by Jeffrey J. Higa
The Japanese doll would not stay in its glass case. Every night before housekeeping locked up the house, the doll was in its case. Every morning after they unlocked the house, the doll would be waiting on the floor next to the case. The third time it happened, the housekeeping staff refused to enter the house and would not unlock the doors.
“You have to open the house,” I said, “What are the docents going to do on their tours? Have the tourists stand outside and look through the windows?”
“You need to do something,” the head housekeeper told me.
At the time, I was Executive Director of Hawaii’s Plantation Village. The Village, as we call it, is a historic homes museum that brings to life Hawaii’s immigration history through period-correct houses, gardens, and artifacts. Think Historic Colonial Williamsburg without the annoying reenactors. So even if my title meant I was nominally the boss, the head housekeeper, an older Filipina about 30 years my senior, never let that detail bother her.
“YOU,” she said pointing at me, “need to do something.”
So, for about a week, I took the easy way out and closed and opened the Japanese Christian house myself. Sure enough, three of the six times I unlocked the house, the doll was outside the case. The houses in the Village are uninhabited and are recreations drawn from plantation records but the objects that populate the seven different ethnic houses are donated by local families. Like most non-profits, the Village is primarily a volunteer-run organization, so let’s just say record-keeping was not a popular volunteer duty. As a result, the provenance of our artifacts were often based on rumor, conjecture, or guesswork.
I knew after a week I would have to confront the problem more directly, not because I was freaked out by the doll who I had to put back into the glass case when she was out, but because I was tired of coming in early every day. As an Executive Director of a non-profit, you think you are going to be running things, but in reality, you really earn your salary taking care of the intractable problems no volunteer wants to address. And in my nine years at Hawaii’s Plantation Village, that included investigating paranormal activity and curating cursed artifacts.
I was not the ideal person to deal with this kind of problem. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute which meant that all of my education had been based on rational explanations for everything. Need someone to read federal grant applications and write long-ass progress reports with graphs? Fine. Need someone who understands financial statements and can extrapolate five-year projections? Great, hand me that pencil. But as I was telling a docent, Uncle Moke, the Monday morning after my early week, how do I solve a problem that has no apparent cause?
He nodded slowly in that kind, tolerant way that Hawaiians have. “So,” he said, “that means you don’t believe.”
“Believe what? I believe the housekeepers. I saw the doll outside the case several times myself. I believe that.” I may have been waving my arms around at this point.
He nodded patiently again. “Let’s go to the house,” he said.
We walked silently to the Japanese Christian house which is located almost midway on the linear walkway that fronts the houses. We call it “walking through time”, having already passed the Chinese, Portuguese, and Puerto Rican houses of the early 1900’s to arrive here in the 1910 through 30’s. Once I had unlocked the house, we stood in the living room and I motioned toward the dolls and the large glass case by the door.
“Which doll is it?” he asked.
I pointed to the older, slightly shabbier doll with the bamboo umbrella. She was tall and thin so that her elongated body could better show off her kimono. Her head was pitched at a disturbing angle toward the sky and a spindly arm reached toward the viewer. He just nodded, peered in closer for another look, and then slowly walked through the rest of the house–a kitchen and two bedrooms. I waited for him in the living room and when he returned, he looked at me for a moment, turned his gaze toward the window and told me a story that would change my life.
“You know, my mother was Chinese at least partly, the building holding our records burned down, so the 1700’s is as far back as I could go. But my father was pure Hawaiian. We spoke English and Hawaiian in the home, so I grew up with both. He had a gift, so people called him kahu. I know the English translation of kahu is shaman or some nonsense like that but he was more of a teacher. People would come from all around and ask for his help or advice. If something was happening in someone’s family or if they were having a run of very bad luck, he would go to their houses and have a look around. Sometimes it was quick, as soon as he entered the door he would know, and sometimes it took a while. But his gift was being able to locate cursed objects in a house.
Say you have a grudge against a family or are angry at someone. We Hawaiians believe that you can bring an object to a black kahuna and have that object cursed. You then give this object to the family, like a housewarming gift or birthday present, and that object will sit in the home and work on that family. It may bring sudden and early deaths, sicknesses, broken relationships, whatever the giver had wanted. My father’s speciality was the ability to locate that object. It’s not as easy as it sounds because sometimes the object was small. Sometimes it was buried under the house. It could be located anywhere nearby where it could work on the family.”
He paused and looked around the room. “And everything here was owned by an actual family. There is something here that is not right.”
The totality of his story took a moment to sink in. “Great,” I finally croaked. “Great. Let’s find that thing and get rid of it.”
“I can’t,” he said matter-of-factly. “That was my father’s gift, not mine.” He pointed at me and said, “YOU. You need to find it.”
