Haunted Halls

Stories of the supernatural are unsurprisingly common among students and staff at Lahainaluna, which is nestled at the base of Puʻu Paʻupaʻu (Hill of Struggle). Founded in 1831, Lahainaluna High School has been around for nearly two centuries, a span of time in which the campus has shifted and expanded. Nevertheless, something has stayed the same, unaffected by the construction of new buildings that occur from time to time. Spooky stories are a legacy as strong as the traditions we pass down from generation to generation. But are they more than stories, or are we just superstitious?

According to various accounts from students, staff, and alumni, several areas of our old campus are rumored to be “haunted” or “spiritually active,” as Librarian Tara Nakata corrected me. “The campus is a little bit up in the mountains, right?” she said. “It’s not odd to believe there is paranormal activity.”

When asked, staff and students had lots to share. At the top of their lists were the Hoapili & David Malo dorms, Samuel Moʻokini Music Building (band/choir room), the Hale I Luna (aka J-Building), and the MacDonald Building. There have also been spiritual sightings from the cafe.

“...something was watching.”

Ag teacher, Nathan Pallett, tells a story about a felt presence outside the MacDonald building. As he describes, it was late at night, around 10PM sometime during the 2018-2019 school year. Pallett was in the MacDonald building, thinking about working for another hour when suddenly a feeling of dread came over him. As he describes it, the feeling was telling him “it’s time to go home.” Listening to the feeling, he decided to leave. After cleaning up, he headed over to the box on the side of the building in order to set the alarm.

“As I was walking back,” said Pallett, “I felt like something was watching.”

Trying to disregard the feeling, Pallett continued to walk back to the front. Still, he continued looking over his shoulder, not turning all the way, and trying to fight an almost eerie feeling coming over him. “It felt like something was gonna, like, rush from behind. I walked much faster, almost to a jog.”

He kept the fast pace as he continued to feel the pressure of the entity. The closer he got to the truck, he felt the presence strengthen. He hastily squeezed through the narrow space between the building and the red gate and finally a hint of salvation occurred.

The presence disappeared after passing the red gate.

He describes the situation as something that you experience in films. “It felt like in the movies where the bad things are about to get the person… and all of a sudden the ghost or whatever disappears when the people turn around.”

“...G-Building wasn’t blessed…”

After Pallett’s scare by the MacDonald building alarm box, the presence, he said, never came back. But he did tell me about another odd incident where he stayed late on campus.

At the MacDonald building again, Pallett was doing his usual routine of going down to feed the animals, when he heard a TV blaring loudly from one of the classrooms in G-Building. “I knock on the door,” he said. But “no one answers, the door is locked. I can see that the lights are flashing.”

He decided to call Principal Carosso to unlock the door. Carosso arrived at the scene shortly after to shut the TV off.

Thinking the problem was resolved, Pallett went back to his room to grab his things. Unknown to him, Carosso decided to check the classroom again and found the TV still on. He walked around the room, checking the backrooms to confirm there was no one in the room. A little later, the two were talking when the fire alarm suddenly went off in the cafeteria. “They (the people at the cafe) thought they could smell smoke and it looked kind of hazy… you could smell stuff.”

The fire department arrived at the school and examined the building, but couldn’t find a trace of fire anywhere. “They checked every outlet, all the heat sources,” Pallett reports, “and nothing was abnormal.” 

Pallett spoke to “Uncle John” Alexander, our cafeteria manager, later that evening who suggested that G-Building had not yet been blessed and this was the source of the abnormal occurrences. G-Building was eventually blessed, which had been already planned, and “everything just stopped,” Pallett says. “I haven’t heard any stories since.”

The Unsettling Melodies of the Band Room

Students and staff often stay late at the band room playing music. But some unusual rhythms, they claim, cannot be explained. According to the Director of the Band & Choir, Jalen Baraoidan, “Mr. B,” there have been multiple paranormal encounters at the Samuel Moʻokini Music building (aka band/choir room), many of which he has experienced himself.

During his four years of teaching, one of the most significant spooky events he experienced  was when he heard drums, specifically Hawaiian drums. “I heard these very loud drums just playing,” he said. “I thought to myself ‘huh, Hawaiiana club practices on Sundays?” Baraoidan had been working on choir tracks and got up from his desk to check it out.

