The Ghost Car of Lanikai

It’s Monday, dear readers, and time for our tenth Cursed Car of Halloween. Today, we go to sunny Hawaii for a little bit of local superstition. I dug way back into my internet archives for a site calledCastle of Spiritsfor this tale of terror because I have a friend who swears that it happened to her and her husband.

The author of the site swears that this actually happened to her back in 1982 in Kailua. On a stretch of road called Lanikai that winds through million-dollar beachfront real estate, she and her cousin were cruising one day as they often did to kill time when skipping school. The road was narrow and only one lane, and passing another vehicle would have been a truly rare occurrence. On this particular day, the two girls were on one particular stretch with no driveways or turnoffs, when a large black Cadillac sedan pulled up behind them and began to ride their bumper. Both girls looked in the rearview mirror and then back over their shoulders. The cousin told the author to pull over to the side of the road to let the car go around them, but when they turned to look at the driver as the car passed,there was no driver.In the time it took for both girls to look at each other in amazement and then look back, the car had vanished.

My friend described an eerily similar experience on that same stretch of road, also in broad daylight, and her fiancé (now husband) was with her to corroborate the story. Hawaii has a rich and extensive history of superstitions, myths, and legends, from goddesses in volcanoes to the menehune dwarfs, but my friend states that the black Cadillac of Lanikai was spotted by many others before and since she was there. She also swears that she had never read or heard of the original 1982 story prior to her and her fiancé’s experience.

So, it’s up for you to decide, dear readers: “believe it or not.”

-Trey Fennell