ʻIolani Palace

ʻIolani Palace is the only royal palace on American soil. King Kalākaua laid its cornerstone on 31 December 1879 and finished it in 1882 at a cost of more than $340,000, replacing an older royal residence, Hale Aliʻi, on the same ground. Designed by Thomas J. Baker with Charles J. Wall and Isaac Moore, it was the setting for the king’s 1883 coronation ceremony, state dinners and the court life of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi.

The palace’s darkest chapter began on 17 January 1893, when a group of businessmen backed by US troops overthrew Kalākaua’s sister and successor, Queen Liliʻuokalani. The building became the seat of the Provisional Government and later the Republic. After a failed royalist uprising in 1895, the former queen was arrested and confined in an upstairs bedroom for about eight months; her trial was held in the old throne room. The American flag was raised over the palace at the annexation ceremony of 12 August 1898, and for almost eighty years it served as the capitol of the territory and state. Liliʻuokalani’s state funeral was held in the throne room in 1917. Government offices left in 1969, and after a restoration the palace opened as a museum in 1978.

The ghost stories are mostly modern and tour-borne. Storyteller Lopaka Kapanui, who trained under the late folklorist Glen Grant, told Honolulu Magazine that palace security guards have described seeing the figure of the queen on the grounds around 5:30 in the morning and hearing a piano playing in the Blue Room when no one is there. He also says that visitors with ties to the royal family have heard chanting or Hawaiian music on entering the upstairs bedroom, and that on a 2006 evening tour he thought he saw a woman’s silhouette in that window from across the street – though he allows it could have been a trick of the light. Older folklore from Grant’s Honolulu tours spoke of long-dead royal guards rattling keys and patrolling the grounds.

The palace itself does not endorse these accounts. Its historian told the magazine that they are hearsay, several steps removed from anyone who claims to have seen a former resident, and the palace’s own website says nothing about ghosts. What the stories do reflect is how heavily the building is charged with memory: a court overthrown, a queen imprisoned in her own home, and a nearby fenced mound that marks the royal burial ground of Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu, where eighteen coffins stood until they were moved to the Royal Mausoleum in Nuʻuanu in 1865. Some storytellers also say the banyan trees Queen Kapiʻolani planted in the 1880s shelter the spirits of people who had no family to care for them.

Security guards are said to have reported a figure of the queen on the grounds before dawn and a piano playing in the Blue Room. Visitors with royal ancestry describe chanting or Hawaiian music in the upstairs bedroom, and tour accounts add footsteps, the smell of cigar smoke and a woman’s silhouette in a window.

The upstairs bedroom where Liliʻuokalani was held in 1895, the Blue Room, the grounds near the banyan trees and the old burial mound, mostly around dawn and on evening ghost tours.

The palace appears in Honolulu ghost tours and Halloween features, and in the work of the late folklorist Glen Grant, whose Chicken Skin tales brought Hawaiian ghost lore to a wide audience. The real story of Liliʻuokalani – composer, last reigning monarch and prisoner in her own palace – is told at length in the museum itself.