Thus began my quest to locate the cursed object. Logically, one would think that the doll was the problem. Wrong. When I went to the Waipahu Hongwanji to talk to the Bon-san about getting rid of the dolls, he told me the Japanese believe that each doll has their own spirit. It was unlikely that the dolls were cursed. “I think there is a spirit playing with the doll,” he advised.
I returned to the house with no idea where to look so I ended up doing what my mother would have done. I rearranged things. I moved the doll case away from the door and closer to the corner. I moved the low table with its zabuton seating cushions more toward the center of the room. In the bedrooms, which had been set-up as bedrooms for teenage boys, I moved the photos and posters of female movie stars and girlfriends to an opposite wall so their eyes weren’t peering into the living room. Then I instructed the housekeeping staff to make sure the bedroom doors were closed each night before locking up.
Still, the doll appeared outside of its case sometimes. Still, housekeeping refused to unlock and open the house each morning. My early days continued and some docents started skipping the house on their daily tours for fear of infecting a tourist with some kind of spiritual contagion or bringing a spirit home with them. That house might still be under the sway of a wretched spirit if a little girl had not gone missing one day.
On the first Saturday of the month, as a publicity event and a way to encourage the public to visit the museum, the Village would hold a festival to honor one of the ethnic groups (Portuguese Festa, Puerto Rican Festival, Chinese New Year, etc.). The houses were opened for the public to stroll through on their own and there were usually performances and food booths on the great lawn. A day after our largest event, Obon, an annual Japanese celebration honoring one’s dead ancestors, a mother called to tell me about her 6-year-old daughter. It seems that Mom had stopped to talk to a friend she saw in the yards of one of the houses and started chatting. She told her daughter to stay in the yard but the girl had gotten away from her.
After realizing she was missing, there was some frantic searching with her friend in the nearby houses. She found her daughter in the Japanese Christian House sitting on the floor of the living room, facing a corner, gesturing and talking as if someone was there. The mother said she was so surprised, she watched her daughter for a couple of minutes before she called to her.
“Who were you talking to?” the mother asked.
“A friend I just met,” the girl said.
“What is your friend’s name?” asked Mom.
“Abigail,” the girl said. “She was there with someone else.”
At that point, the mother said, she relaxed because her grandmother’s name was Abigail. “I had never talked to my daughter about my grandmother or ever mentioned her name. But the fact that she said that name…I don’t know…I felt like my grandmother was looking over her great-granddaughter and I felt good about that.”
However, when I relayed the story to Uncle Moke he interrupted me mid-way. “The girl said there was another person there?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you this other person’s name? Where was this other person?”
I thought about it. “No, I don’t think the girl knew the other person’s name. And all she said was the other person was behind Abigail.”
“No,” Uncle Moke said suddenly. “No.”
“No?”
“No, the other person is dangerous,” he said hurriedly. “The girl is in danger. Tell the mother. And never let them go into the house again.”
“So that wasn’t her grandmother?”
“That may have been the girl’s great-grandmother, that may be true,” explained Uncle Moke. “But the presence of the other spirit is no good. It could be an evil spirit manipulating the grandmother to get to the girl.”
His words were like a mallet striking my mind, creating a vibratory hum that struck me mute.
“She is in danger,” he repeated. “Did you ever find the object in that house?”
But I had already hung up. We both already knew the answer to that question.
The first thing I did was call the girl’s mother. After breathlessly telling her about Uncle Moke’s warning, I extracted a promise from her to never let the girl go into that house again. Then, I went back to the Japanese Christian house with an arsonist’s desire to burn the house down. Instead, I searched the corner where the girl was found. I’m not sure what I expected to find, but there was nothing in that corner. That particular corner was centrally located in the house with one wall adjacent to the kitchen and the other wall adjacent to a bedroom. I searched the opposite side of the wall in the kitchen and there was nothing there either, the walls were blank. However, on the corner wall opposite the bedroom there was a large tansu.
A tansu is a long, flat series of drawers that can be stacked like legos and are designed to store kimonos. I tried to look up the provenance of the tansu in our records, but there was nothing on file. I then called Amy–our oldest, most Christian volunteer–and asked her about the tansu. She recalled that the tansu had been moved to the house later. It had not been a part of the original YMCA donation of items that populated the Japanese Christian house.
“It came from another Japanese house,” she said. “I think it was put into the Christian house because it looked nice there.”
That was all I needed. I grabbed groundskeeper Benny and we dragged all the pieces of that tansu out of the house and loaded it onto the back of the golf cart. I drove it to the edge of Waipahu Stream where Benny had an empty 55-gallon waiting. While Benny chopped up the tansu with a hatchet like Tom Robinson on a chiffarobe, I fed pieces of it into the burning drum and watched the smoke rise up like Scout watching Miss Maudie’s house burn.
