Feel the spirit during village’s haunted tours

Before he took the helm as executive director of Hawaii’s Plantation Village eight years ago, Jeff Higa had not had any supernatural experiences, nor did he believe in them.

Since then his attitude has changed.

"Now I can’t deny that strange things happen at the village that can’t be explained any other way," Higa said. "They occur too often, have been reported by so many different people."

For the past six years, in the weeks leading up to Halloween, Higa has led evening tours revolving around peculiar incidents that have taken place at the village. "The tours are different each year, based on the encounters that I, the staff, our volunteers and paranormal investigators have had," he said. "I might retell the most popular stories, but I always add new ones."

The Friends of Wai­pahu Cultural Garden Park, a nonprofit educational organization, started raising money and drawing up plans for the village in 1973. Chronicling life on Hawaii’s sugar plantations circa 1850 to 1950, the outdoor museum opened in 1992.

In addition to the Hawaiians, the village spotlights people who came from faraway lands to work on the islands’ sugar plantations — the Chinese, Japa­nese, Koreans, Fili­pinos, Portuguese and Puerto Ricans. Most of its 25 buildings — including the store, infirmary, manager’s office, community bathhouse and cottages representing the various immigrant groups — are replicas constructed from actual plantation blueprints.

Local families donated the clothing, cookware, photos, furniture and other artifacts in the exhibits. "Spiritual counselors have told us spirits are sometimes associated with those artifacts," Higa said. "They said when bizarre things happen with the objects, the spirits are trying to communicate something to us and we need to address that issue."

Higa recalled a family portrait in the Japa­nese Family House that would continually fall to the floor for no apparent reason.

"When we contacted the person who donated the picture, he told us one of his ancestors had died young and that the picture we were displaying did not include that boy," Higa said. "He gave us another picture of his family, which did include the boy, and that picture stayed on the wall."

One day Higa was accompanying two young women from Japan through the Japa­nese Duplex. As they were standing in the kitchen, two pots on the wall suddenly banged together. The women asked, "How did that happen?"

Higa told them he didn’t know and proceeded with his narrative. The two pots banged together once more. The women again asked what was causing them to move.

"I told them ‘obake,’ which means ‘ghost,’" Higa said. "As soon as I said that, they ran out of the house. I caught up with them, and although they decided to continue the tour, they were so unnerved they didn’t pay attention after that. All they could talk about was what had happened in the house."

Longtime docent Fran Caba­nilla has seen the mysterious resident of the Puerto Rican House twice. The tall, lean man with tanned skin wears a brown derby, khaki pants and a long-sleeve white shirt with the sleeves turned up.

"He’s not an apparition; he looks as real as you and me," Caba­nilla said. "My niece saw him the same day I first did, which was at an open house that the village held several years ago. My niece speaks fluent Spanish, and he spoke to her in Spanish. He asked her if the little girl who was with her was her daughter, and she said yes. He asked her if she was enjoying her visit to the village, and she said yes. He said hello to her daughter."

According to Caba­nilla, the unidentified man likes his privacy. "The front door of the house has to be kept closed," she said. "If the door is left open, he’ll close it. You can see the door slowly close, even if there’s no wind."

Although the man appears to only a select few, Caba­nilla says he watches everyone who enters the Puerto Rican House. "If you want to see him, look at the picture that’s on the trunk in the living room of the house," she said. "That’s him in the picture."

Noa Laporga has organized the Haunted Plantation since 2006 (see hawaiihauntedplantation.com). An experience he had during the second year of the event still gives him chicken skin.

"Every night, our actors take a 15-minute break together in the social hall at the far end of the village," Laporga said. "Performing can be intense, so the break is a time for them to relax and have refreshments."

As he was rounding up actors for the break, Laporga saw a tall, thin woman with long black hair behind one of the houses. She was holding a flashlight and peering up into the branches of a tree.

Assuming she was one of the Haunted Plantation’s performers, Laporga told the woman to go to the social hall immediately for the break. "She didn’t respond, so I walked closer to her and repeated that she needed to take her break right away," he said.

When she continued to ignore him, Laporga realized she wasn’t one of his hires. His next thought was that she was a homeless person. "I told her, ‘You’re not supposed to be here,’" he recalled. "I said, ‘I’m going to call the cops to escort you off the property if you don’t leave on your own.’"

Suddenly, the woman turned and looked at Laporga. "Her face was long and white; she was creepy," he said. "She said, ‘I’m not going to leave until I find my children.’ She went back to shining the flashlight and looking up at the tree. By then I was really freaked out."

Laporga spun around, took a few steps and shouted for assistance from a staff member. Moments later he glanced behind him, but he saw only the outline of a big tree in the darkness.

The woman had vanished.

Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi is a Honolulu-based freelance writer whose travel features for the Star-Advertiser have won several Society of American Travel Writers awards.