OUTRIGGER Kāʻanapali Beach Resort

The hotel stands on one of the most storied stretches of Hawaiian shoreline. Kāʻanapali was a royal retreat; the black-rock promontory of Puʻu Kekaʻa, beside the resort strip, was held to be a leaping place for the dead, where spirits departed the living world — and where the aliʻi Kahekili reportedly dove to prove mortal men could do what souls were said to. From the late 1800s until July 4, 1918, the Koko O Nā Moku racetrack ran along the sand in front of the site.

Amfac master-planned Kāʻanapali as Hawaiʻi's first resort district in 1962, and the Kāʻanapali Beach Hotel — later billed 'Hawaiʻi's Most Hawaiian Hotel' for its cultural programming — anchored it. OUTRIGGER acquired and renamed the property in July 2023, inheriting the staff-lore file along with the keys.

The 1980 account, retold by Hawaiʻi ghost-tour historian Lopaka Kapaʻa's operation, collects the era's reports: the utility worker's collapse at the cold spot; a kitchen worker stacking cups who felt cold hands press her back; a night worker hearing drumming with no source. Staff mapped the activity to the kitchen entrance and a corner of an empty dining room that had once been a disco.

The file's set piece belongs to a front-desk worker playing piano alone in the empty dining room — 'Kanaka Wai Wai' — who watched his walkie-talkie jump off the instrument, then his duffel bag hit the floor, then the chandelier behind him come down entirely. He ran. The account entered print within the year, which makes it unusually fresh for the genre.

The resort strip sits inside a much older Hawaiian file. Puʻu Kekaʻa, the black lava point beside the hotels, was understood as a leaping place — where spirits left the world — and the Kāʻanapali coast carries the broader West Maui tradition of the huakaʻi pō, the night marchers, processions of the dead said to move along old paths. The racetrack ran its last official race on the sand on July 4, 1918. Read in that register, the hotel staff's night-shift reports — drumming with no source, cold hands at the kitchen door — attach to a landscape Hawaiian tradition had already posted.

The reports are filed under the hotel's earlier name and earlier era — night shifts, empty dining rooms, a 1979 cold spot — while the property now operates under the OUTRIGGER flag. The lore travels with the staff rather than the brand: Hawaiian ghost-tour literature keeps the 1980 story in circulation, and the reports remain what they were — employee accounts, attested in print, from a hotel built on ground Hawaiians had already filed as sacred. The 1980 newspaper account remains the file's anchor document — a manager attesting an employee's report, in print, while the building was still young.