Coming off two successful investigations at Wake and Nikumaroro Islands, and still giddy from the news that Polaris's drawing of the “Japanese officer” seemed to match a the Wake commandant who was later tried for war crimes, the team arrived in Chuuk anxious and upbeat. A beautiful lagoon with a coral reef border, Chuuk Lagoon is roughly triangular in shape. Visiting ships can slip through the reef at one of three passages. There are six major island groups inside the barrier reef and even more atolls and low-lying islands which are remotely located around the lagoon. Weno, Tonoas, Tol, Udot, Fefen and Uman are the major islands. The team docked at Weno and off-loaded their supplies for what promised to be the most extended expedition they have had in the South Pacific thus far. The team intentionally left their departure date open so as not to repeat what happened on Wake and Nikumaroro, where keeping to a schedule meant losing opportunities.

Although their recent successes had done much to sooth the problems between some of the members, Trespass continued to be obstinate and frustrated, as he expressed in his journal of October 19th:

“I have not written a journal entry in a long time, but I am trying to get back a little into the swing of things. I know there’s been a lot of speculation about me recently, so before I write about Weno I just want to clear a few things up. First, I have kind of come off sounding like I am the OCE drama queen, which I guess is partly my fault because I haven’t been spending enough time explaining myself and having to spend TOO MUCH time defending myself. Whatever. I just want everyone to understand that I’m not some fucking emotional invalid. The news about [Hurricane] Katrina and what it did to Louisiana really took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about Louisiana in a long time. It’s been almost two years since I left there, and I never looked back until the storm happened and all these places I knew were suddenly under six feet of water. Katrina reminded me of some stuff that I had tucked away in my head, so if I was moody (more so than usual) then that’s why...”

Although Trespass wouldn't offer any details about his past at this point, it was during the Weno phase of this investigation that he and Polaris began to discuss his returning home to Louisiana to check in on his family [See Trespass's Return to the Bayou for more information].

On October 22nd, the entire team drove into the mountains to investigate some of the old Japanese fortifications. They went crawling through the caves that perforate the mountain below the old lighthouse. The caves are all natural formations, but the Japanese fortified many and booby-trapped others in anticipation of an American assault. The locals warned the team not to go into the caves, saying that some still have live ammunition hidden inside, but mostly because they are believed to be haunted. Apparently both dead Japanese troops and island spirits dwell there – so naturally the team had to go inside!

The most accessible caves have been transformed into tourist attractions. One, which lay right below the lighthouse, still had a rusted 200-mm naval gun pointing north, in perpetual vigilance for hostile navies. The team, however, was more interested in the caves where snipers once lay or where troops crawled when the bombs started falling. On the east slope, they found the mouth of a tunnel about four feet in diameter and decided to go inside. Unsure of the conditions, and reminded of how quickly Trespass became lost in the caves on Motu Nui, they made a human chain with Meridian stationed at the mouth of the cave and each other member positioned about ten feet apart so we could stay in constant visual and voice contact. This seemed to work well. Polaris was on the end of the chain, or about seventy to eighty feet inside. No one found anything of any historical significance… or any ghosts for that matter.

The team spent the next few days exploring the island, but by October 28th it became obvious that the best paranormal “hunting grounds” were underwater in the lagoon. They hired a boat from a really nice man named Charles who would prove to be an invaluable asset to the team throughout their stay in Chuuk. Charles took them out to see a wreck called Gosei Maru, which had gone down in relatively shallow water. Once the six OCE members got into the water, they immediately noticed that the Gosei was lying against an underwater hill facing downward. Her stern and propellers were closest to the surface, or maybe ten feet below. The nose of the ship was unreachable or about 100 feet below. The stronger team members could make shallow dives down and run their hand along the ship's hull. For everyone, floating above the ship was eerie. It was very overgrown with ocean life, so it was hard to distinguish where the ship ended and the seabed began. The cranes, decks and curve of the hull were all visible. Anvil said he could see the large rupture in her side where a torpedo sent her to the bottom. So many of these ships were full of supplies and people. Scuba divers can drift through them and look down on caches of ammunition, daily supplies and human bones. The Gosei Maru is supposed to be full of mines and torpedoes. Charles said that Americans came by in the 1970s and blew up a lot of the left over ammunition because it was self-detonating. The villagers on the islands nearby kept hearing explosions and seeing these big bubble "clouds" appearing in the lagoon... and some of them thought the war was back on!

Just as eerie was Ash's journal entry after he returned to shore:

“I didn’t like going into the water today because it was very noisy. When I put my head under the water I could hear the boat [the Gosei Maru]. All the people were groaning and whispering. It sounded like an auditorium full of people and they were all talking about us. I asked my dad if we could leave but the others didn’t want to. So I had to sit in the boat while they swam. But at least I couldn’t hear the voices there.”