Moving toward the sound of drums, Baraoidan approached the choir room. “When I walked in,” he said, “the room was pitch dark, no one was there.” He quickly thought, “maybe someone snuck into my side of the room” and circled around Kumu’s room for a bit longer before going back to his side. But again, no indication of anyone else that was there except himself.

Baffled, and a bit alarmed, he thought to himself, “Okay, maybe it’s time to leave.” So he did.

The drum sounds could have come from anywhere, but what about an unsettling melody from a piano? According to Isikeli Tafea (Assistant to the Director of BAC), a former student, Carlito Justin Luben, “CJ” (Class of 2015 Alumni), and Baraoidan, they once heard the band room piano playing when no one was around.

Years ago, said Baraoidan, he decided to give the school’s grand piano to Maui High School choir, replacing it with a smaller piano. Though the piano was gone for a short duration, students often reported hearing it play in the area it was once located, and he also heard it from time to time.

Isikeli heard the story from boarding students who cleaned areas of the campus after school. A group of them were assigned to the band room as their area to clean. According to them, they could often hear the piano being played, but when “they would look, there’s no one inside. The band room’s pitch dark…”

According to Luben, multiple people have reported hearing “like a trickling on the piano… It would usually be at night with all the lights off.”

Until the new piano was installed, the melody continued. All three interviewees claim that there is a little girl spirit attached to the piano. Baraoidan said “...a girl spirit, a ghost spirit LIVES in the piano and when I got rid of it, she got agitated.”

These encounters with ghosts at the band room are odd as it is more modern compared to other buildings. The band room finished construction in 1977 and has only been around 48 years since Lahainaluna has been here.

Nevertheless, many say the band room is one of the most haunted spots on campus and, one reason, apparently, is the water.

There were multiple waterways. While many were demolished alongside the sugar cane fields, some water canals remained, such as the one by the band room. According to an anonymous staff member, “water attracts spirits” and many cultures have entities associated with water.

Perhaps this was a reference to Japanese culture in which mischievous water demons/spirits called “Kappa” harass people. The kappa are also sometimes saviors who save people from drowning.

The staff member is not too sure, though.

“…the student she thought she saw was outside.”

Many of the borders have attended Lahainaluna for generations. They have inherited a love for their school as well as stories about their predecessors’ experiences: the good, the bad, and the haunted. Hearing about ghostly experiences may sound ridiculous to some people, but generations of borders on campus claim that our ghosts are real.

Hilinaʻi Sodetani, is a freshman border who talked about a haunting experience by her auntie, 2016 alumni. Sodetani’s auntie claims to have heard chains dragging in the halls of the Hoapili Dorm. “They say,” said Sodetani, “it’s like a legend that it’s David Malo’s dog walking down the hallways.” It is also a tradition that if you ever see a lady in white in the hallway, you must go back into your room.

Although Sodetani has not encountered the spirits that her family members told her about, she says that she recently had some chilling experiences at the Hoapili Dorm when her roommate and herself were on their phones heard a knock coming from the door. Sodetani describes the situation as odd because she thought “Was I the only one hearing the knock?” Her roommate had not reacted at the time.

Sodetani decided to ignore it and laid back down when the knock came again, “like three knocks. And then I opened the door, but nobody was in the hallway.” Her roommate told her to ignore the knocking, but later, Sodetani went to discuss the situation with a friend, a fellow freshman border, who also heard knocking and coincidentally her roommate had told her to ignore it too.

Sodetani mentions, her father, a 2001 alumni of Lahainaluna, who claims to have heard the toilets in the David Malo dorm flushing while he was in the bathroom, but there was no one else there.

LeiAloha Amram, a sophomore border, has many little occurrences to share that happened here and there. One encounter happened to her dorm attendant who saw someone walking into a dorm room. The dorm attendant thought it was one of her students but soon after leaving the dorm  “the student she thought she saw was outside.”

Amram also mentions that “someone’s lights were flickering and turning on at night, and there’s doors shaking, opening by itself.” She added that her friends had seen a tall, long figure in one of the dorm rooms but once they turned the lights on, it disappeared.

“...things would break or the lights would fall down.”

In 1990, the original Hale I Luna burnt down. Five years later, a two-story and ten classroom-building was established in order to replace it. The new building kept the name “Hale I Luna” aka J Building. Anne Cook, the English Department Head and 10th Grade English teacher thinks the fire was “kind of strange” since “they never ever found out the reason for it.”

