Sumay
Sumay is a ghost town in Santa Rita, Guam. Destroyed CHamoru town within Naval Base Guam. The archive files it under ghost towns and dark history. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Demolished — only the file and the location survive. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.
NPS explicitly marks the site not open to the public; access requests go through the military Public Access Plan coordinator.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Sumay haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Sumay is the village that became a naval base — the CHamoru port town on Apra Harbor that was Guam's commercial hub for centuries: the galleon anchorage under Spain, the whaling port of the 1800s, the cable station that connected Guam to America and Asia, and the place where the China Clipper landed its flying boats and built the island's first hotel. By 1941 two thousand people lived there, a tenth of Guam's population.
The war erased it twice. The Japanese bombed Sumay first on December 8, 1941, occupied it, evicted the residents, and garrisoned it; the Americans destroyed what was left retaking the island in 1944 — and then refused to give it back, taking the whole Orote Peninsula for Naval Base Guam. The people of Sumay were moved to a 'temporary' thatched settlement up the hill that became the permanent village of Santa Rita. The townsite is still inside the base; Sumay's descendants still hold a memorial there.
The file keeps Sumay: the galleon port, the Clipper era, the two destructions, and the village that exists now only as a Navy reservation and a displaced community's memory.
Sumay is the archive's displaced file — Guam's hub, the occupation, and the village Santa Rita inherited.
Why this file matters
Sumay is the archive's displaced file — the Apra Harbor town, the Japanese occupation, the American seizure, and the village that moved uphill.
A village erased twice keeps its descendants — the file's suggestion being that Sumay's hold is the dispossession: the port that was Guam's gateway, the base that took its land, and the community that rebuilt next door.
Sumay, also Sumai, was a village on the United States territory of Guam. It was located on the north coast of the Orote Peninsula along Apra Harbor. It was inhabited by Chamorro people before contact with Europeans. Sumay became a prosperous port town serving whalers and other sailors in the 1800s and the second most populous settlement on Guam after Hagåtña, the capital of the Spanish Mariana Islands. Following the Capture of Guam by the United States in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, the village was the site of Marine Barracks Guam. In the early 1900s, it was a link for two firsts connecting the United States and Asia: the first submarine communications cable for telegraph and the C
Sumay, GuamDocumented history
Sumay was destroyed during the 1944 Battle of Guam. Its displaced residents resettled in Santa Rita; the Navy seized the townsite in 1948. Sumay's history is documented — boom, bust, and desertion all on record, the lore layered on top. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. 'Sumai/Sumay' documents the entry. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context.
Verified historyNational Park Service
Sources on file
- 01Sumai/SumayNational Park Service · government · A1
Field notes & open questions
Townsite record, distinct from its surviving cemetery. No haunting claim inferred from NPS references to ancestors.