Horror in Paradise (27 page)

“Sit down,” said my mother wearily. She had a headache, I could tell.

We sat fixed, waiting for the great joy of seeing it suddenly, as we knew we would—the mountain, the surf running in with its arched neck and blowing mane, the dizzy blue water level on the sand. There it was. Oh, sea, sea. My brother and sister wouldn’t sit still. My father cheered up, and lifted his head and his dreamy gaze to focus on it; my mother sat dully, because her head ached so. I could tell, by the narrowed slits of her eyes. She didn’t look. The sun hit the water and the sunlight hit you as it shot off the surface. Black things danced in the air. It hurt between the eyes to look at it.

We got off at the Waikiki Inn and my mother and father hurried ahead. We ran for the sand.

They came out of the office in a minute, looking very embarrassed and troubled and trying to look untroubled. A Japanese boy led them to a little cottage under some vines and unlocked the door. My mother looked in and then came down to get us.

“You can’t go in the water today. I’m sorry. Get out right away. You look like little wild children. You mustn’t get wet,” she said in a lower tone when we came, holding up our skirts to our waists, all wet-legged from the first tumbled wave. “Mother doesn’t dare let you get in the water. One of us may have it.”

With that her face looked so terrified and in such dull pain that we came limping in, letting down our dresses, and picking up our shoes and stockings. As we walked away from sand to grass lawn, the sea talked and roared and mumbled and swished at our backs. We didn’t dare even turn around.

That night I was sick. The black dots in the air turned to balls of fire; the terrible sunlight on the water, the terrible water we couldn’t go in, that became noisy torment, throbbing like the heart in illness; fever that took the bones and broke them and wrenched the stomach. My mother was sick too. We were sick together. The others slept. I lay under the thick mosquito net as if I were as wide as the Pacific Ocean and the fever took one arm off to the east, the other to the west; my legs stretched into dimness, I gazed flat up-

ward, fixed, at some immensity—I immense, and facing immensity. The kerosene lamp purred on the table, a yellow torment. My mother sat retching with a sick headache. Now and then she would come and bow her head on the bed outside the mosquito net and say, “Oh, Genevieve, will this night never be over?” and then she would vomit again.

The sea rose outside in a great wind. A hard tropic tree scratched and clanged on the iron roof of the cottage. It was utterly black except for the torment of the little flame in the lamp. The ocean broke outside so near, the same wave sounds as in daylight, but so interminable at night, and no one to hear it, but us, me and my mother. The waves hit the shore like a blow on a wound; the lamp burned in its chimney stifling the air, never wiggling, just burning. Horror, the black death!

She fanned me and called out that I was her first born, and rubbed the wet hair from my head and chafed my feet. Her hand on my legs made them limited again at the bottom of the bed, not so long that they had no feet as a moment before. “Oh, mother, will this night never end?”

It ended—fear and a sick headache and a little fever—that was all. And I did not die except in some experience of the mind.

Pacific Commercial Advertiser

Although the Hawaiian people have always been kindly and gentle as a group, and even in the heat of battle seldom tortured their foes, they were victims of a cult of sorcery that sometimes caused outbreaks of fiendish fame. Such an episode took place as late as February 12, 1892, on the smaller island of Lanai.

The
kahuna anaana
or sorcerer could be either male or female. His professional calling included murder, in which he was guided by a familiar demon. “He usually does his victims to death by secret administration of poison, or quite as commonly, perhaps, by some occult influence upon them, possibly of a hypnotic sort,” an editorial ran in the July issue of
The Friend
, a Protestant missionary journal founded in Honolulu in 1843. “He first establishes himself in business by killing one or more of his nearest relations. This creates for him a reputation of remorseless truculence, which makes him greatly feared, and ensures large emoluments. All these murders he professes to execute by means of his demon, often claiming to have produced deaths in which he really had no hand. Sometimes he overdoes the business, and has to fly before the wrath of the outraged people whom he has held in terror. This is very rare; their fear of his demon masters their anger.”

