MYTHOS: Only a few weeks after I joined Outcast Earth, we are already in the thick of it when it comes to paranormal investigations. Here's what's going on... Epoch had been in previous conversation with a school on one of the neighboring islands about some strange occurrences there. Now stick with me because this will get a little weird. According to the school principal, staff and students have been seeing and smelling some strange childlike creatures for several months.

The story starts like this...

One day after school, at the end of the last academic year, the librarian was returning from a teachers' meeting and was startled to smell smoke upon entering the library. She immediately [looked] around for a fire but found nothing, As she passed through the stacks of books, she came upon what appeared to be a miniaturized child. (By this, I mean that the ghost or whatever had a childlike body but it was too small to actually be a normal human child.) This thing was lying on the floor and curled up. The librarian could not see its face but described the skin as being dark grey or black and had a flaky or scaly surface. The librarian was so panicked that she ran down to the school office screaming for someone to contact emergency services. When she returned to the librqry several moments later with other staff members, the "being" had vanished and no one could smell any smoke like e librarian described. The local sheriff came out but quickly closed the case. Then school let out for the summer break and no one really thought about it again.

It was until the beginning of the current school year that similar experiences were reported. The first involved two fourth graders who reported seeing a "dark skinned child who walked like a crab" in one of the hallways. They also smelled smoke and they thought the "child" was smoking a cigarette because they saw "him" leaving "a thin stream of smoke behind him." They followed the creature until it vanished around a corner. Several days later, the school custodian smelled smoke in the basement and actually pulled the fire alarm. Again, no fire was found. This time, however, it was a fireman who saw a "nude child with dark flaky skin" who ran from him while he was searching the basement. The firefighters did an exhaustive search of the area but were not able to locate the child.

Although these strange sighting are well known within the small community in which they occurred, the school district doesn't want any undue publicity. Outcast Earth is being allowed to investigate only if we do not reveal the name of the school or even which island it's located on. It is not on Kaua'i, however, so we traveled off-island and will begin investigating on Monday. By the way, I'm very excited to be a part of this investigation, even if I'm a little creeped out by it all!

Return to top of page

MIST: A few days ago we landed on the little Hawaiian island where we will be conducting our newest investigation. This afternoon we actually met with the staff of the school in question. The attendees included the principal, the assistant principal, most of the teachers and classified staff, the superintendent and a couple members of the parent- teachers association. It was pretty obvious at that point that whatever was going on in the school was the worst kept secret in town. Of course, since many of the school children had seen strange things, the stories naturally made their way home and became very exaggerated. The principal, who seems to be a very rational man, was very concerned with rumor-control. For example, one new story claimed that the strange black-skinned creatures were attacking people, while all the reports so far would indicate that these apparitions (if they are apparitions) are very shy and tend to run when seen.

There was a mixture of attitudes in the room concerning our involvement. [Some] of the attendees were very thankful. Others, although polite, clearly didn't believe in the veracity of our work and were mindful of the native beliefs about ghosts and seemed certain that our presence would just make things worse. Thanks to the principal's diplomacy skills, we were able to broker an agreement that we would be very discreet, sensitive to cultural feelings and openly share our findings with all interested parties. As a result of this agreement, we will only be working inside the school after-hours. We also won't have the opportunity to interview any of the child witnesses as it was decided that this would be intrusive and we will rely on the interviews already conducted by the police and school officials.

Since we agreed to investigate several weeks ago, there have been two other incidents. During a school assembly, a room was evacuated after several people smelled smoke. Another incident involved a "hunched over shape" that was seen lurking about the bookshelves in the library. Since the library appears to be a focal point, this is where we will set up our main observation post. We will al be handling the onsite investigation, and Meridian and Epoch have agreed to look into the history of the school and the geographical site in general as well.

We'll have more updates once we have spent our first night in the school, sometime in the next day or two.

Return to top of page

ASH: Today was our first day in the school. We weren't allowed to arrive until late in the afternoon as we are suppose to hide from the students. The janitor let us in and we set up most of our equipment in the library.

Then we broke into teams and wandered the school. Rune and I took the basement, which is where the fireman saw the strange crab-kid a few weeks ago. The basement was very creepy. It had a bunch of old supplies like tables and chairs and old chalkboards. It's also where the plumbing and pipes and stuff like that is. It was raining outside at the time we were down there, so the sound of the rain hitting the basement windows made it even weirder.

