[Music] despite it being a relatively small island in the ryuku island chain off the southernmost point of Japan okanawa has a rather intriguing and dark reputation among military circles for decades following the end of World War II the island has long played host to several US military installations and therefore tens of thousands of active duty American Service members and their families with its variable seasonal temperatures typhoons bugs and all the nuances that come with living in a place inundated with Japanese culture many service members fall in love with it and even move to okanawa following their end of service many more will never go back for any reason but aside from being either loved or hated as a place to live okanawa is widely considered to be one of the most haunted places in the US military far from being only a military phenomenon there are countless stories littering online forums books written by Ghost Hunters and other sources citing local Okinawan Legends and spiritual beliefs it's not possible to even scratch the surface of these many stories and their history in a short amount of time so we are going to dive into a few of the more detailed accounts offered by several individuals particularly those who spent time living on one base located in the central region of of the island this is the smoke pit and these are true stories As Told by various servicemen about the terrifying experiences they had while stationed aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Schwab [Music] I don't think I've ever shared this before but after leaving the military a few years ago I was actually working full-time in sales and marketing it wasn't until I bumped into a guy at the DMV who randomly asked me if I ever considered working in voiceover that I told him I like the idea but I had no idea where to start and as fate had it he was actually enrolled in an audio and voiceover course at a local college and a couple of weeks later I signed up for the same classes and here you are today listening to me if you feel like your experience is holding you back from pursuing the career that you want then I'm excited to tell you about today's sponsor Southern New Hampshire University snhu has one of the largest accredited nonprofit online degree offerings in the country and considering it's a high demand high paying career field not to mention my recent concerns about data breaches I wanted to talk to you about their cyber security program in this program you'll learn to solve complex cyber security problems by applying systems thinking and adversarial thinking to your skill set you'll gain a deep understanding of hacker tradecraft apply security principles and practices to various components of a system and learn how to evaluate systems for risks and threats in short you can become a marketable cyber security professional worried about the cost snhu is radically Affordable their online tuition rates are some of the lowest in the nation and they offer Career Services to help you prepare for the job market go to snhu. edu wartime stories also linked in the description to see what the current average annual salary for a cyber security profession is and request free information about the program when you request information a real person will hop on a call and discuss how the program can benefit you personally it only takes one click to find your calling good I love staff sir you have any idea which one of these Keys opens this damn thing no Staff Sergeant I do not oh that's just great it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon the garage the front door the back door why don't they label these things oh where did she come from oh young lady how'd she get over the fence oh I hope this doesn't mean paperwork young lady you were not supposed to be in there there where do you think she came from uh she looks local uh Sumi Masen um AO honey honey maska do you do you have any idea how to say anything in Japanese no uh no young lady we all right I got to get this gate open Hey Hey where's she going hey hey don't don't don't walk to no come back come back this first story was originally submitted to the tales from the grid Square project by an unnamed Marine since he wrote this expecting it to be read primarily by other Marines this Story begins with him speaking about the widely accepted notion that there is a ghost of a small girl on Camp Schwab who haunts the ramp the ramp is just a military term for a large fenced in parking lot used for storing and maintaining military vehicles when I was in Okinawa I rarely ever set foot on the base myself but it seems many marines who spend time living and working on the base will at some point hear about this story while some guys are rotated out on overseas deployments on an individual basis this particular devil dog was deployed to okanawa along with his entire unit a cycling of troops in six-month intervals which is called a unit deployment program or UDP it's a term he's going to be using I wanted to clarify that he writes so I never witnessed missed the ghost girl but my staff sergeant saw her on the first UDP he was on when I replaced my buddies during my UDP they told me they saw her as well from what I was told back in the 70s or 80s a 7on one of the large troop transport trucks ran over a little girl in the ramp area and she's haunted that area ever since in our first UDP in 2014 my staff sergeant was on Battalion staff duty and he and the duty driver were heading down to the ram late at night to double check