The behavior of Pulolo, the sorceress of Lanai, follows the classic formula. Again to quote the article in
The Friend
, “A significant fact is that Pulolo learned her trade of sorceress during a residence of some years in this city. Under the fostering patronage of royalty for a little more than thirty years, Honolulu has grown to be a headquarters of superstition and a chief seminary of sorcery. This began when Prince Lot’s agent Kapu issued printed licenses to about three hundred kahunas or native doctors, with schedules of fees ranging up to fifty dollars. These kahunas rarely knew much of real remedies. Their chief stock in trade was the superstitious fears of the people, who would hire their incantations to propitiate or exorcise the evil demons that made them ill. In order to educate and develop those fears, they immediately formed private classes in idolatry and sorcery throughout the kingdom. Since then this culture of diabolism has gone steadily on. Fresh accessions of force were largely made to it during the late reign.”

The story of the Lanai outbreak may best be told by quoting from successive issues of the
Pacific Commercial Advertiser,
a Honolulu newspaper which ran weekly from 1856 to 1888 and resumed publication daily in 1882. A sequel to the event described is to be found in
The Friend
for October, 1892: “The scene of the Pulolo murders and
hoomanamana
frenzy is at the steamer landing at the western end of the island. A curse rests on the place. The houses that stand there have been abandoned, and the place where the killing was done and where the bodies and the house were given to the flames is now but a bit of sand marked off by the stumps of the fence posts.”

February 17, 1892.

THE steamer
Mokolii,
which arrived on Tuesday, brings a strange story from Lanai. At the quiet little hamlet of Awalua, the landing at Lanai, there stood near the shore a grass hut, occupied by a family of about ten persons, one of them an old Hawaiian supposed to be crazy
(pupule).
A female kahuna attended the old gentleman. During the evening of the 12th inst., several bowls of awa were consumed by the family, the children included, to appease the
aumakua
deity.

After the awa, it is conjectured that the entire party went to sleep, with the exception of the female kahuna, the spirit not allowing her to rest until the aumakua had brought the desired relief. The story goes that she waited until after midnight, when the aumakua, continuing conspicuous by his absence, she lost patience and determined to hasten the steps of the dilatory god by the application of fire to the house. The flames woke the sleepers, who rushed out of the burning hut. When nothing was left but ashes, it turned out that a young man of twenty was missing.

And now comes the strangest part of the story. When the steamer
Mokolii
reached Lanai, an astonishing sight met their gaze. The once well-beloved occupants of the hut at Awalua were running wild on the rocks, clad in nature’s attire. The whole family had been seized with real or apparent insanity. When approached, they appeared to have lost all means of communication, and no intelligible account of their condition could be obtained. When the
Mokolii
left for Honolulu, Hon. F. H. Hayselden of Lanai had sent a boat to Lahaina to fetch Deputy Sheriff Makalua to investigate the matter. According to the chief officer’s story, it seems that the unfortunate young man who perished in the flames had a pretty wife, to whom another native in the same house had taken a fancy, and the belief is that the rest of the family, not being in sympathy with the husband set the house on fire, with the intention of murdering him.

This is as much of this strange eventful history as has yet reached Honolulu. A family all going crazy at one fell swoop in an event unparalleled since the days of the Bacchic frenzy.

February 22,2892.

A horrible outbreak of heathenish superstition has occurred on the island of Lanai, leading to deeds of the most frightful violence, to the murder of a man, a woman, and a child, and the savage torturing of still another unfortunate. The first rumors of these shocking events reached Honolulu on the
Mokolii
last Tuesday. Yesterday the
Kinau
brought confirmation of these rumors, together with twelve prisoners, an entire family all charged with murder, some of them on three indictments. The names of the twelve [sic] persons are as follows: Kaaaio; Kala; Keliikuewa; Keola; Puulolo (wahine); Nawai (wahine); Kanae (wahine); Kahikina; Kanoenoe (wahine); and Kalakaa.

The murdered persons are the three following: Kula (liilii) [infant], six years; Puni (wahine), sister; and Kaholokai.

