The Little Girl on the Ramp
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Despite it being a relatively small island in the Ryukyu Island chain off the southernmost point of Japan, Okinawa has a rather intriguing and dark reputation among military circles. For decades following the end of World War II, the island has long played host to several US military installations and therefore tens of thousands of active duty American service members and their families.

With its variable seasonal temperatures, typhoons, bugs, and all the nuances that come with living in a place inundated with Japanese culture, many service members fall in love with it and even move to Okinawa following their end of service. Many more will never go back for any reason. But aside from being either loved or hated as a place to live, Okinawa is widely considered to be one of the most haunted places in the US military.

Far from being only a military phenomenon, there are countless stories littering online forums, books written by ghost hunters, and other sources citing local Okinawan legends and spiritual beliefs.

It's not possible to even scratch the surface of these many stories and their history in a short amount of time, so we are going to dive into a few of the more detailed accounts authored by several individuals, particularly those who spent time living on one base located in the central region of the island.

This is the Smoke Pit, and these are true stories, as told by various servicemen, about the terrifying experiences they had while stationed aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Schwab. I'm Luke LaManna, and this is Wartime Stories. Ah, ah, good I love staff duty. Sir, you have any idea which one of these keys opens this damn thing?

No, Staff Sergeant, I do not. Oh, that's just great. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. The garage, the front door, the back door. Why don't they label these things? Oh, where did she come from? Oh, young lady. How'd she get over the fence? Oh, I hope this doesn't mean paperwork. Young lady, you were not supposed to be in there. Where do you think she came from? She looks local. Uh, sumimasen, um, ego, hanimashika?

Do you have any idea that I say anything in Japanese? No. Uh, no. Young lady, we got, all right, I gotta get this gate open. Hey, hey, where's she going? Hey, hey, don't, don't, don't walk toward, no, come back, come back.

This first story was originally submitted to the Tales from the Grid Square Project by an unnamed Marine. Since he wrote this expecting it to be read primarily by other Marines, this story begins with him speaking about the widely accepted notion that there is a ghost of a small girl on Camp Schwab who haunts "The Ramp". The Ramp is just a military term for a large fenced-in parking lot used for storing and maintaining military vehicles.

When I was in Okinawa, I rarely ever set foot on the base myself, but it seems that many Marines who spend time living and working on the base will at some point hear about this story.

While some guys are rotated out on overseas deployments on an individual basis, this particular devil dog was deployed to Okinawa along with his entire unit, a cycling of troops in six-month intervals, which is called a Unit Deployment Program, or UDP. It's a term he's going to be using. I wanted to clarify that. He writes...

So I never witnessed the ghost girl, but my staff sergeant saw her on the first UDP he was on. When I replaced my buddies during my UDP, they told me they saw her as well. From what I was told, back in the 70s or 80s, a 7-ton, one of the large troop transport trucks, ran over a little girl in the ramp area, and she's haunted that area ever since.

In our first UDP in 2014, my staff sergeant was on battalion staff duty and he and the duty driver were heading down to the ramp late at night to double check everything was locked. From what he said, they pull up to the gate at the ramp and he gets out and starts to get the gate unlocked. He looks up and about 30 feet away, next to the last line of AAVs, there's this Japanese girl looking at him and the duty driver.

She then walks past the AAVs, through the fence, and disappears into the jungle. My staff sergeant said, "F that," and they hauled ass back to the battalion building. A couple years later, in 2016, I arrived a month early to do a changeover with the other company. I'm hanging out with my buddy, and he tells me that the prior week they were in the bay, one of the garage-type workspaces, working on an AAV track.

It's late at night and pouring rain. There's about half a dozen guys working on getting this track fixed. He said they all just turned and looked out to the line of LAVs and AAVs and there's this girl looking at them. And once they see her, she turns and walks through the line of vehicles and the fence back into the jungle. They all bounced and didn't want to hang around after that.

I know some more of the guys I had been with had witnessed this "ghost", but those are the two that I recall in detail. We were always spooked if we were out there late at night. Some of the instructors would even talk about getting old radio transmissions from World War II when they were in Okinawa. They told us that if we get to Okinawa and are doing night ops, we might run into that while we were there.

As he more or less indicated, detailed accounts of the ghost girl on the ramp at Schwab certainly exist, but most have not been widely shared. It's more of a rumor than a collection of stories. But if it's any indication of how widespread this story is, it is often mentioned by Marines in online forums. Another Marine under the handle iBuildRobots posted in a forum about Okinawa ghost stories, The old boat ramp on Camp Schwab, Okinawa...

One Marine with the handle "Automatic Sprinkles 2" asked a question:

My last UDP, I was a camp Schwab. I worked as an AAV crewman and heard the stories of a little girl at the ramp and so on. This whole island is creepy. A buddy of mine said he'd seen a little girl in his closet one night. Any other Marines have any stories? Also, feel free to share stories about Camp Fuji as well. Another Marine with the handle Navalis2208 responded...