As with his experience when drifting in a boat above the Hayate off the coast of Wake Island, Ash appeared to have some distinct and disturbing impressions about the wreck that lay beneath him. What was most interesting is that Ash appeared to have an experience in clairaudience, which was a new type of psychic phenomenon for him.

“What’s interesting to me is that he heard the voices underwater but not when his head was out of the water or when he was sitting in the boat,” wrote Trespass at the time. “Does that imply that the water itself was the medium for the sound, like dolphin squeaks? If the "sound" was psychic in nature, did the water still serve as a medium? If... water would distort actual human voices, and if what Ash heard was undistorted, then the voices had to be psychic in nature, right?”

Despite yet another haunting event, the OCE members were still stymied by their mutual inability to scuba dive. As a result, they asked their new friend and guide, Charles, for some guidance on finding a haunted site that they could access and examine for an extended period of time. Charles immediately remembered something from his childhood... an airplane crash site on one of the smaller islands in the western part of the lagoon. This region was known as Faichuk, and it was considered to be the most "backwater" area of Chuuk. According to Charles, a Japanese fighter plane crashed in the lagoon just offshore from one of the islands. He did not know when the plane crashed or why, but said that the islanders did not go near the wreckage because it was thought to be haunted by plane’s pilot. He produced a single black and white photograph of the crashed plane, which he said was a "Zero." The photo looked like it had been taken at least thirty to forty years earlier as it was warped and cracking. Charles said that he did not know if the plane was even there, as he had not visited the site in decades but offered to everyone for a look.

Charles took them on a two-leg journey today to scout out their theories on ghosts underwater. After discussing it again, the team decided to return to the Gosei Maru first and get back in the water. Polaris wanted them to just float there, with their heads in the water, listening. After floating face down for about an hour, however, everyone was freezing and very ready to move onto the next stop. No one reported anything unusual, not even Ash. But he did say that the ghosts in the ship weren’t talking this time around because they knew we were listening. They were quiet, he said, because they didn't trust the team or any outsiders.

After pulling themselves out of the water and back onto Charles’s boat, the team made off for Faichuk, which was about forty miles away. Charles seemed pretty sure that he knew where the downed Japanese Zero was located, but was careful to tell everyone that he didn’t know if it was still there. Although Micronesian law prohibited the removal of any of the war artifacts in the lagoon, the Zero was remotely located and not on any tour itineraries. Bandits and collectors could have salvaged the wreckage and no body would have ever known. Additionally, Chuuk was pounded by a typhoon in 2002, so the storm could have easily moved, dismantled or buried the wreck. Either way, it might prove as difficult to find as Amelia Earhart’s Electra [See Amelia's Shadow: The Search for Earhart and Noonan on Nikumaroro Island].

The site in question was to the southwest of the large island called Tol. It turned out to be such an insignificant speck of land that it didn't even have a name. When the boat got within about a hundred feet of it, everyone let out a collective gasp. The tail section was the first thing they saw, sticking out of the turquoise water like a silver shark’s fin. The Zero was located in a small indentation in the atoll’s shore… Trespass said the plane "flew up the island’s crotch and crashed there.” It was amazingly intact. The propellers and canopy were gone, and any trace of paint long since scoured away. Polaris immediately pulled out his sketchbook and began to draw diagrams.

Polaris expressed everyone's excitement about the discovery:

“The atoll where [the plane] is located is so far removed from any of the major islands, that one has to wonder how a Japanese Zero ended up way out here in the first place? Was it on a reconnaissance mission when it ran out of gas or hit a patch of bad weather? Was it assigned to an aircraft carrier that left it behind? Was it racing to escape American guns but just wasn’t quick enough? If you look at a wreck map of Chuuk, all of the major sites are in the eastern part of the lagoon. Then there’s our little Zero, way out here all by itself. Its isolation is our good fortune, I guess. We have the laboratory we were looking for… a watery site that is accessible from the beach (about 30 yards away). The atoll is lushly forested with mangroves and palm trees, so there’s some escape from the tropical sun. We are going to come back tomorrow for a full tour of the atoll to scout out camping sites, but so far everyone in the party agrees that this is place we’ve been looking for!”

The team returned to Weno and began to prepare their extensive provisions for a move onto what they were now calling “Zero Atoll.” Meanwhile, Charles brought another surprise… an old woman who he said was a witness to the Zero Atoll haunting. Her name was Kayoko and although she spoke no English, Charles acted as translator. She basically told the team what sounded like a local urban legend about a Japanese plane that had crashed on a small island and the island was now haunted by the pilot. She did not know the name of the island but said it was a small place that no one visited as there was nothing of importance there. She said that many of the locals thought that the haunting took place because the Japanese pilot was cursed and doomed to walk the earth as a punishment for some unknown transgression. The story was interesting because it gave credibility to Charles's tale, but that still didn't mean there was any truth to it. A legend is a legend.