Both Rune and I are pretty psychic and there were places in the basement that just creeped us out! The worst one was a little room where they kept a lot of tables and chairs. There's nothing particularly strange about tables and chairs, but the room bugged both of us. We spent about 45 minutes in the basement, but we [never] saw anything so then we went upstairs.

I think the last school we investigated was the high school in Oregon, [click here to view The Thespian Ghost of South Eugene High School] but we didn't spend much time there. Schools are actually pretty creepy once everyone goes home. They are dark and echoey and they always smell like crayons and glue. We didn't have anything else to report in the six hours we were there so we finally just went home.

Return to top of page

Return to top of page

RUNE: Today was thermal camera day at school, kiddies! It was both exciting and kind of frustrating for some of the older team members like myself. Historically, Outcast Earth hasn't relied heavily on EMF readers, thermal or infrared cameras, etc., etc., that many other ghost hunters use. Have always tended to prefer the experiential approach combined with historical research. It is Epoch who has brought the gadgetry into the mix, which isn't a bad thing but which most of us know little about.

Epoch had two thermal video cameras with him. One he set up in the library, and the other in the hallway just to the so uth of the library where we recorded the strange temperature readings the day before. The cameras read heat sources, so it was weird looking at ourselves as black-and-white heat signatures on the monitors. Polaris and Ash [liked] playing in the cameras a lot. Polaris found that he could take his hand, press it against Ash's chest and when he took his hand away a visible handprints would stay there for a few seconds. It demonstrated how sensitive the cameras were. Then we waited.

About three hours later, we started seeing what Epoch called a "thermal blob" on the monitors. It originally appeared against a hallway wall, then moved down the hall toward the camera, crossed the hallway to the wall [that] adjoined the library and disappeared. What was really chilling is that the library thermal camera picked it up seconds later coming through the wall at approximately the same place it had disappeared in the hallway. It remained stationary for a moment and then dissipated.

The blob didn't have any recognizable shape, and certainly it didn't looking like a scuttling crab-child (as Ash would put it.) Rather it was just an amorphous blob, but this was by far the best evidence we've obtained of strange phenomena in the school. After the blob disappeared in the library, Epoch, Polaris and I went down to the basement to see if there were any kind of pipes or ductwork that might create the heat source. We didn't find anything like that, but what was interesting to me is that the place where the heat source disappeared was directly above the small room with all the tables and chairs that Ash mentioned in his blog. This was the room where he and I got totally creeped out on our first day. I don't know the significance of that, but there's got to be something to it. We're not sure where the fireman saw the "child" in the basement, but it's not a huge space so it had to be close to this room too. Still, it once again ties together the library and basement. Tomorrow, we will be put the thermal cameras in these two areas.

Return to top of page

POLARIS: After our success with the thermal cameras on November 13, we were excited as hell!! Then nothing for days. After doing this for so many years, I'm convinced this is how the supernatural makes fun of we mortals. Just when you think you're about to catch something in your net, it either vanishes or decides to go in the opposite direction. We weren't about to give up on the thermal cameras given our success, so we continued to monitor both the library and the basement. It was a shame that we didn't have a third one for the hallway, but c'est la vie!

By November 18, we started to get hits again. It started in the basement side room with the tables and chairs. Again, the heat signature was just a blob. This time, however, we sent in our most psychic and most empathic members -- Ash and Rune -- to check it out personally. Mythos went in too as a more independent observer. None of them saw anything, although all three smelled smoke. Rune did acknowledge that the smell may have been psychosomatic as everyone was creeped out by then. We had Ash approach the heat spot with a digital thermometer. The temperature rose six degrees immediately as he entered the area. He also said he felt heat on his skin, but that neither the surrounding walls or the floor were warm. In other words, there seemed to be a "pocket" of heat there that did not warm the surrounding surfaces. This did seem to rule out the idea that the heat signatures are being produced by faulty wiring or hot water pipes. Instead, the heat blob appear to be self-contained and moving independently of the physical environment.

At this point, we are not sure if we are reading multiple heat signatures or just the same one bouncing from place to place. Most likely, however, there is more than one.

Return to top of page

EPOCH: Excelsior! Yes, I say excelsior! I am not usually one to engage in Chess Club geek-speak, but the circumstances seemed to warrant it. I am happy to report that Meridian and I may have uncovered a basis for the strange activity at the school, although I this point I admit that this is [only] a working hypothesis. I must start first with a few words about leprosy. Yes, leprosy.

