This spot on the corner of this busy intersection has a fairly unremarkable history. Old fire insurance maps show the space was once occupied by a doctor’s office, a church and school, various small dwellings, and a place called “Villa Lani.” Newspaper searches don’t pull up a lot of information. However, there was an announcement of the death of a 65-year-old woman on Valentine’s Day in 1905 at her residence here on the corner of Beretania and Punchbowl Streets.
While there is no printed information on this location, that doesn’t mean it isn’t haunted. That just means no one wrote it down.
You might recognize this building as the place where you pick up your birth certificate, marriage license, or copies of family death records. Today, on this corner, you’ll find Kinau Hale, the Hawai‘i State Department of Health headquarters, which contains offices for the DOH and its director and the vital records division.
Years ago, a young woman told me that she reported to her new office job on the second floor. She was nervous but determined to find Room 256 on her own. As she approached the door, she took a deep breath and then opened it. Sitting in the corner of the room was a middle-aged man. She recalled he smelled of cigarettes and didn’t smile. In fact, he didn’t acknowledge her at all.
Although she introduced herself and stated that it was her first day, the man just sat there quietly writing in a notebook. She tried to ask if he was her boss, where she should put her things, and where she should sit. But she got no response. She said it felt like she was invisible.
She walked along a set of cubicles that looked like they already had occupants, papers and folders stacked in the corners, a pen on one desk, an open notebook on another. Finally, toward the back of the room, she saw an open space with only a typewriter and a stapler sitting on a clean desk. The woman assumed this would be her station and placed her bag on the desk while she began to get settled. She brought a favorite pen that she placed next to the typewriter. She placed one new notebook next to her pen and put three more in the desk drawer. There was room for her purse in the bottom drawer, so she put it there and then leaned back in her chair. The back squeaked loudly, and she immediately sat up and looked around, a bit embarrassed. But no one popped their head up. The room was still silent and empty, except for the man in the front corner, but he didn’t even flinch at the sound.
After waiting 15 minutes, she stood up and went in search of the restroom. She glanced briefly at the man in the corner but decided he probably wouldn’t help her if she asked, so she set out to look for it herself.
In the hallway on her way back to the office, she ran into the office manager who had interviewed her.
“He was asking me where I was and said I was supposed to start 20 minutes ago,” she told me.
She tried to explain that she was there the whole time, just waiting by her desk. She said no one even came in; there was just the quiet man who smelled like cigarettes. She told the manager that she had found an empty desk and put her things in it before she went to look for the bathroom.
“‘Where are your things now?’ he asked me.”
So she brought him to Room 256 and opened the door. But it was different this time. Instead of a bright office with cubicles lined up, the room was dark with random furniture stacked against the walls and on top of each other. Slowly, she walked to where she thought her new desk might be, and there she found her things, just the way she left them. Only, the desk was dusty, and there was no typewriter or stapler.
She turned to the manager with tears in her eyes and explained exactly what she saw. She looked to where the quiet man would have been sitting, but there was just an empty desk with a chair on top of it.
As they walked out of the room, the manager closed the door and pointed to the number. As he touched the 6, it swiveled on a single nail.
“He said this isn’t Room 256. It’s room 259. It hasn’t been used as an office for a really long time. They just use it for storage.”
In a separate account, also several years ago, I was asked to come to this building for a special blessing. Some of the office staff were uncomfortable because one of their coworkers had passed away, but it seemed that her ghost kept showing up for work. On the way to this haunted cubicle, I noticed jars of some clear, bubbling liquid sitting on a few desks. As I was being ushered through the office quite quickly, I made a mental note to ask about them when I was finished.
I often joke that if a person works for the state or the county, they don’t move on after death; they go right back to work. In this case, it wasn’t a joke.
The manager told me that the person who died was alone. She had no other family in Hawai‘i, and her only friends were the people she worked with. They only had good things to say about her. She was a kind person with a big heart, always willing to help out whenever anyone needed her. But... However nice she was, no one wanted to work with a ghost.
Quite often, a spirit will attach itself to the place that made them the happiest in life, and it seems that work was this woman’s happy place. The blessing I performed was a simple one that I learned from my mom. It involved pa‘akai (Hawaiian salt) braided ti leaves, and a prayer in Hawaiian as I encouraged the spirit to let go of her earthly life and move on.
Whether a person believes in this type of thing or not isn’t the point. We don’t tell anyone they must believe, or if things don’t work out, that they don’t believe strongly enough. A blessing of this fashion is meant to bring peace to the dead, but also to the living. It acknowledges their concerns and offers a bit of hope. Hope for something after this life has passed, hope that they won’t be forgotten or left behind.
As I was leaving, a jar of liquid on a woman’s desk caught my eye, but it was no longer bubbling. I remembered my question and asked about it.
I was told that the jars were filled with coconut oil and that some of the Filipino women have them on their desks. If the oil is still, then that means everything is fine. But if the oil starts bubbling, it means a ghost is present.
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