The Story Behind These Ghost Town Cemeteries In Hawaii Will Chill You To The Bone
By Megan Shute|Published April 30, 2018
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Megan Shute
Author
With more than 10 years of experience as a professional writer, Megan holds a degree in Mass Media from her home state of Minnesota. After college, she chose to trade in her winter boots for slippahs and moved to the beautiful island of Oahu, where she has been living for more than five years. She lives on the west side but is constantly taking mini-road trips across the island and visits the neighboring islands whenever she can getaway. She loves hiking, snorkeling, locally-grown coffee, and finding the best acai bowl on Oahu.
The Hawaiian Islands are steeped in history, from the first Europeans visiting the islands in 1778 and the establishment of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1795 to Hawaii’s admittance to the United States of America in 1959. But not all of Hawaiian history is remembered fondly, as is the case with Molokai’s leper colonies, where hundreds of individuals with the chronic infection were forced into isolated quarantine for more than one hundred years.
Though the Kalaupapa and Kalawao might not technically be classified as ghost towns, the county in which these former leper colonies are located is the least populated county in the entire United States, and that’s certainly saying something. And the cemeteries you’ll find here? Well, you’ll just have to read on to learn about the heartbreak that took place here.
Located on the tiny island of Molokai, with the ocean on one side and giant 1,600-foot cliffs on the other, are the Kalawao and Kalaupapa Leper Colonies — described by Robert Louis Stevenson as a "prison fortified by nature."
In order to prevent the transmission of leprosy, the Kingdom of Hawaii passed a law in 1865 to send leprosy patients to an isolation settlement on Molokai.
The leper colony was founded in Kalawao in 1866 with a hospital, two churches, and several homes. It served as the home of the U.S. Leprosy Investigation Station in the early 1900s but moved three miles away to Kalaupapa shortly after because it offered a warmer, drier climate and easier access to the sea.
In 1980, the Kalaupapa National Historical Park was established in order to preserve the culture and physical settings of this former leper colony. The area is home to a dwindling population, those of whom are outnumbered exponentially by those in the cemetery — where an estimated 2,000 graves lie unmarked in addition to those with headstones.
In fact, there are twenty documented cemeteries on the Kalaupapa Peninsula, and there’s no telling how many bodies are buried within this island prison.
These historic tombs at the Siloama Churchyard, constructed from lava rock and lime mortar, have begun to deteriorate and collapse throughout the decades. Despite a recent effort to restore several of the tombs by the National Parks Service, the graveyard still lends itself to the eerie — especially at night, or in black and white.
