Glen Grant has made a cottage industry out of the macabre. More tales from
the Dark SideHe may have a regular job teaching at Hawai'i Tokai International College, but the source of his local-kine fame is the Dark Side.
Ghosts, spooks, mysteries.
Grant has defined a second career of retelling supernatural tales in books, a radio show, television series and his walking tours of Honolulu. Many stories came to him from people who experienced the events first-hand; others were culled from old newspapers and other sources.
Every ethnic group in Hawaii is haunted by these stories, he says. "In Hawaii they bring us together."
Grant's latest two books, "A Chilling Tale of Shave Ice: Mrs. Sugihara Haunts a Village" and "Obake Casebook," are just now hitting bookstores -- in time for Halloween.
"Shave Ice" is partly a work of fiction, Grant's first. Yet it draws heavily on real people and real events. The central characters -- Mrs. Sugihara, proprietor of a plantation store, and her son, who dreams of being a jazz saxophonist -- are based on a real family, and their story is drawn from a newspaper article published in 1910.
"I really can't write fiction," Grant says. "I always borrow from history."
Mrs. Sugihara invents a ghost sighting in order to draw the villagers out for a couple of nights so she can sell more shave ice. It's an innocent prank that spins out of control.
Grant's "Obake Casebook" is a darker, more graphic collection divided into four parts: murdered people who return, demonic possession, people who are "prayed" to death and necromancy, or what happens to people who try to bring back the dead.
Is Grant ever concerned about the possible bachi attached to dabbling so much in the supernatural? Always.
When he started collecting these tales more than 20 years ago, Grant says, a Hawaiian woman asked about his intentions: "She said, 'If you ever do this for a bad reason, you'll bring (the stories) back to you and you'll suffer.' And I said, 'What's a bad intention?' and she said, 'You decide.' And that has always been on my shoulder."
So he shares the tales for the enjoyment of others, but also to preserve elements of Hawaii's culture and history, and hopes that these motives are pure.
By Betty Shimabukuro, Star-Bulletin
