The Ghosts of Kadena Air Base in Japan

Could you imagine an Air Base that was so haunted they had to shut down a barrack?

Kadena Air Base in Japan is notoriously haunted, with countless generations of Air Force men and women, along with civilians, claiming to see, hear, and experience ghostly phenomena.

But is it believable? Listen now!

Would the military tear down a perfectly good barrack because of ghosts?

Has a shadow made marines consistently abandon their post?

What would you do if you were trapped in another country in a haunted house?

What is up, Bizarros?! This week we fly into the haunted Kadena Air Base. 

Sourced from the Kadena website:

What is The Kadena Air Base?

Currently, The Kadena Air Base, located in Okinawa City, Japan, is the home of air power in the Pacific. It is home to the 18th Wing and a number of other units.

The city developed as a farming city and somewhat of the hub of Okinawa because Kadena was in the middle of the island.

Because the village was so central, it was one of the first and hardest-hit cities in ww2. It was burnt out until the end of the war.

The airfield was put to use in the war mere hours after the initial capture of the island and has been used by America ever since.

Is The Kadena Air Base Haunted?

There have been a number of strange occurrences that have occurred at the Kadena AB. Some of them include strange sightings at building 2283, reports of ghosts at entrance gates, and Japanese military ghosts from World War II.

Though Kadena Air Force Base is in an old city with many hauntings and sightings. However, there are three that stand out as the most unusual.

The Cave In Okinawa City

Next to the air base, there is an old cave that was used during World War II as a Japanese field hospital. The entrance was covered in vines and had two mounted machine vines outside of it.

The rumor behind this cave is that 17 nurses took their own life while inside.

I would imagine that they would have rather done the honorable thing and taken their own life rather than be taken by the enemy. However, there is no consensus on why exactly they did do it.

Many who still live near the cave treat it almost as a respectful no-go zone and encourage others to do as well.

Building 2283

This was a home designed for officers and their families. The house was actually next to a daycare center.

No one is quite sure why the house is haunted however the story that is told is by Jayne Hitchcock, who lived in Okinawa for several years and wrote several books chronicling her and others’ experiences there.

About building 2283, she wrote why it was haunted.

“The most frequently heard and most horrifying story is of the teenage girl who was stabbed to death by her stepfather. They were the last family to live in the house. After the murder, it was boarded up before being used as storage”.

The ghostly activity was said to be as simple as the faucets running by themselves and the lights flipping on and off of their own accord.

However, there were more uniquely Japanese apparitions that were said to appear such as a Samurai warrior on a horse and a woman washing her hair in the utility sink in the basement.

Residents and neighbors also reported the laughter and crying of children when none were around.

The base would assign people this home year after year, but families would move out as quickly as they could. However, they stopped trying to give it away and converted it into a storage facility until 2010.

The base would also give ghost tours, and this, of course, was a big stop in the tour.

April Marlong was giving the tour at night, and as she finished telling some of the rumors involving the haunting.

“Suddenly, the phone started ringing in the house,” Marling said. Everybody darted for the bus, she added, “No one called to add an extra element of fear to the tour. The house wasn’t even connected to a phone line.”

Another group in the 90s had their own experience.

From Jerry Johnson, “a curtain parted in front of all of them,” said Johnson. “That was enough to break up the tour for the evening”.

Johnson, who is a former tour director of Kaneda United services organization, had his own experiences in the house.

Here is a quote from 75 stripe

“So he and some fellow USO employees went inside. Although it was summer and nearly 100 degrees outside, he said the house was ice cold, as if the air conditioning had been left on high.

Because past residents had often complained of one room is much colder than the rest of the house, base officials knocked down that room.

Besides the chill he felt in the un-air-conditioned house, Johnson said he saw bloodstains on the floor and on the old curtains.

Johnson said, “It was an extremely eerie experience going into that house. One could almost feel a presence there,”

Apparently, Hitchcock had her own experience in that house (quote from 75 stripes)

“In her book, Hitchcock details how she held a séance in the house on Halloween night in 1994.

During the séance, she said she spoke with a spirit of a little girl who played with the spirit of a little boy.

The girl said she was afraid of a man on a horse.

The author noted how a candle flame would jump up four or five inches each time; she would ask a question that required a yes answer.

She claimed to have a recording device that picked up whispers of the spirit answering questions.

