Halloween scares found in Hawaii year-round

Kids getting too old for Halloween? Afraid of taking candy from some of your sketchy neighbors? Thinking of a haunted house but not too keen about having to wait in line?

Terrifying places abound in Honolulu. You don’t have to look very hard.

Just drive around Iwilei. It’s free and it’s scary. Wild-eyed, scraggly haired people will yell out as you pass. The smell of filth and decay will penetrate your car’s ventilation system. You may even be treated to a scene of violence. It’s all very realistic.

Iolani Palace grounds and the surrounding sidewalks look like a set for “The Walking Dead” during the day. People in horrible physical condition shuffle and drag themselves along the way and scream out at unseen demons. It’s terrifying. It’s sad and untenable, but the overarching feeling is fear.

The area around Lake Wilson in Wahiawa is like a haunted forest with hidden campsites and trails leading into secret hideouts. Just passing by on the highway can send a chill down your back as you imagine all the things you can’t see but you know, just know, are in there.

The stairwells in the state Capitol echo ominously and are lit with fixtures that give off a sickly light, like a movie set in an old asylum or a “Ghost Hunters” episode in an abandoned penitentiary. Sometimes you hear the disembodied voices of staffers who clatter from one floor to the next hissing scary words like “caucus” and “special session” and “excise tax.”

Every neighborhood used to have the allegedly haunted house with its peeling paint and boarded-up windows, the one all the kids would whisper about during sleepovers and speed up to a run as they passed on their way home from school. Now, those homes are being systematically sold off, torn down and replaced with massive commercial-looking cement fortresses with no garages and untold numbers of occupants. Who lives there? What are they doing with all those lights on all night? Is this what “Hawaii Architecture of the Early 21st Century” will look like in the textbooks? All brutal and stark? Those are much more frightening than the dilapidated wood houses with their creepy hanging trees.

And then there’s just the scary infrastructure all around — the pitted municipal parking lots, the cratered side streets, the homes and businesses in flood zones with owners that now must cast a wary eye and haul out sandbags whenever there’s a high tide.

Beach park bathrooms. You read those three words and shuddered, right? No description necessary.

Trying to get out of the two right-hand lanes on H-1 eastbound before the Punahou offramp on a Friday afternoon around 5:30 is an experience that will turn your hair white.

Why go looking to be scared when you can be scared, truly fearful, for free? Well, because haunted house attractions come with the comforting knowledge that it’s all pretend. When stuff is terrifyingly real, there’s no fun in that.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.