everything was locked from what he said they pull up to the gate at the ramp and he gets out and starts to get the gate unlocked he looks up and about 30 ft away next to the last line of aavs there's this Japanese girl looking at him and the duty driver she then walks past the aavs through the fence and disappears into the jungle my staff sergeant said f that and they hauled ass back to the Battalion building a couple years later in 2016 I arrived a month early to do a changeover with the other company I'm hanging out with my buddy and he tells me that the prior week they were in the bay one of the garage type workspaces working on an aav track it's late at night and pouring rain there's about half a dozen guys working on getting this track fixed he said they all just turned and looked out to the line of lavs and aavs and there was this girl looking at them and once they see her she turns and walks through the line of vehicles and the fence back into the jungle they all bounced and didn't want to hang around after that I know some more of the guys i' had been with had witnessed this ghost but those are the two that I recall in detail we were always spooked if we were out there late at night some of the instructors would even talk about getting old radio Transmissions from World War II when they were in okanawa they told us that if we get to Okinawa and are doing night Ops we might run into that while we were there [Music] as he more or less indicated detailed accounts of the ghost girl on the ramp at Schwab certainly exist but most have not been widely shared it's more of a rumor than a collection of stories but if it's any indication of how widespread this story is it is often mentioned by Marines in online forums another Marine under the handle IU robots posted in a forum about Okinawa Ghost Stories the old boat ramp on Camp Schwab Okinawa uh had dudes in my shop refuse to work overnight shifts because the little girl roaming the Halls the current building my command HQ is in used to be the base hospital now it's all offices roaming Duties are interesting when you roll into a secured basement with motion detector lights that randomly trigger one Marine with the handle automatic sprinkles to who asked a question my last UDP I was a camp Schwab I work as a aav crewman and heard the stories of the little girl at the ramp and so on this whole island is creepy a buddy of mine said he'd seen a little girl in his closet one night any other Marines have any stories also feel free to share stories about Camp Fuji as well another Marine with the handle navalis 2208 responded we had two guys in my unit see a ghost of a little girl on the ramp at Camp Schwab on different occasions it was back in 1992 93 they were both teased mercilessly but both swore that it happened after reading a different ghost story shared by another Marine stationed on Camp leun in North Carolina a marine with the handle f F kid loves PC gam responded this story hit a nerve with me I've literally heard a story very similar to this from The Trackers out of uh Camp company on Camp Schwab except at their ramp it was a grown woman who would walk up from the ramp at the guard the eyes though the description of the evil in her eyes is exactly what was described by those trackers out of Camp Schwab huh you trackers have some weird stuff at your ramps this next story about the same little girl was directly emailed to me by a marine named Ryan not sure if you wanted me to OU your full name brother but in cases buddies are listening and they doubt that this is his story his last name starts with a and correlates with a type of currency I'll leave it at that something to first point out is that it seems like a lot of Marines who spend time in okanawa also end up flying up to Mainland Japan and conducting training around Mount Fuji which I did as well there is a Marine Corps Base nearby Camp Fuji and also a forest at the base of the massive volcano called Aoki gahara which translates to sea of trees that is commonly called by another much darker term and has been the subject of many controversies including the one with famous YouTuber Logan Paul with this forest's dark reputation a place where many Japanese locals walk in with a length of rope and no intention of ever walking back out perhaps it's no surprise then that Marines training in the area seem to have paranormal experiences there Ryan writes in his email hope all is well with you I was going to include a story about my platoon's encounter with a ghost in the forest near Mount Fuji but I can't find the map of the Fuji training area where I had marked our location where it happened so here's a story of the ghost girl my buddy John and I saw in the barracks at Camp Schwab Okinawa Japan 2015 it was a late night at Camp Schwab and I was having trouble sleeping my buddy John was on Barrack's Duty that night and I thought I'd keep him company so I grabbed a couple of Red Bulls from my fridge and sat with him in the duty Lounge talking about what we were going to do once we got back to the States about 15 to 20 minutes passed by when he got up from the desk to go tour his post just when he stepped outside the doorway he had a look of fear on his face and just stood there for what seemed like a minute or two and then he motions for me to come see what he's looking at what I saw cemented my belief in the Paranormal I looked down the hallway and saw an apparition of a little girl in ragged old clothes standing by the fire exit I don't know what maybe do this but I said hey