Spooky Sites Tour!

To get in the Halloween Spirit, a couple friends and I decided to go on the Spooky Sites Tour here! The tour was very informative! For example, the Japanese are very superstitious people and fear the number 4 as Americans do the number 13. Four in the Japanese language is pronounced "shi" which is the same pronunciation as "death". In Japanese buildings, there will be no number 4. There are a few towers on some of the bases here that are supposed to be haunted and it is usually on the fourth floor. Japanese ghosts do not have legs. I haven't researched that one so I'm not sure why not. The Japanese people believe that if you throw salt over each shoulder and sprinkle salt by your doors, you can rid yourself of a ghost. It's all very interesting. If there is any place in the world that has seen it's fair share of death, it would be Okinawa. In the battle of Okinawa, there were 249,000 Okinawans killed in 99 days. That's more than 80,000 a month. Many of them were young men and women and children. The Japanese believe that if you have unfinished business when you die, you'll stick around to complete it. I'm guessing a few of those 249,000 people weren't quite ready to go.

One of the first sites we went to was house #2283 on Kadena Airbase. The story is there were back to back families where the father committed murder suicide. It was empty for months and then years. They actually tore down the back room because it was always cold. Like 20 degrees colder than any part of the house, and that was during the middle of an Okinawa summer. The house had no electricity, therefore no air conditioner. Oi vey. 

Visitors are said to have seen a woman washing her hair in the sink, and heard children laughing or screaming. There has also supposedly been a sighting of a Samurai warrior who rides his steed through the living room. A Halloween séance was even held there on Oct. 31, 1994, in which an attempt was made to contact Harry Houdini. Although they didn't contact him, it is said that while those involved didn’t contact Harry Houdini as planned, they definitely did contact a spirit. And the batteries in several of the cameras used that night suddenly lost their charge. 

Whatever story you have heard, or perhaps believe, there is something strange about the house. Why board up a perfectly good home when a grateful family would gladly take it? Why does the USO use it for storage, and why do the employees there only enter in the daylight or in groups? Maybe someday the truth will be told about the house behind the USO. Funny thing? Kadena Airbase decided to build a CDC right next door. Go figure. :) 

UPDATE: This house was torn down at the beginning of 2010. They won't build anything there. They left the fence around house up so noone will go on the property. 

We also went to the Camp Zanpa Lighthouse. Our tour guide mentioned a story about a woman who came to the area to see her husband off to the mainland and in her sadness of him leaving, fell to her knees and toppled over the cliffs. 

We found this little guy running around under the lighthouse! 

This is supposed to be a statue of a navigator. The whole time we were there it looked like he was pointing in one direction and on the way out it looked like the other direction. Mind tricks!

One of the really sad stories was of the Hospital Cave. Legend has it 17 nurses (all school girls forced to be nurses for Japanese soliders) were told that if they were ever to get caught by Americans they'd be raped, tortured, and killed. They were each given a hand grenade. On April 1, 1945, they saw American soldiers coming up the hill and they all put the grenades to thier bellies and pulled the pin. They weren't killed instantly unfortunately. They slowly bled to death. 

The Hospital Cave they worked in was hidden in a hill where they would bring the wounded Japanese soldiers that needed to have limbs amputated. They would then throw the limbs down the side of the hill and also the bodies of the soldiers that didn't make it. 

Where is this cave? Directly above the playground we frequent. Again, go figure! :)

We had alot of creepy fun!