Although many people asked her to do more séances, Hitchcock said she was so spooked and unnerved by her experience she never returned to the house.”

There is a graveyard across the street from the house. Apparently, in that graveyard is the remains of a Samurai, and that could be why the Samurai is said to have been seen in this house. There is a chance the property overlaps with this graveyard.

This haunted single-family home was demolished in 2010.

Kadena Air Base’s Gate 3

Gate 3 is at the Northeast entrance to the base.

This place is so eerie, and creepy marines have refused guard duty on this portion of the base.

There is video evidence of an apparition at this gate from 2008. https://youtu.be/9S8pAqAWZko

Quote from sandbox

The video shows “shows what appears to be a black, human-like figure run from behind a sign, over to the other side of the road. In the video, you can hear the security guards confirming with one another that they’re both seeing the same thing, seemingly in disbelief.”

There are also consistent sightings from pairs or guards of a bloody ww2 soldier walking up to the birds on duty and asking for a light for his cigarette.

Unexplained Phenomena Encounters at the Air Force Base

Ghost on Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan

From the end of 5th grade till the end of 8th grade (2002-2005), I lived at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan.

I lived at 72 Clark Vista, and there’s no other way to say this; the house was fucking haunted.

Keep in mind while you are reading the Battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific during WW2, and its current population is about 1.4 million.

The island is 70 miles long in length and averages 7 miles in width. I have many stories, but I want to share one in particular.

The paranormal experience I want to share with you happened in my bedroom.

In my bedroom was a mirror in which I could see myself if I faced a certain way. As I was trying to go to bed one night, I suddenly felt like something was watching me, and at that moment, I felt an incredible amount of fear.

My heart was beating out of my chest, and with a quick glimpse into the mirror as I was laying on the bed, was a tall shadowy figure in the shape of a man.

But this man had no face, and it was standing directly over me.

The shadowy figure wasn’t a solid human shape but rather looked like it had an all-black robe on with wisps of black smoke coming from its body.

The moment I saw the figure, I was frozen with fear, but I managed to put a blanket over my head.

I stayed under the sheets for what seemed like forever and mustered up the courage to peek into the mirror to see if the shadowy figure was still looking at me. I lifted up the sheet and, with one eye, peeked into the mirror, and in the mirror, I saw the figure even closer to me than before!

Again I retreated to under the sheets. After a few minutes of staying absolutely still, I started to hear ..knock..knock..knock from my closet door.

Once that happened, I said fuck it and sprinted to my parent’s bedroom and jumped into their bed. I was in 8th grade, and my dad was in the army, so his reaction was a little bit of “what the hell are you doing”.

He told me to go back to my room, and I absolutely refused. My mom believed me and showed me some pity, and allowed me to sleep in their bed that night.

My dad was stationed back to the states about 2 months later, but I will never forget that night.

Second Paranormal Encounter

I lived in a haunted Air Base in Okinawa.

My whole family (aside from my dad, who was rarely home) experienced very odd and paranormal things in our house, and we were told stories from our neighbors as well.

I was a really young kid when we lived there (6-8), but my memory is fairly clear about some of the things that happened to me.

When we lived there, we would tell my mom about all of the experiences we were having, and she would dismiss them.

Finally, when we moved away, she told us about her own experiences and said she didn’t want to scare us at the time.

Firstly, I had a neighbor girl I was friends with who told me she would speak to other little girls through the air conditioning vents, and she would drop coins and little keychains down into the ducts for them.

Along those same lines, my older sister once saw a black gooey mass ooze from one of the vents at a neighbor’s house she was babysitting for.

The girls she watched would also hold loud conversations in their bedrooms and would play with “their friends in the walls” during their bedtime.

I was playing with dolls once in my shared bedroom with the door shut. I remember the doorknob kept twisting and opening every few minutes, and I just told it to stop, and it did.

On another occasion, I noticed one of my stuffed animals missing, and my mom has thrown it away.

Apparently, I had told my mom that the plush was whispering to me, and I wasn’t sleeping because of it. I don’t remember any of that, though.

My older sister and I shared a bedroom with bunk beds, but we both slept in the bottom bunk together because there was just an… odd presence in the top bunk that creeped us both out.

We ALL expressed feeling extremely uncomfortable walking up or down the stairs like something was watching us; even my mom admitted to sprinting up and down them and constantly checking behind her for eyes.

My little sister had her own bedroom, and her toys would constantly go off at night, even if they were turned off.