right when the door opened and she ran out we ran down the hallway out the door and looked around the area outside and there was no trace of her many veterans who spend time in Japan have a similar story from Camp Schwab it doesn't surprise me that military bases especially Camp Schwab have been the setting of so many stories about the Paranormal okanawa being the place of one of the Marine corps's bloodiest battles during World War II I imagine there are many lost souls trying to find their way home [Music] [Music] well it's nice to actually be able to get my laundry done while everybody's gone huh we're all going to come back and probably stuff their sift gear right into the machines break the only two we have left [Music] oh who H hello what the hell hello okay all right that didn't just happen okay all right the following is another story submitted to the tales from the grid Square project one thing I should clarify for anyone not familiar with Marine Corp Barracks especially the ones in Okinawa they are usually like a sort of shabby Hotel a long rectangular building in this case with a central hallway and the barracks rooms are staggered on both sides usually three floors the barracks guard or Duty sits at a desk right there in the middle on the first floor near the main entrance to the building so he can see anyone entering or leaving either at the main door or at either end of the long hallway and on every floor right near the central staircase there's the laundry room a handful of washers and dryers you bring your own detergent it's kind of a first come first serve deal and there's always some jerk who takes your clothes out of the dryer or the washer before the cycle finishes and throws them soing wet under the dirty floor because they are just terrible people if you are one of these marines by the way may all of your bacon burn anyway now that you have a basic grasp of the layout of the barracks it was during the time when most of the Marines in his unit were out of the barracks that this Marine started to experience well I'll let him tell you about it he [Music] writes so I was on a UDP and on Camp Schwab for the story the whole company goes goes to the Philippines three dudes from headquarters and two guys from Easy Company are left in the entire Barracks that's when it starts getting weird every day I did laundry middle of summer oy sweat issues the doors for every dryer were open I was on the top floor and the headquarters guys were the rooms by me I'd go back to get my laundry out and they're all open I shut the doors every time and then they would be open when I came back but I can clearly hear when the other guys on the floor would open or close the doors so I'm like who the hell is doing this so one night I was in there I had just shut all the dryer doors and out of the corner of my eye was a solid white figure but once I looked it was gone whatever so later on I go back to get my laundry and as I'm kneeling in front of the machine machine to pull my clothes out into a basket I feel someone run their hand across my head I have a shaved head and there is a distinct difference between a hand and wind on my head later I'm lying in bed that night and suddenly the guy in the room across from me is banging on my door and yelling for me to open the door I let him in and asked what the hell was going on he said that he had a dream and that this lady in all white was grabbing him yelling for him to come with her and when he shoved her away the metal circular vent cover that was attached to his ceiling crashes down onto the floor and he wakes up for anyone who never lived in the Oki Barracks you have to push up and twist for these vent covers to come down so it's not like it could just fall on its own I went over with him and checked and sure enough the vent was right there on the floor and now he said his shoes were gone turning a camera light on under his bed we see that the shoes are now pushed into the corner of the room under his bed and this is a guy who kept his shoes aligned like he was still a recruit like he's one of those guys so this wasn't normal I start asking him if he'd been experiencing weird things and he said yes the next day we asked a few others in the barracks and they also said yes when everyone came back whatever this was it it went away I take it that the ghost didn't have enough energy to haunt some 300 Marines but when it was just a few of us we were Prime targets [Music] this next one is from a marine who likewise shared his account with the tales from the grid Square project as with the little girl on the ramp story if only one guy saw it eh you know but when a lot of guys over the course of several decades report seeing the same thing makes you think not sure if it's the same building uh since most units are split up into sections S1 S2 S3 headquarters Battalion all that and they might each be assigned to several different Barracks but this next one reminded me of a story my buddy trip who I met in Okinawa shared from living in the Marine Barracks on the base in 29 Palms and I gather that there's guys from 29 Palms who ship out to Oki and back and with trip I mean these two stories are so similar his and this one that it implies that there is some truth about spiritual entities attaching themselves to people and being transported from one place to another and this thing seems to be moving back and forth between those two bases because he the Marine in Okinawa now writes I couldn't tell you exactly when it happened just that it was