The team officially moved onto Zero Atoll on November 26th. Before Charles left the team, he loaned Rune a plastic deck chair because she was moaning how the island would be perfect if she just had a nice chair to sit in and watch the sun set. After the camp was established, she proclaimed that anywhere within a six-foot radius around the deck chair would be known as "Club Rune." That evening they built a big campfire and had a nice meal of fresh roasted fish. Rune put the deck chair near the fire and everyone got to sit in it for five minutes. The Polynesians believed that every island has its own spirits that live in the earth, trees and water so after all the team members sat in the chair, Rune offered it to any unseen inhabitants of the atoll.

The next day was spent setting up observation points and examining the wreck from the water. It was their first night on the atoll that was most surprising, however.

“The first thing we realized is just how very dark the night can be when you’re away from city lights,” wrote Polaris. “The starry sky was just amazing, but the strange shadows cast by the moonlight made the whole atoll very creepy. It was a very different vibe from the daylight hours. Meridian said that one of the things that she found disconcerting was hearing the ocean but not being able to see it... No one claimed to have seen our wayward ghost, but three of us (Meridian, Trespass and Ash) all noted what they called a "pathway" leading from the wreck, up the beach and into the forest. Each person described it a little differently, but essentially his or her mutual impression was of an unseen trail that led from the plane to somewhere else on the island. Ash described it most vividly, saying that the trail appeared to him like a "glowing line on the ground." None of them followed the path, although everyone noted where it was. This will be something we follow up on later.”

This “pathway,” which the members described as “feeling” rather than seeing, connected the crashed Zero fighter plane with a picturesque beach on the opposite side of the atoll. But if it was a pathway and the atoll was inhabited, just what was the team sensing? And was someone (or something) using this unseen trail through the forest? The team set up monitoring equipment, including digital camcorders with nightvision, in the area but this produced no results. Then, quite unexpectedly on December 5th, Trespass had another one of his patented psychic “explosions.”

“I had a really weird experience last night that kind of freaked me out...” he wrote. “Anvil and I have our tent off by itself and much closer to the Zero beach. The strange path through the trees that we all sensed the other night runs right by our tent, about ten yards away. Last night around 1 a.m. I had to go take a squirt on a tree, so I got out of the tent and walked a little distance away. So I’m standing there and doing my thing, minding my own business, when I get this feeling like someone’s watching me. No guy likes another guy too close to him when he’s standing at the urinal in the public bathroom. That’s what it felt like, like someone had just stepped inside my safety bubble. I finished up quick and ran back to the tent and zipped it all the way up. I didn’t hear anything unusual and nothing else happened, but it was a weird sensation and it really scared me.”

Was Trespass just imagining this presence? It seemed likely until other members recorded similar experiences along the path. Several nights passed without incident, but on the 8th several members distinctly heard footsteps crunching leaves along the trail. Ash insisted that someone had walked out of the woods and down to the wreckage of the plane. Meridian ran down to the water's edge and with her digital camera filming the entire time. What she captured, although she didn't realize it until the film was enhanced using the team's portable computer equipment, was OCE's first photographed apparition. A color-enhancement of the film showed a ghostly figure standing next to the wreckage of the Japanese Zero airplane. This entire length of film in which this figure appeared was approximately 3 seconds. The figure did not appear to be a reflection of moonlight off the waves, as it clearly obscured some of the plane behind it and disappeared at the water level.

To make the experience even more tantalizing, Trespass revealed that he too had had a clairaudiant event during the night of the 8th, when he heard a man's voice say something that sounded like “Shinny yusha.” Charles later told the team that it sounded like they were pronouncing a Japanese word that could be translated to mean “invader” or “trespasser.” What the island ghost expressing his displeasure with the team's arrival on Zero Atoll?

Convinced that the presence on the pathway and the plane wreckage were connected, Polaris decided to start a full blown excavation of the beach on the opposite side of the atoll. They found only meager artifacts, including bits of metal and a bullet casing, but it was enough to keep them interested. The excavation was put on hold for several days, however, due to poor whether and driving rains. The storms produced one near tragedy when exceptionally high waves swamped Anvil and Trespass's tent while they were inside. Although they escaped unharmed, most of their belongings were ruins and they were forced to bunk with the other members for the remainder of the investigation. The experience threw Trespass back into a deep funk and he refused to participate on any other investigations, asking to be removed from the atoll altogether.

Not dissuaded, the rest of the team decided to actively hunt for the suspected ghost of the pilot on the evening of January 3rd, 2006. Around 10:00 p.m., Ash reported that he felt the ghost “rise out of the ground” on the beach on the opposite side of the atoll. He was truly earning his pet name, “The Top Gun of Psychics,” for his uncanny impressions on Zero Atoll. The team began tracking the apparition, using Ash as their guide.