All activity in the house ceased after that. The doll never left her case again until one day a couple of years later, a boy on a school tour claimed he was pushed by a classmate onto the glass case which fell to the floor and shattered. I took that opportunity to discard the glass case and made a donation to the Hongwanji to dispose of the dolls, save one, a non-ambulatory one, which stands to this day in the house all by itself, collecting dust.
The most important people in any historic homes museum is the housekeeping staff. They arrive the earliest, opening all the doors and windows, sweeping all the porches and walkways, and generally clearing the way for the rest of the staff and public to enjoy the museum upon opening. I thought of them as my AWACS (Advanced Warning and Control System) an acronym I rechristened from my Air Force upbringing. Because of their familiarity with all the material objects on the museum grounds, they always knew, before anyone else, when something was amiss.
Trouble, one morning, was announced by a broken picture frame thrown onto my desk. “We fix twice already,” said the head housekeeper. “Now, cannot.”
The pieces of the black plastic frame lay atop a 8x10 black and white picture of an infant girl in a yukata (summer kimono). Her body was in profile as she supported herself on a prop, with her face fully turned toward the camera.
“From the Okinawan house,” she explained.
“What happened?”
“The picture jumped off the shelf again,” she said.
I considered that for a moment. “What do you mean ‘jumped off the shelf’?”
Her sigh was violent and sharp, like a balloon being knifed. “It won’t stay on the shelf, it just keeps jumping off the shelf.” She moved her arms as if she were pushing someone. “Like that.”
I knew from docent training that this child’s portrait, along with another photo, was kept on a small shelf in the living room of the Okinawan house. “What about the other photo? Does that one jump off the shelf too?”
She looked at me and squinted, searching for intelligence. “You think they hold hands and go down together?”
I shrugged.
“One does the pushing, the other does the falling,” she said. Her unsaid “duh” hung in the air as she left my office.
I purchased a new frame and took everything along with me to the Okinawan house. Except for the missing picture, everything else was still on the shelf. The thumb-sized vase with fake flowers, the small tealight in glass, the vermillion-colored sakazuki sake cup, and the 8x10 photo of an Okinawan woman all looked untouched.
I knew the shelf was a launching off point for the docents to talk about midwives and childbirth during the sugar plantation era. A PG-13 narrative suitable for even our school tours, the picture of the older Okinawan woman was an actual midwife in the Okinawan camps. As plantation doctors were scarce and plantation housing was segregated by race, ethnic midwives played an important role in the camps. The woman not only delivered babies in the Okinawan camp, but she was also known as a specialist for breech babies. She often served women from the other ethnic camps who came to her to have their babies turned before birth.
Even so, infant mortality was still high on the plantation. The photo of the baby that usually stood next to the midwife was actually a baby the midwife had delivered. But since the girl had been born sickly, the parents had a picture made, fearing the baby might not survive. Sure enough, the baby died soon after.
I placed the photo of the baby on the right side of the shelf and pushed both frames closer together toward the center and away from the edges. I hoped that would be enough.
The next morning, the head housekeeper did not say a word but just placed the newly broken frame on my desk. I bought another frame and this time I inspected the shelf. As I tried to push down on it, there was no flex, it was as solid as a sidewalk. I couldn’t get it to tilt one way or the other. When I looked closer, I noticed that someone had used drywall screws to mount the shelf instead of using period-correct nails. The shelf wasn’t going anywhere. This time, I switched their positions and moved the midwife picture to the right and put the baby picture to the left. Again, I had them crowd the middle and moved the tealight closer, as if they were huddled for warmth.
I arrived at work the following morning and went straight from the parking lot to the Okinawan house. Of course, the picture frame was on the floor, broken. I was annoyed. I was going to have to spend another $10 for a third frame. $30 is a lot for a non-profit. Non-profit math operates like this: $30 spent on frames in one month means the housekeeping staff does not get their box of disposable gloves the next month, or if they do get their gloves, then the groundskeepers do not get the whips for their line trimmer. I would need to make some calls before I bought another frame. I collected the baby picture and went back to my office.
I begin by calling retired board members, trying to find anyone who could remember the details of the pictures in the Okinawan house. I already knew that the baby’s family was not part of the midwife’s family, but I quickly learned that the midwife’s family had not been active with the Village for a long time. It was finally the old curator, whose idea it was to put the two photos together on display, who remembered the last name of the midwife, Oshiro. Digging through old records, I was able to come up with some phone numbers and eventually tracked down an Oshiro daughter who agreed to come down to take a look.
About a week later, the Handi-Van dropped off an old woman in a wheelchair and I wheeled her out to Okinawan house. As we crossed through the ADA-compliant doorway she exclaimed when she saw the picture of her mother.
“So young,” she said, “I hadn’t seen her that way in a long time.”
I handed her the picture which she placed onto her lap and gazed at it while I explained the whole story. I then handed her the photo of the baby in a new frame. She looked at the baby and then turned the picture over. Then she picked up her mother’s picture again and looked at it for a long time. She handed it back to me and watched while I placed it on the shelf.
