Spookiness in Hawaii
Aloha!

Besides some of the more traditional things we've been doing on our vacation in Hawaii, we've gone on a local Ghost Tour.

We've been on a similar tour in Salt Lake City. My wife is a professional storyteller, and her specialization is on ghost stories / scary stories. She has a whole selection from silly or cute "jump stories" for younger kids to stories designed to creep out adult / teen audiences only. So this tour was a bit of "professional development" for her, as she's started collecting stories from other cultures.

The stories were fun, and got a little on the creepy side. Stories of faceless women and goddesses hitchiking --- stuff like that. Fun. Actually they had two variants on the story. It's very tricky picking up a supernatural hitchhiker in Hawaii, because some kinds are very bad and dangerous to pick up, and others are dangerous or bad luck not to pick up. And they had their own variation on the "toenails" urban legend, and some pretty horrific stories from Oahu's past.

There were a couple of big differences between the "ghost tour" we've taken in Utah and this one. The one in Utah focused more exclusively on spirits of the departed, and what history they could come up with on who the suspected haunt might have been. The Oahu tour freely spoke of fireballs, and entities that could only be described as "monsters" (or gods) in addition to traditional ghosts.

Also, the Oahu tour focused on trying to freak the tour groups out. They used little psychological tricks to suggest to the audience that there might be something going on and that they might be perceiving something emotionally that was supernaturally charged. They invited those who felt they were psychically sensitive to express what they might be sensing.

While I enjoyed both kinds of tours, I think I prefer the Utah ghost tours approach better.

But I sure enjoyed the spooky. I snapped this shot at the Pali Lookout at night - the place where King Kamehameha drove his enemies to their deaths over the cliffs. The moon was full and the wind was blowing the clouds swiftly. At one point on this lookout, there's a vortex of wind caused by the cliffs which becomes a stiff, powerful gale that threatened to rip cell phones and cameras out of people's hands, and we had to raise our voices to talk to people right next to us. A few yards along the path or back past the lookout, and the wind was still. It was pretty neat.

But hey - in the interest of adding my own spooky - I don't know what that second light was below the moon. I was pointing my camera up, and there wasn't anybody in front of me with a camera or light that I can recall (they'd also have had to be about fifteen feet tall to appear in this shot, as I was holding it above my head and angling it up by about sixty degrees - it is a tall cliff). Still, it's likely to have simply been some kind of lens flare artifact on a crappy cell-phone camera. But hey - jussincase.

Unfortunately, our better camera lost power on this trip. Nothing supernatural there - the batteries were already running low and we forgot to replace them before we left. Our bad.

Fun stuff! I definitely enjoy the creepy.

Labels: horror

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 3:35 PM (Permalink)