Meridian recorded the events of that evening:

“...I asked Ash what the ghost was doing and he said "watching us." At this moment, I am wishing I were back at the campfire with Trespass.

Polaris asks: "Why is he watching us?" And Ash replies "Because he's afraid."

"What's he afraid of?" Polaris asks.

"He's afraid we're going to kill him," says Ash.

What a spooky statement! And very keeping [with] the common belief that many ghosts persist in this dimension because they do not know they're dead. This could also explain both the ghost's incessant, nightly journey to check on his fallen plane and the word "Shinny Yusha" that Trespass heard him utter during our first encounter near [the beach]. Is this ghost still reliving World War II? Stranded on this atoll [for sixty years], is he checking the beaches for rescue or capture?”

Shortly after, the team lost the ghost only to find him in their base camp where he surprised Trespass!

“A few minutes later the walkie-talkie starts crackling and we can hear Trespass yelling,” wrote Meridian. “He's calling for Polaris, yelling for him to come back to camp. He sounds really hysterical so we all start running like hell, but it's not an easy task on a dark island with plenty of things to trip over and run into.. When we get there, Trespass is standing right next to the flames shining a flashlight into the trees. His eyes are as big as hubcaps and he's trembling so much I keep thinking he's going to fall over. He runs over to Polaris and throws his arms right around him and is just shuddering. He tells us all how he saw the ghost in the camp, how the ghost walked right past the campfire and disappeared into the trees.”

This terrifying experience had almost pushed Trespass to his breaking point for reasons that the rest of the OCE team still didn't understand. Torn between helping his troubled team member and finishing their investigation, Polaris decided to expedite the excavation of the beach where they had found the metal scraps and bullet casing. The team began to sweaty endeavor the following day. Rune attempted to ease their burden with a little humor and improvised recreation:

“If you looking for that perfect alternative to hours sifting through coral sand in search of the sixty year old remains of a long-forgotten pilot, then spend a few hours at Club Rune. Nestled between two palm trees and a cute little bush, Club Rune offers a variety of tropical distractions for visitors of all ages. Whether your taste includes slapping mosquitoes or catching a catnap in the warm sun with a little stream of drool dripping off your lower lip, Club Rune fits the bill! Reasonably priced and conveniently located near a beautiful white sand beach, the wreck of an old airplane and the hole where people go poo-poo. For more information, call 1-800-CLB-RUNE or see the Outcast Earth website.”

Slowly but surely, the team was amassing a collection of artifacts from their dig, including a leather strap, burned wood and pieces of bone. Although this still did not prove that this beach was used as a campsite for the Zero's pilot, it was reminiscent of the archaeological finds reported from Nikumaroro Island in the search for Amelia Earhart. On January 25th, the team made an amazing discovery by uncovering a human tooth... and later an almost complete human skull. The find lead to some very mixed emotions for all of the team.

“Should one feel this excited about digging up someone else’s head?” Rune asked. “It has been an amazing twenty-four hours and I have felt such a weird range of emotions. The second Polaris put that tooth in my hand; I knew what it was and whom it belonged to. I got this really clear image in my head that there was something else near the tooth. I didn’t know it was a skull, just something important. That’s when I started to dig. I also got this flash of our ghostly pilot, sitting on this beach near a little fire, looking out to sea and awaiting a rescue that would never come. It made me feel really sad. Now that the initial rush has worn off, though, I’m feeling so many other things. Is this our pilot, as we all believe? If it is, what does this indicate about his last days on earth? Now that we’ve found bona fide human remains, what do we do?”

In the end, Micronesian law made the decision for them and Polaris dutifully reported the find to the authorities on Weno. The excavation came to a halt and with it the haunting investigation.

Rune wondered about the fate of the atoll's restless spirit: “I read an old story from Classical Greece once upon a time. It was about an Athenian man who moved into a house only to be awoken every night by the spirit of an old man, wrapped in chains. At first, the homeowners inclination was the abandon the house, but he finally summoned the courage to follow the ghost on its nightly walk through the house. The ghost led him into the garden where it vanished on a particular spot. The following morning, the homeowner hired some men to dig up that spot in the garden. To their amazement, they uncovered the old skeleton of a man wrapped in chains. After they gave the man a proper Greek burial, the haunting stopped... Even if the Japanese ambassador to Micronesia came to Chuuk and performed a Shinto burial ceremony on the spot, would it be enough? Is the skull enough? Maybe we need to give some thought about doing something to help this poor spirit before we leave here?”

In the end, each team member paid their respects to the fallen Japanese pilot and hoped that his restless spirit would eventually find peace. Charles emailed Polaris several months after the end of the investigation to inform him that the skull was tentatively identified as belonging to a Japanese man but that further clarification would probably never be possible. To this day, the team does not know if the ghost they encountered on Zero Atoll still roams the beaches in the moonlight.