It is not common knowledge outside of Hawaii as to just how catastrophic leprosy, or Hansen's Disease, was to the islands. The first known case occurred in 1848 when a ship from China made a port of call with infected passengers on board. Needless to say, having such a virulent air-borne sickness on a closed environment like an island was the perfect formula for disaster. The panic over the disease, certainly enhanced by the grotesque deformities it caused to the human body, helped promote great acts of inhumanity toward the stricken. In the islands, they were summarily shunned, abandoned or murdered. By 1866, Kalaupapa peninsula on the island of Molokai was designated as a permanent leper colony.

Kalaupapa was chosen due to its unique geographical features. It was was surrounded on three sides by the ocean and on the fourth by a 1600-foot cliff. New "inmates" to this paradisiacal prison were often thrown off passing ships and told to swim to the beach. Because there were no amenities on Kalaupapa during these first years, these poor souls were forced to live in a feral state, hiding in caves and hunting or fishing to survive. It wouldn't be until 1873, when a Catholic priest named Damien deVeuster arrived on Kalaupapa that schools, housing and medical services actually started becoming available to the residents.

So what does all this have to do with our spooky school investigation, since we are not on Kalaupapa? What we uncovered is that during the mid- to late-1800s, there was an outbreak of Hansen's Disease in this area. But due to the remoteness of the site, and the fact that the victims had no incentive to self-report their symptoms, the infection was not discovered by outsiders for some time. This demonstrates an important difference in attitude about the disease between the native Hawaiians and off-islanders. Leprosy had plagued Western cultures for millennia and was well-known even to the most uneducated man or woman due partly to the famous Biblical story of Christ healing a leper in Matthew 8:1-4. There was a common belief among Westerners that leprosy stemmed from being "unclean" in both a bodily and a spiritual sense. As a result, the Western attitude toward afflicted Hawaiians was particularly harsh, and probably proof to their nineteenth century minds that the natives were "just not right with God." Once this local case was discovered, it did not take long for the Westerners on the island to form a "brute squad" and burn the stricken families alive in their own huts.

Since those responsible for the massacre had no reason to document it, and almost everyone else on the island was probably illiterate at the time, we have not been able to find any contemporary records of this tragedy. What we did find were anecdotal tales written down many years after this event, tales that were probably transmitted between family members or friends of the victims. As intriguing as the tales of the massacre itself were, the rumors of survivors (including children) who fled into the forest and survived there for years were even more fascinating. Many of these outcasts received surreptitious aid from those sympathetic to their plight, but in the end it wasn't enough to save them from the disease that ravaged their bodies. In just a few years following the massacre, these poor souls either succumbed to their illness, the elements or injury... their bodies were never recovered.

So, we now have a historical basis for our haunting containing all the classic elements -- suffering, brutality, death and survival despite the odds. Could the strange, black-skinned "crab children" reported be either the burned victims of this massacre or the ghosts of those who survived and fled to the forest? Or both?

Return to top of page

MERIDIAN: Most of us have now accepted Epoch’s theory that these childlike creatures we are investigating may be the apparitions of leprosy victims from the 19th century. We know that there was a leprosy outbreak in this area that resulted in the murders of an untold number of people. That being said, we still haven’t figured out why so many of the sightings are occurring below ground at the basement level. Then Mythos recalled that when the first lepers were put on Molokai, they weren’t given any resources so they had to live in sea caves and hunt and trap their food. This had us thinking that the surviving lepers, on the run from the lynch mobs who killed most of them, may have hidden themselves away in nearby caves and caverns. The Hawaiian islands are volcanic, after all, which usually means plenty of caves. But are any in close proximity to the school?

Epoch has obtained a US Geological Survey of the area which does indicate a variety of caverns nearby. We are going to explore those tomorrow. We now believe that the strange appearance and crab-like movements of the apparitions may be partly due to the deformities and nerve damage of the lepers. Many historical records describe lepers as “shambling” or “limping” along because they literally could not feel their own extremities. There’s a famous story about Father Damien of Molokai that relates how he realized he had contracted the disease when he put his foot in scalding bath water but didn’t feel any pain.

There are two theories among us about the black, flaky appearance of the apparition’s skin. The first is that we are seeing a symptom of leprosy which causes the skin to have a grotesque, pebbly surface. But since so many of the sightings have been accompanied by the smell of smoke -- and in one instance the ghost was actually spewing smoke from its body -- the second theory is that we are seeing the spirits of those who died in the fire at the hands of the lynch mob. Whichever is the case, we will hopefully find more once we explore the sea caves and other caverns nearby.

Return to top of page

Return to top of page