My mom told us once we were older that my toddler sister and she were lying down for a nap, and she heard something in the room says, “I love you, mommy.”

Confused, my mom said, “I love you too.” But my sister said, “who was that?” or something along those lines.

My older sister and I were playing at a friend’s house at the time.

We have a toooon of stories, and lots from neighbors too. I was just wanting to share a few I thought were the strangest.

The Third Encounter At The Air Force Base

-mean-bean-‘s on the last experience pos

I also lived there for a time and had one experience.

It was shortly after I had my first child, and so I was getting up for nighttime feedings.

My house was set up, so there was a hallway connecting the two bedrooms, and it also passed by the living room.

I heard my baby crying, so I got up and started walking to the other room when I realized as I approached the living room that I had just heard someone stop talking. Like I suddenly noticed the sound had stopped, if that makes sense.

It was definitely a woman’s voice, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

I chose to ignore it as there wasn’t much I could do about it, and there was no negative feeling associated with it.

Sort of anticlimactic, I guess. It only happened one time.

Down the street from my house was a “hospital cave” in which it was said many Okinawan people were forced to commit suicide during the war.

A few other people I knew said they saw “legless” ghosts.

Fourth Encounter Story

I lived in Okinawa for eight years on Kadena Air Base.

There was one house on Kadena, right next to the USO, that wasn’t lived in.

Come to find out, sometime in the late 90s-early 2000s, the dad of the family that lived there snapped and killed his wife, kids, and then himself.

They tried to put other families in that house, but they always moved soon after because they claimed the house was haunted.

So the haunted house’s backyard and fence backs up to the daycare.

My friend worked at the daycare, and she said that the kids would walk over to the fence and talk to the “kids” that lived there, and if a toy was ever thrown over the fence, it was always immediately thrown back even though the house was empty.

Fifth Paranormal Story From Kadena

My son was stationed there from 2014-2017 at Kadena. Okinawa is a beautiful place.

We visited him twice. During both of these visits, I felt sick to my stomach and lost my appetite.

On both visits, I went to the clinic, was checked out, and nothing was wrong.

I am a very positive, happy person, but on both visits, I felt extreme sadness and depression that came over me anytime we ventured out to do sightseeing.

My father was in the Battle of Okinawa, so I really wanted to see the beaches and go to the museums in the area.

I don’t understand why, to this day, I could not eat during both visits(we stayed a total of 12 days on each visit).

Interesting to note that late one night, I awakened to see an orb coming in through the window.

It rose up and through the top right of the window. It was yellow-white and about the size of an apple.

There were no cars driving by and no lights from the road. In fact, no one was out at all. His apartment was the last one on the end, and no apartments were behind him either.

Dont know what it was…Anyway. I am somewhat of an empath, very sensitive to the emotions of others.

Did I pick up on the suffering that came from the Japanese occupation and from the Battle of Okinawa?

Sixth Kadena Air Base Encounter (From mysterious universe)

We usually like to walk at night because of the cool breeze.

Occasionally you would see the Okinawan bats flapping around at night and hear them screeching.

This never bothered us. Tonight was a different story. My hands are still shaking while writing this on the keyboard.

We are very afraid of what we just saw. We walked over to the shopette around 9:00 p.m. like we normally do.

On the way back, we were walking next to the Jungle treeline, and something caught our eye. We thought a person was standing there in the brush.

We looked, and sure enough, it was. We figured it was a local, maybe farming some land out in the jungle.

We got to looking, and the person was not moving. We pushed the stroller closer and realized it was an apparition.

There was an old Okinawan man in a Straw Hat with drooping jowls staring at us blankly, not moving. Only… this is hard to say… he had nobody.

It was just a shadowy mass. The jungle was right behind him. My wife and I just stared in disbelief at what we were seeing.

His head then faded away. He did not just back into the jungle; the head just disappeared.

Right then and there! It faded. We ran home, pushing the stroller as fast as we could, and locked the door behind us.

My wife is still shaken from it. We never believed in ghosts. Now I see why this place has a reputation for being haunted.

I am now a believer in the afterlife. I will never walk past that spot again.

Is The Kadena Air Base Haunted?

What do you think, Bizarros?

Are American Troops and civilian employees witnessing paranormal events?

Is the air base housing have more tenants than a military family?

Let us know in the comments whether you find it believable or unbelievable.