She handed me the baby’s picture. “Don’t bother putting that one back on the shelf,” she said. “It will fall off again.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why, do you think?”
“The baby,” she paused to reconsider her words. “I think the baby is restless.”
“What do you mean?”
“The baby’s spirit is still a baby. I think she is angry. I think she misses her mother.”
It made sense but having been a stay-at-home dad during my own child’s first five years, all I could remember was the many failures I had soothing rages. “How? How do I fix that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. Then seeing the look that must have creased my face she said, “I guess I can talk to my mother’s friends. The ones that are still alive.”
I took the frame apart and handed her the picture. “Take this with you.”
She nodded and I wheeled her out of the Okinawan house and back into the present to the big banyan tree in the parking lot, where we waited in the shade for the return of the Handi-Van.
The empty frame sat on my desk for a couple of months before I started to worry. Who did I think I was, sending an old lady on a mission? She wasn’t Tom Cruise from the Impossible Mission franchise. I had sent her out without even considering that she may die before fulfilling her charge. What if she was dead already and the photo was sitting in her family’s home “working on the family?” I did an online search of the newspaper obituary section and was relieved to come up empty. I had a little while, then, to try and figure out how to get the picture back.
But my fears were shelved when I received a manila envelope in the mail about a week later. When I opened it up, I saw the baby had returned and there was another 8x10 picture enclosed. It was a blurry picture of a young Okinawan woman, clearly an enlargement from a group photo, with several disembodied shoulders on each side of her, their faces out of frame. A post-it written in a shaky cursive attached to the back of this picture commanded, “Put this in with the baby’s picture.”
So I did. I opened up the back of the frame, laid down the baby’s picture, and then placed her mother’s picture behind the baby; the baby’s eyes stared outward through the frame’s glass, while the mother’s eyes were filled with her baby.
Since their reunion, the picture has never jumped off the shelf again.
In the time I served as Executive Director of Hawaii’s Plantation Village, I dealt with many objects and incidents that could not be explained except by being a “believer.” I dealt with an angry, violent Filipino spirit that would push people off a second-floor stair landing which was tied back to a donated tricycle. I had a friendly girl who would only appear to other children in an infirmary window, a window made from the office glass of a dentist whose daughter had been run over by a bus. We received such notoriety that the Ghost Hunters reality show filmed a whole episode about the Village. They only intended to stay half a day but ended up having enough experiences to stay two days.
When I was younger–during The Amityville Horror heyday–I used to wonder how people could live in a haunted house. I no longer wonder. It is not unlike living somewhere with banging radiator pipes or next to a neighbor whose teenage son has decided he wants to be a drummer. Quite simply, an indifference settles in and you get used to it. Once, I was leading a couple of young women from Japan through the village. They were in their 20’s, young OLs, as the Japanese call them, who work full-time and like to use their money and holidays to travel before they get tied down with marriage, children, and societal expectations. I had led them to the kitchen of the Japanese duplex and was pointing out familiar objects to them–charcoal iron, tofu press, outdoor rice cooker–when there were two short banging noises, like sharp retorts, directly in front of us. I stopped talking and as we looked, directly across from us hanging on the opposite wall, two pots hanging from nails banged together again.
“Nan dayo,” one of the girls asked. What the hell is that?
I shrugged. “Obake?” I answered. Ghost?
As soon as I said that, they were gone. I had never seen two women run so fast in high heels. I eventually caught up with them but only at the other end of the Village. To prevent further incidents after that, I added a nail between the pots and hung a leather apron between them, effectively muffling the sound.
Jeffrey J. Higa is the great-grandson of Okinawan and Japanese immigrants who came to Hawaii at the turn of the 20th century to work on the sugar plantations. From them, he inherited their love of their adopted land and the stories that sustained them. “Cursed Objects” is located in Hawaii’s Plantation Village, where Higa served as Executive Director for nine years. He likes to say he entered his role as a non-believer but left with an appreciation of the supernatural when faced with problems that could only be resolved through supernatural means.
Higa is a widely anthologized fiction writer, essayist, and playwright and the author of Calabash Stories (Pleiades Press, 2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His work can be found in Zyzzyva, Tahoma Literary Review, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, Salt Hill, Bamboo Ridge, Turning Leaf Journal, The Hawai’i Review of Books, Poets & Writers, and others. His story “The Shadow Artist” received an honorable mention in the Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize from the North American Review. His full-length play Futless won First Place in the Kumu Kahua Hawai’i Prize contest and his holiday story “Christmas Stories” has been serialized on Hawai’i Public Radio. In 2022, he was the recipient of the Kundiman fiction fellowship at the Sewanee Writers Conference.
He can be reached at his website: www.jeffhiga.com or on X: @higatweet
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