There are three charges of murder: (1) Puulolo (wahine) is charged with the murder of Puni (wahine); (2) all twelve are charged with the murder of Kala [sic: Kula], (Iiilii); and (3) Kahikina, Puulolo, Kakaio ([sic: Kaaaio], Kala, Keola, and Kealake [s/c: Kalakaa] are charged with the murder of Kaholokai.

The police are cautious in their utterances, and it is difficult to ascertain the course of the whole dreadful history. Much of it will not be known until the trial; some of it will never be known. The following brief sketch of the facts is derived from the most trustworthy sources accessible.

On Monday, the 15th inst., news reached Lahaina that murders had occurred at Awalua, on Lanai. The deputy sheriff dispatched Mr. Chillingworth, R. P. Hose, and other constables to the scene. They left Lahaina at 10 a.m. Tuesday, reaching Awalua at 12:30, where they found Puulolo (wahine) and Kealaka [sic] tied with ropes. It appears that sometime before the events described below, Puulolo had cured, or was credited with curing, a child of Kaholokai’s which had been very sick. This had gained for her the reputation of a kahuna, and she probably was convinced of the reality of her supernatural powers. The
aumakua,
or spirit, which had power over her was called Kihilikini. Acting under the guidance of this spirit, on the night of Thursday, February 11, she beat and killed her sister Puni, beating her to death with a club. Puni, it is said, had expressed disbelief in her power, which had angered her. The following night was marked by events still more bloodcurdling. The furious woman clubbed to death her nephew Kala [sic], a boy of six years, the rest of the family acquiescing or assisting. After this action was completed, the other members of the family held Paa, a young man of about thirty and a brother of the kahuna, while she burned him over the face, body, and arms with a flaming torch made of cloth dipped in oil or lard. Later in the night her fourth victim, Kaholokai, was seized and held while she beat him with a club until he became unconscious. At this point the rest left him and went away, leaving the murderess alone with the dying man, to whom she was supposed to have dealt the finishing strokes. The family returned and went to sleep, and early in the morning the fire was started which destroyed the hut. Into its flame the body of Kaholokai was thrown, the other corpses being left to die on the ground outside, where the sickening horror had been enacted.

Saturday morning a native by the name of Palau, who lived about a mile away, came down and asked questions about what had occurred, but receiving no answers went to the other side of the island, about eight miles away, to inform the constable. Returning, he with another native, by the name of Kahulu, made some rough wooden coffins in which the three murdered Hawaiians were buried. Some of the family, who by this time may be supposed to have come partially to their senses, dug the graves.

This was on Saturday night. On Tuesday the four police officers arrived from Lahaina, and on Wednesday morning at four o’clock they started back with two boats, in the second of which were the twelve prisoners. They reached Lahaina at 6:30 and were met by an excited crowd, among them women armed with sticks. The face of the burned man, Paa, was covered from sight with a veil, it being feared that his disfigured appearance would incite the people to violence against Puulolo.

The examination of the prisoners was set for the following day but was postponed until Friday owing to the absence of Mr. Chillingworth in Wailuku. All twelve prisoners were sent down to Honolulu and arrived on the
Kinau
on Sunday morning. They were taken first to the station house, and afterwards to the Oahu Jail. It is said that Dr. Davison, of Lahaina, from an examination of the kahuna Puulolo, found no reason to suppose her insane. An officer who had a good deal of conversation with her on the voyage from Lahaina says that she seems perfectly rational. She is a young woman between twenty and thirty years of age, rather slender in figure. An eyewitness in the Oahu Prison speaks of her as cowering in a blanket, with her head bent down and muttering to herself.

The murders of Kaholokai and the child Kala [sic] were perpetrated, it is believed, in the expectation that the kahuna would bring them to life again. Paa, the brother, who was so horribly burned, is said to be improving, with a prospect of recovery.

The natives have all deserted Awalua, and the scene of this sickening outburst of heathenism and superstition is now a desert.