Tales from the Tour Guide

A few years ago my wife and I went on one of the ghost walking tours they have every year around Halloween in Honolulu. I am a huge skeptic but my wife believes in this stuff. She was so excited that I finally agreed to go on this tour.

Naturally, we arrived early and only the tour guide David was there. Immediately, he looked at me and said, "You no believe in dis stuff, eh?"

"No, not really," I replied.

He said, "Betchu by da end of dis night you will."

"We’ll see," I said.

He decided to tell us a story before everyone else arrived. He told us the story of the missing hiker. He said that a girl had gone missing on a hiking trail and her body was never found. David said that he himself had gone hiking on that same trail exactly one year later but got caught in the fading daylight and had to spend the evening on the trail.

Later that night, the missing girl, whose name was Sharon, appeared to him and guided him to her body. Sharon told him that she had been hiking with her boyfriend when she broke her ankle and couldn’t walk. Her boyfriend, Eric, was supposed to have gone for help but he never came back. No one came up the trail the entire next day so she began to worry.

Finally, the next night, in a panic, she tried to make it down the mountain but slipped and fell over the edge of a cliff into a ravine where she died. David said it’s a matter of public record that he reported what he knew to the authorities who eventually did recover Sharon’s body and contacted her parents.

A report said the boyfriend had been located the day after the couple had started on the hike. His body was discovered off the trail about half a mile from where David claims he saw Sharon. Eric apparently never made it for help.

David said he went back up the trail a few days later to let Sharon know what had happened to Eric. She was very grateful and was now able to move on.

I told David that this was an interesting story but I was still not convinced this couldn’t have been made up.

David said that when Sharon’s parents arrived to take her body back to Indiana, they wanted to meet David and thank him for finding their girl. They said he told them things no one outside the family could have known, including her parents’ nickname for her, Shanni. David told them that she asked him to tell her parents that she loved them and was with Eric and Sebastian now. (Sebastian was a pet dog who died when Sharon was 5 years old.)

Her parents apparently were convinced but I still wasn’t and I told him so. "It’s still early," the tour guide said before excusing himself to go use the restroom. I told my wife that everything David said could have been made up.

Finally, people started showing up and I asked the first person to arrive whether he was here for the tour. The gentleman, Ernie, said that he was the guide. I told him that David was already here and he said, "Oh, you met David." I said yes and asked if the story David told us were true and he said it was. I said I had my doubts, and he sighed and pulled out a copy of an old newspaper article about the recovery of Sharon Yearwood’s body.

I said that only proved they found the body, not that she appeared to David after death. He then pulled out a copy of an old obituary for a David Kalama with a picture of the tour guide who had just told us the story.

I told my wife, "Let’s go now."

"Now do you believe?" she asked.

I said, "What do you think?" and we left.