Once the new building was built, it opened up strange encounters in the classroom, claims Cook. “I was downstairs before--I was in J104. There were times where things would break or the lights would fall down.” It made her get shivers like chicken skin. Cook describes how she heard the bushes and trees rustling, "but, there was no wind. Why were they rustling?"

Importantly, perhaps, Hale I Luna connects on its north side of the campus where the night marchers start their path.

The stories of paranormal activity were apparently frequent enough that school leaders asked custodian “Uncle Nalu” Naleieha to perform a blessing on the building. Naleieha told Cook that the location was a hot spot for spiritual activity as it is where the night marchers would walk down the mountain. Their path apparently takes them along the old stream after they reach the front office.

Sodetani adds, “They say that the night marchers' pathway goes into boarders field but one thing that they always tell us is to try to ignore them, and verbally say out loud sometimes to tell that we’re here… they only come and go…”

Cook said “I felt like they weren’t harmful spirits, but there were spirits here.”

Many on campus believe similarly. While there are wandering old souls and scary entities, there are also guardians that keep the place safe. According to the ELL Coordinator/Spanish teacher, Ashley Olson, two ghosts appeared to her in her first year of teaching.

Working during the school day in K14 of the Hale Puke building, Olson was sure that a couple of students had walked past her door wearing rugby uniforms. She remembers wondering to herself: “Why are there students out during class?”

Rushing outside to remind them to head to class, she was met with an empty field and no students. “I walked around to the back of the building,” she explained, “and there’s nobody. That happened a couple of times…”

Discussing her situation with Naleieha, he told her “Those are warriors that are just keeping the campus safe.” Olson added that because of what he said to her, she made sure to appreciate them, and said thank you. “After that,” she claims, “it didn’t happen anymore.”

Alexander claims that every morning, whenever he opens the gate and drives past Sue D. Cooley Stadium, he sees shadows at the fence. “I would call them like a guardian of the campus… I don’t think most of the things that I’ve seen here are evil or wicked…”

Breakfast is Served!… to Nobody?

Alexander has encountered many ghosts or spirits. They come around when he arrives at school to set up around four-thirty to five, and around the time he leaves campus, which is sometimes as late as 11:30 or midnight.

Though the majority of his encounters weren't horrifying, he claims, there are times where he gets chicken-skin.

“There are two types of encounters you can experience on campus,” says Alexander. “I would call it a presence type where you can sense and feel their presence. Then there's another one that you can feel a form of fear or borderline terror like something's not right here.”

Alexander has only experienced one spirit that gave him a “I shouldn’t be here” feeling. That was when he first started working here, and at the time, there was random equipment that hadn’t been transferred from the old cafeteria (currently ʻEpekema aka H-building) to the newer cafe (Hale Pā’ina).

One morning, he went down to grab some of the equipment that they needed for the day. As he attempted to unlock the door, all of the hair on his body stood up. “It was not friendly at all… my skin started tingling.” That is the only feeling of terror he has gotten from ghosts in his decade of working here, he said.

His chicken-skin experience may have ended there but, at the Hale Pā’ina, the “wandering” ghosts of the cafe continue to appear before his eyes. “I have seen shadow figures walk across the dining room and I hear chairs moving from time to time… Usually I say good morning, aloha.”

Alexander explains that he does not feel the same terror with the ghosts that just wander. They are “friends of his”: “I feel that they are all very old souls… It’s not scary. At least not for me.”

Again, not all ghosts are scary, Alexander insists. He explained one encounter he had experienced with “Auntie Jane” Casco, the cook for the cafe, as proof.

It was a normal morning and their usual routine. Turn the computers on to check if they were available to scan for ID’s, clicked through the them and to see if the search bar was working–in case they need to find a student’s name.

After this, they turned away from the computers when they heard a beep. It was the sound that was only heard when an ID had been scanned. They hastily turned back towards the screen to see the search bar popped up on the screen. And in the search bar, the initials “DM” appeared.

In this brief second, they looked at each other and said “David Malo.” Alexander laughs as he explains the encounter, “It’s like ‘Oh! David’s here’... Not to make joke or any disrespect, but it’s just a thing that we’ve accepted. There are, and I truly believe there are, past spirits on campus.”

“Some would say you’re never really seeing what you’re seeing, and like that’s okay,” Alexander concluded. “You don’t have to agree with me.”