on Camp Schwab at the fourth Marines Barracks probably in April around 0200 0300 in the morning nothing before this would have ever led me to believe my Barracks were haunted Schwab had a handful of cats and dogs loose and one morning on my way in a dog caught me off guard by barking and jump scared the hell out of me coming over a hill that was the extent of scary things I figured would ever happen I don't particularly remember what woke me up I remember coming to and being 100% awake no eye rubbing or yawning just bam awake and unable to move anything other than my head I turned right and I could feel this presence watching me my bed was positioned on the back wall so it was the first thing you'd see if you entered the room I could see the faint outlines of a shadow about the size of a person this thing felt evil it felt like it was after me and God only knew what it would do if it ever got to me I started to pray I'm not even religious but I've read into a few different religions out of curiosity I prayed to every deity that came to mind for help help once I realized I could actually start moving my body uh I I finally was able to build up the courage to sit up in bed get dressed and go past it out of the room my praying seemed to have held it in place while I quickly walked past it I made it out past the duty desk and he asked me why I was awake I proceeded to tell him thinking he would never believe me but he does oddly enough one of my buddies came up and recounted he felt tired earlier in the night but something within himself told him he needed to stay awake a while longer like he had this weird intuition and that's why he came out to the duty desk as well we all ended up going back to my room and this entity was gone by the time he returned I had later heard rumors of people on base throughout its long history practicing black magic but who knows knows if that's true or not I never heard from anyone else during my time on the Rock if they experienced anything similar I recently read a post about someone else at L having something similar happen to them gives me the creeps to think about it all but at least I know I'm not 100% crazy [Music] dude dude talking in your sleep man wake up yeah one more story from the barracks on Schwab even being a marine myself I'm not familiar with all the unit designators but I gather this Marine out of all the Marines we've heard from so far that this Marine was with a different unit I could be wrong and then some units do share the same Barracks so it might be the same building I don't know he is now the second here among these Okinawa stories to mention a topic that I find comes up often when dealing with spiritual encounters sleep paralysis it's a topic that we will have to cover more in future because it is being mentioned a lot in the stories I'm reading coincidentally there was a woman uh I actually spoke with at a bank some months ago who earlier in the conversation she had asked me what I do and I said that I kind of tell scary stories for a living so she's explaining interest rates and then it's like it comes to her that she suddenly mentions is having an unexplained experience which is strikingly similar to the one that this Marine describes only she said that as she was experiencing sleep paralysis one morning she heard a voice outside the door to her room telling her to open the door but she couldn't move not that she wanted to to get up and open the door uh but she said that she knew that she was completely awake when this was happening and she just didn't know what was going on and I guess until we kind of started talking about scary stories it just never really occurred she it's like she forgot about this happening but I asked her what her first thought was about what the voice was and she blurted out demon and she actually seemed kind of surprised at hearing the word when she said it like she hadn't meant to say it but then she glanced around at the other staff members in the bank working around her before like composing herself and saying you know we need to get back to talking about this account so it always just fascinates me to bring up the subject of the strange and unexplained and just to have people just blurred out stories like this so nonchalantly like it's an everyday thing for people anyway this Marine said much the same as her about his own experience and his story seems eily similar even to the last account about a shadowy entity being seen in the barracks again I don't know if it's the same building but his story has a rather unusual twist he started speaking in an ancient language he writes I was with third L at Camp Schwab okanawa before I tell the story I do want to mention that sometimes I have sleep paralysis it's not always a constant thing in my life but it comes and goes it's maybe 600 or 7:00 a. m.
