haunt Aloha Stadium, now a rusting hulk of metal where the University of Hawaii football team seldom wins.

The ghost of the wife of Sen. Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, still haunts Room 120 of the Moana Hotel where she died mysteriously of poison the night of Feb. 28, 1905.

Gov. John Burns, who died in 1975, has been seen guiding visitors through Washington Place, the governor's former residence.

Warriors defeated in 1795 by King Kamehameha the Great at the cliffs of Nuuanau Pali, behind Honolulu, often may be heard now, 200 years later, screaming in agony as they fall to their deaths.

On Oahu's Waianae Coast souls of ancient Hawaiians wait to depart for the nether world. Wandering ghosts still linger in graveyards.

Graveyards

"Hawaii's graveyards are full of chicken skin," says Nanette Purnell, who knows.

As founder of The Cemetery Research Project she spent 10 years in Hawaii graveyards recording three volumes worth of names she found engraved on island tombstones.

Once, she said, she was guided around old Hawaiian cemeteries by a man who turned out to be dead.

"There's a lot of strange activity in graveyards, most of it by the living," she said.

Often, cemeteries' silence is split by the obnoxious roar of power lawn mowers and leaf blowers - although a few Chinese ghosts may have won their eternal peace.

"One day," Purnell said, "I found this ball, like a fish-net float, on a 6-foot pole in Manoa Chinese Cemetery. Cemetery workers said they put it there to mark the haunted spot.

"Every time they tried to mow the grass in that area the mower broke down, the weed whacker broke down or somebody got hurt. Something always happened.

"Nobody liked to go in that section, so they marked the spot. Now. everyone knows to stay away."

That spot today is blissfully quiet, if a bit overgrown. ----------------------------------------------------------------- More information

Rick Carroll's new book, "Chicken Skin: True Spooky Stories of Hawaii" (Bess Press, Honolulu, $9.95) is scheduled for publication in October. Advance copies will be available in some area bookstores this month, including Borders Books & Music in downtown Seattle and Tacoma, and at Puss 'N Books in Redmond. Carroll is scheduled to sign books at 4 p.m. Friday at Borders in Tacoma, and at 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Puss 'N Books.