I have a lot of stories that come from the Nakagusuku Castle Haunted Hotel (now torn down). I’ve spent hundreds of nights and a few days in this place. No exaggeration… This post is mostly to explain the spot, and give context to my relationship with it, so I can refer back to this post for future stories concerning the hotel. Context concerning my relationship with the hotel is important, but I don’t want to have to explain it every time I post a story about the place.
Have you ever seen any of those “ghost hunting” shows where they get really excited over “bumps in the night,” but mostly find nothing? They go into a place for a night, set up all their gear, and 90% of the time get some garbled noises on a sound recorder or blurry photos of an “apparition?” Where if you believe hard enough, it just might sound like a voice from “the other side,” or if you cross your eyes and squint, you can see what could be images of a “ghost,” but that’s about it? Mostly they find nothing, so people assume it’s all BS, and the place isn’t actually haunted.
It doesn’t work that way; go into a place for a night and come away with a judgement of haunted, or not-haunted. In my experience, it comes and goes. Sometimes, a place is “switched on.” Sometimes it’s completely off. Or it could be anywhere in between. Mostly, it’s completely off.
Get that? Mostly it’s completely off.
The prime example of this is the Nakagusuku Castle Haunted Hotel, which has now been torn down. It’s my opinion that this place is/was the most active spot on the island. Certainly, the most active I’ve experienced. It’s also the place that taught me how most of the time, you’re going to get skunked.
One in ten times, you get something. A “that was strange and unexplainable” moment. Footsteps in the broken glass. A door slamming on a windless night. One in a hundred times, you get the “fully switched on” experience. Anyone could get lucky (or unlucky) and get that hit on the first time, but usually it’s just going to be dead (no pun LOL), with most of the ”bumps in the night” being rationally explainable.
I first visited the hotel in 1986 for a school party. This was before the fire. The rooms were furnished with made-up beds, TVs, pink rotary-dial phones, and so on. The fake zoo was full of fake animals, the glass wasn’t broken. No vandalism that I can remember.
The shrine and tall structure at the top of the hotel was there, but I believe this was built later, after it was abandoned. Brochures for the hotel that my brother and I found in a storage shed showed the hotel in full swing, with guests walking around, the pool being used, etc. The shrine and structure at the top were missing in an aerial photo in the brochure. I’m guessing that it was open at one point, the hotel looking more or less finished, but construction of the shrine and upper tower structure being very unfinished.
Lots of rumors about this place. Owner going insane. Construction workers being killed and injured. The fire. On and on. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not. But the fire didn’t happen until the very early 90s, well after it was shut down. No one died.
The cave. If you go to the top, past the shrine, there is a cave. This is a cave with human remains, where I assume people died during the war. I’ve been in the cave a few times, and never had a bad experience, other than the heaviness of what happened there… Is this the reason the ground is haunted? Who knows… I’ve had a few conversations with a priest who lived at the shrine for a short time, but for some reason, I never asked him about the cave, or why the shrine was there. Dumb. He did say that he'd never seen a ghost…LOL. Nothing ever happened in that area of the hotel, and it always had a peaceful and “safe” feeling about it. Even after the shrine was destroyed by vandalism, and long abandoned, when you entered that area of the hotel, after going through the hotel proper, it was like a weight was lifted. You felt “lighter.” Like coming out of a long tunnel. The castle area, itself, also felt like this. Dark, ancient castle grounds, not scary at all.
In 1987, I was a senior in high school. We had moved to Kishaba Kitanakagusuku from Shimabuku, which was pretty close to the hotel. Sneaking in the front way, it was only a 30-minute walk from our house, so my next younger brother and I were up there three to five nights per week, sometimes staying an hour, sometimes staying until 3am, or so, depending on what was going on the next day.
I’ve seen things during the day, too. Night time is when you have time, so that’s why the vast majority of time ghost hunting is done at night.
Most of my time there was post-fire. We got to know the place so well, and were so comfortable there, we wouldn’t even bring flashlights a lot of the time. My brother had had some experiences prior to that, as well, and was all-in on getting to these places, sitting, listening, watching.
You could feel when it was switched on, and when it was, that place was BAD. Like I said in the last post, I don’t pretend to know what a ghost is, but the hotel had a lot going on. Playful things, and on the rare occasion, mean and violent things. There were nights we’d be walking in the back way, through the woods, and we’d both stop, look at each other, and say “not tonight.” Turn around and walk out.
At least three times, we were in the middle of it when it suddenly switched on. A midnight stroll, looking to scare other “hunters” one minute, and scared shitless, “we need to get out of here right now” the next. It’s my belief that the place is bad. It’s not the hotel. It’s that place. I won’t go back to that area.
I’m sorry there’s no story attached to this one. It’s simply a background on the place.
I’ll leave you with this, it’s the one place I’ve seen someone get physically injured by something that wasn’t there. It happened right in front of me.
by [deleted]