on a Saturday and I'm asleep in my Barrack's room my bed is alongside a wall and you can see the wall lockers from it as well as the little entrance into the room where the sink would be it has some dim yellowish green light and it's not very bright anyways I wake up at like 0600 0700 and of course I am now caught in an episode of sleep paralysis and I felt something staring at me so I looked towards the entrance of the room and I see some weird black smoke or Mist almost transparent right away my entire body starts to shake and tremble and the first thing that comes to my mind is that a demon is trying to possess me I'm a guy of Christian faith so I start praying and it suddenly stops I open my eyes and it's still there but this time it's closer I just lay there for several minutes with my eyes shut and I can now smell the scent of something like rotting so I keep praying and finally it feels like it stops for good but the moment I open my eyes is when my roommate starts talking to me and I and I look and that this thing is gone but my roommate is now staring at me and he goes bro you were sleeptalking I didn't know you spoke Spanish I don't speak Spanish and I now believe he actually heard me speaking Latin but I don't know Latin either nor have I ever heard it spoken and I also read somewhere that's the sent of something rotting can indicate a demonic Apparition so yeah scary [Music] [Music] stuff you don't have to look very hard to find evidence that okanawa is a very interesting place reading up on other opinions about the causes for the Island's paranormal track record many people do seem to agree about the tragic history being the root cause around 50,000 American casualties 100,000 Japanese and nearly 150,000 civilians were killed during the 11we period known as the Battle of okanawa that would amount to a staggering average of 3,896 people dying every single day which is about one person every 22 seconds for over 2 and 1/2 months and we know that's not how it happened in reality right the averages quite possibly There were single days where the lives of tens of thousands of men women and children came to an abrupt and tragic end and even more sadly many among the civilian casualties especially women and children died unnecessarily traditionally speaking okinawans are not Japanese the annexation of the ryuku Kingdom by Japan happened in the 1870s the assimilation of the ryuku kingdom and the prefecture of Okinawa into Japanese Imperial culture then took place one example now being that relatively few people still speak Okinawan the nation's original dialect and it has recently been classified as a severely endangered language true the replacement by Japanese culture was somewhat gradual during the first few Decades of Japanese rule but in an increasing effort to Foster okan loyalty Japanese military culture was being more forcefully imposed on the okan in the leadup to World War II the concept of gyokusai or shattering like a jewel was prevalent in Japanese military culture this ideology emphasized dying honorably rather than facing the shame of capture okinawans were ultimately subjected to Imperial subject education which taught that dying for the emperor was honorable and that falling into enemy hands should be avoided at all costs during the American invasion of the island among all the other atrocities that war produces the American soldiers were shocked to see okan parents throwing both themselves and their children off of cliffs it wasn't until later when they found out why which was that the Japanese military had either coerced the Okana aans or forced them to do it telling them that if they allowed themselves to be captured the American barbarians were going to brutally torture and murder their families anyway many civilians were given hand grenades one to use on the Americans and the other one to use on themselves and their children a practice often carried out by Japanese soldiers in the face of surrendering to their enemy just an awful battle and a staggering amount of Terror and death all taking place on a relatively small little Island and now although the guns and screams have been silent for nearly 80 years the evidence of that battle's brutality seems to persist in the form of spectral sightings many of these sightings being reported by present day American Marines Airmen Sailors and their families the island is Rife with witness accounts and these are only a few and only those from a single base camp Schwab the little girl on the ramp is the most prevalent story from the base considering the fact that many young women and children died during the battle to take the island during World War II while there are no sheer Cliffs on the beaches nearby I do have to wonder if that little Japanese girl and even the Japanese woman some Marines have reported seeing the two of them staring so intently at what they might even know are American men and the little girl running away from them I have to wonder if these ghosts are not a haunting Testament to the atrocities that took place on where Marine Corps Base Camp Schwab now sits [Music] hey guys welcome to the after action here in the credits fortunately I can't say I've ever experienced a haunting in a Barracks I have had some pretty awful roommates though um I never smelled the scent of sulfur or Rotting Flesh but one of the guys had some really smelly boots that I made him keep them in a trash bag because they smelled so bad when he took them off and they were like his favorite boots and he just didn't want to get rid of them but and he didn't want to wash them I guess cuz he'd worn them in Afghanistan and I was like dude I get it you've still got the Afghan dirt on there but dude it took less than 2 seconds after he took his boots off that smell to hit my nose and it was awful um but now that I've read these stories it called to mind all the times when our Recon unit would find an empty Barracks or even old based housing units unlike Camp Foster or Camp Hansen or something to use as a sort of mock building to train in as if we were in country on an actual Mission and we had broken into an abandoned building to set up a hid sight and spy on the enemy speaking of the air vents on the Barrack room