DISCOVERY IN THE OLD HOUSE:
In early 1999, Ash, Coyote and I made another trek through the misty forest to the burned out house. This time I came prepared, packing in food, water, cameras, flashlights and protective, waterproof clothing. The boys and I ate a picnic lunch near the ruins, then spent the next fewhours looking for some kind of clue that might explain Ash’s ghostly visitor. Ash made a breakthrough when he climbed down into the house’s basement and called up to me.

"Come on, Daddy," he called up. "I will show you."

I was furious, certain that the place would collapse in on him at any moment. I gave Coyote instructions to wait above and climbed down to where Ash was squatting. It was late afternoon, with the sun breaking low through the trees, so the basement was dark and treacherous to navigate. The area was small, more like a crawlspace than a true basement. Large areas were impassable because years of rain and rot had caused the floor overhead to fall in. The basement floor was all dirt, vegetated in some areas with thick grass. Ash crawled ahead of me to one corner of the room and informed me that we needed to dig. He began to carve into the wet earth with his bare hands. I helped him dig, using pieces of charred wood as tools. The earth was soft and damp, so we were able to move it quite quickly and easily. When we reached the depth of about two feet, we began to unearth what were clearly bone fragments. They were small at first, no more than an inch in length, but as we progressed we exposed larger and larger sections of skeleton. Due to the small size of the bone pieces, I was convinced that they were from an animal rather than a human being. Still, the thought nagged at me. After all, why would someone bury an animal in their basement? It wasn’t until Ash pulled out a section of what was definitely a section of human scapula that I was convinced otherwise. At this point, we should have stopped digging, hiked out and summoned the county police. But I needed more, so Ash and I continued to carefully pull away dirt as Coyote called down from above, "What it is? What did you find?"

When he were successful in unearthing the top portion of a human skull, Ash sat back on his heels, smiled, and said proudly, "See, I told you she was here."

Amazingly, this five-year old child was not unnerved by the discovery. I think he felt vindicated.

I did not have time to be amazed by my son’s uncanny insight. The only thing I could think of is that we had uncovered a decades’ old crime scene that no one suspected was even here. We needed to halt our excavation and go tell someone. I packed the boys out, their energy renewed by the discovery. It struck me later how little Coyote had questioned his brother’s clairvoyant abilities. Perhaps that was a quality of being a child – they were able to believe in the unbelievable with much greater ease than a thirty-year old man.

As we hiked back to our home, Coyote kept up a barrage of questions for Ash. The younger boy answered each question with confidence, as though the discovery of the skeleton had opened a floodgate of information. We told every detail to the county police officer who arrived at our home later that afternoon. He took copious notes although it was clear from his questions and the circumspect looks he gave us that he did not believe most of it. It doesn’t matter, I thought, the proof is lying there in the forest.

Starting early the following morning, we led four police officers through the woods to the burned out house. The journey this time was faster and easier, as the cops had located an old road leading into the site that was still passable with four-wheel drive vehicles. Forensic and news teams followed. The police were careful, however, to note that human remains had been discovered in the forest, but did not ever speak to the exact location or the circumstances under which they had been detected. Even as time went on, and they connected more and more of the clues Ash had given them, they never credited him with the discovery. The closest we got was a mentioned from their public information officer who stated that the "remains had been accidentally discovered by a family of hikers."

Although I too had been originally pessimistic, Ash’s abilities had convinced me. In a sense, I felt as though my son had been slighted because the authorities were not comfortable in acknowledging his abilities. He was only five, they reminded me, and his stories were nothing more than the fantasy of a young and creative mind. I felt the facts said differently.

THE SHADOW FINDS HER NAME
Here is the story of Barbara Anne Hsiao as I can best reconstruct it from my own research and that of the local authorities:

Hsiao was born to a prostitute mother working in Iwilei, the Chinatown and red-light district outside of Honolulu. Hsiao’s father was unidentified and probably wasn’t even known to her. Very little information was uncovered about her early life, although I was able to find some primary school records for her. She was a poor student. She seems to have officially entered her mother’s profession at age seventeen, which is when she makes her first appearance in the local police records.

Multiple arrests followed, although only a few were for prostitution. At the time, that profession was overseen by powerful crime bosses and treacherous madams (the most famous of which was Betty Jean O’Hara, who chronicled her life in a self-published tome called The Honolulu Harlot). As a result, most of the elicit vice activities on the island were either overlooked or supported by the local police. Sometime early in her career, Hsiao became the paid mistress of a local businessman who Ash identified by the name "Richard." This is the man who would later abduct Hsiao from her home, probably during the late evening hours of Saturday, May 4th, 1940, and forcibly transport her by boat to his rural home on Kaua’i. Dental studies of the skeleton found in the basement of the burned out house did confirm that these were the remains of Barbara Anne Hsiao. The woman was killed by a blow to the head. But did a man name Richard build and own the house where he bones were discovered? The police said no, as public records showed that the home was built in 1932 by a man named Lloyd J. Weller (not his real name, as Outcast Earth does not wish to be sued by his surviving family.) This fact became the crux of their argument against Ash’s paranormal knowledge of the case.

(My belief was that a reputable businessman probably would NOT tell a local harlot his real name, even if he was visiting her on a regular basis and paying for some of her expenses. Ash insisted that the ghost of Hsiao identified her attacker as "Richard," which may simply have been the name she knew him by. The police seemed to disagree with my theory, and granted, I have no proof one way or the other.)

Weller was originally from San Francisco, but moved to the islands several years before Hsiao's disappearance to invest in the sugar trade. He had a wife and three children, the latter of whom were still alive and living on the mainland. (Mr. and Mrs. Weller died of natural causes in 1975 and 1989 respectively.) Weller was, by all published accounts, a well-respected businessman, a member of the local lodge and a law-abiding citizen… if you happen to overlook the fact that the body of a known prostitute was buried in his basement. In 1963, Weller and kin decided to leave Kaua’i for the big island of Hawai’i, where they resettled in Hilo Bay. Just prior to finishing their move, however, their Kaua’i home caught fire under mysterious circumstances and burned to the ground. Although many of their belongings were destroyed in the conflagration, the Wellers were compensated by a sizable insurance settlement that allowed them to live out the remainder of their lives in luxury. Surprisingly, (or not surprisingly if you are looking at this story with my jaundice eye) the Wellers did not sell their Kaua’i property. The fire rendered the site uninhabitable, but they never rebuilt their home there and allowed the road and other conveniences to degrade. To me, this was Weller’s way of disguising the crime scene and making a little money off of it in the process. The property was finally sold off by his heirs in 1990, and by this time the old homesite was too dilapidated to ever be salvaged.

Only one of the detectives working this case was impressed enough with Ash to consult him on a regular basis. He also privately confirmed that our account of the events was the only one that fit all the facts. Regardless, the official crime report did not list Weller as a suspect or include any of Ash’s insights. The report concluded that "due to the age of this crime and the fact that the remains deteriorated in a damp environment for over a forty-seven years, it is highly unlikely that a suspect will ever be identified." The case officially remains open and unsolved.Although I felt slighted by the authorities overlooking Ash’s contribution to the investigation, I was so impressed by his abilities that I decided to continue to encourage him. As amazing as the Barbara Anne Hsiao case was, it would pale in comparison to what was about to be revealed…