ceilings the one that like fell down in in that story there was one time I did embarrass myself to no end in front of a group of other Recon guys and it involved an air vent cover on the ceiling it was probably 2: a. m. we had been given access to an empty Barracks building on Camp Hansen and had moved upstairs to a third floor room it was part of a 3 or 4 week Special Operations training group course that we always had to do prior to being qualified to be a Recon element assigned to the 31st Mew we were doing a one night Op with the Enemy objective being the base football field or the track area uh near the where the skate park that I never saw anybody skating on but that area if you're familiar with it big wide openen area so the only way we were going to remain hidden was by sneaking into a barracks and setting up a hid sight in one of the rooms and then looking out the window and let me tell you an empty barracks in the middle of the night that is a creepy place whether it's haunted or not I don't know why but super creepy just walking through the empty dark Halls of this building there is something about those Oki Barracks at night when all the lights are off and we were also being all Ricky Recon so we were already feeling tense about not wanting to be seen and we had just patrolled across the whole base at night dodging lights and staying hidden in the shadows you know pretending like we were actually in enemy territory cuz there's marines that are still awake out in the Smoke pits or whatever and we can't let them see us there was one time on Camp Foster we were doing this kind of training at base housing and we had to do an extract and there was no we had no choice we had to walk by these marines who were out in their smoke pit late at night and as soon as we walked by them I mean they can clearly see us we're just up against a tree line and the lights are on and everything and it was the most embarrassing thing cuz they're like hey look it's Recon look at these guys they think they're so cool we just ignored them and kept walking but yeah so we didn't we wanted to avoid that right so that's the enemy in this case so anyway back to this other training Mission we get inside the room we camp out for maybe 10 minutes to do our Sills or stop listen smell see if we hear any noises in the building which would tell us we had been followed inside or someone was still living in the barracks or something the six-man team me and this other radio Recon guy were assigned with uh they were going to be the ones taking pictures doing their whole visual reconnaissance thing through the window of the barracks and then me and my buddy were going to be doing the earson stuff you setting up antennas in the room and enemy radio transmission collections EES dropping on the enemy that kind of thing and we were also like the new guys we had never worked with these Recon guys before like this so these these other six guys we were trying to make a good impression on them so that they could learn to trust us so I'm trying to set up our collection antenna which was a sloping V it's exactly what it sounds like it's two copper wires attached you know in the middle it's sloping downward in a vshape and then we attach that to our scanners and it's just a type of collection antenna but unlike being in the woods where there are trees and branches there was nowhere in the barracks room to attach the upper ends of the wire except the ceiling of the room but the ceiling was painted the AC was off in this Barracks so with the humidity in okanawa none of our rigers tape or anything that we had was sticking to this smooth damp ceiling so I was able to attach one end of the antenna wire to the metal air vent cover the bare metal held it up pretty well but the only other thing I had to get some distance between that wire and the other wire to make the vshape and the only other thing on this ceiling was a fire sprinkler and this little metal like I don't know what it was it like a little disc a little metal cap of something I I thought it was covering like a pipe in the ceiling I don't know I didn't want to touch the fire sprinkler because back when I first joined the Marine Corps and I went to my first unit but there was a guy who hung his uniform on the fire sprinkler he broke that little tube that's in there and it flooded the whole Barracks I knew not to mess with the sprinklers so I decided you know I'm going to use this little metal disc thing to tape this copper wire to so I start to you know I get up on a chair and I start to tape this thing and unless it was just some horrible coincidence as soon as I start messing around with this disc thing on the ceiling the fire alarm goes off in the entire building like everyone in a/ quar mile radius now knows that there is someone in this building so there I am just standing on a chair my hands touching the ceiling Frozen in place in the middle of this Barrack's room and everybody all the other seven guys in the room are now staring at me like unpacking their gear like mid pulling something out of their ruck sack just looking at me and they were all just getting ready to settle in for a night of collection like we just had a really long Patrol and they're like dude what the as if it wasn't already obvious one of the guys just points at me and he goes it was you was so embarrassing so we all take a beat and we look at the Recon team leader who's in charge of this team and we're like okay this is a training Mission you know what do we do I mean it's 2: a.
m.