We had two guys in my unit see a ghost of a little girl on the ramp at Camp Schwab on different occasions. It was back in 1992, 93. They were both teased mercilessly, but both swore that it happened. After reading a different ghost story shared by another Marine stationed on Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, a Marine with the handle Fat Kid Loves PC Gam responded,

This story hit a nerve with me. I've literally heard a story very similar to this from the trackers out of a cab company on Camp Schwab. Except at their ramp, it was a grown woman who would walk up from the ramp at the guard. The eyes, though. The description of the evil in her eyes is exactly what was described by those trackers out of Camp Schwab. You trackers have some weird stuff at your ramps.

This next story about the same little girl was directly emailed to me by a Marine named Ryan. Not sure if you wanted me to out your full name, brother, but in case his buddies are listening and they doubt that this is his story, his last name starts with A and correlates with a type of currency. I'll leave it at that.

Something to first point out is that it seems like a lot of Marines who spend time in Okinawa also end up flying up to mainland Japan and conducting training around Mount Fuji, which I did as well.

There is a Marine Corps base nearby, Camp Fuji, and also a forest at the base of the massive volcano called Aokigahara, which translates to Sea of Trees, that is commonly called by another much darker term and has been the subject of many controversies, including the one with famous YouTuber Logan Paul.

With this forest's dark reputation, a place where many Japanese locals walk in with a length of rope and no intention of ever walking back out, perhaps it's no surprise then that Marines training in the area seem to have paranormal experiences there. Ryan writes in his email:

Hope all is well with you. I was going to include a story about my platoon's encounter with a ghost in the forest near Mount Fuji, but I can't find the map of the Fuji training area where I had marked our location where it happened. So here's a story of the ghost girl my buddy John and I saw in the barracks at Camp Schwab, Okinawa, Japan, 2015.

It was a late night at Camp Schwab and I was having trouble sleeping. My buddy John was on barracks duty that night and I thought I'd keep him company. So I grabbed a couple of Red Bulls from my fridge and sat with him in the duty lounge talking about what we were going to do once we got back to the States. About 15 to 20 minutes passed by when he got up from the desk to go tour his post. Just when he stepped outside the doorway...

He had a look of fear on his face and just stood there for what seemed like a minute or two. And then he motions for me to come see what he's looking at. What I saw cemented my belief in the paranormal. I looked down the hallway and saw an apparition of a little girl in ragged old clothes standing by the fire exit. I don't know what made me do this, but I said, hey, what's

right when the door opened and she ran out. We ran down the hallway out the door and looked around the area outside and there was no trace of her. Many veterans who spend time in Japan have a similar story from Camp Schwab. It doesn't surprise me that military bases, especially Camp Schwab, have been the setting of so many stories about the paranormal. Okinawa being the place of one of the Marine Corps' bloodiest battles during World War II,

I imagine there are many lost souls trying to find their way home. Well, it's nice to actually be able to get my laundry done while everybody's gone. Hmph. We're all gonna come back and probably stuff their sift gear right into the machines and break the only two we have left. *singing* *sounds of a car crashing* Oh! Whoa! Hello? What the hell? Hello? Okay. Alright. That didn't just happen. Okay.

The following is another story submitted to the Tales from the Grid Square project. One thing I should clarify for anyone not familiar with Marine Corps barracks, especially the ones in Okinawa, they are usually like a sort of shabby hotel.

A long rectangular building in this case with a central hallway and the barracks rooms are staggered on both sides, usually three floors. The barracks guard or duty sits at a desk right there in the middle, on the first floor, near the main entrance to the building so he can see anyone entering or leaving, either at the main door or at either end of the long hallway.

and on every floor right near the central staircase there's the laundry room. A handful of washers and dryers, you bring your own detergent, it's kind of a first come first serve deal, and there's always some jerk who takes your clothes out of the dryer or the washer before the cycle finishes and throws them sopping wet onto the dirty floor because they are just terrible people. If you are one of these marines by the way, may all of your bacon burn. Anyway, now that you have a basic grasp of the layout of the barracks,

It was during the time when most of the Marines in his unit were out of the barracks that this Marine started to experience, well I'll let him tell you about it. He writes: "So I was on a UDP and on Camp Schwab for the story. The whole company goes to the Philippines. Three dudes from headquarters and two guys from Easy Company are left in the entire barracks. That's when it starts getting weird. Every day I did laundry, middle of summer, okie, sweat issues.

The doors for every dryer were open. I was on the top floor and the headquarters guys were the rooms by me. I'd go back to get my laundry out and they're all open. I shut the doors every time and then they would be open when I came back. But I can clearly hear when the other guys on the floor would open or close the doors. So I'm like, who the hell is doing this?

So one night I was in there, I had just shut all the dryer doors and out of the corner of my eye was a solid white figure but once I looked it was gone. Whatever. So later on I go back to get my laundry and as I'm kneeling in front of the machine to pull my clothes out into a basket I feel someone run their hand across my head. I have a shaved head and there is a distinct difference between a hand

and wind on my head. Later, I'm lying in bed that night and suddenly the guy in the room across from me is banging on my door and yelling for me to open the door. I let him in and asked what the hell was going on. He said that he had a dream and that this lady in all white was grabbing him, yelling for him to come with her

and when he shoved her away the metal circular vent cover that was attached to his ceiling crashes down onto the floor and he wakes up for anyone who never lived in the oaky barracks you have to push up and twist for these vent covers to come down so it's not like it could just fall on its own i went over with them and checked and sure enough the vent was right there on the floor and now he said his shoes were gone

Turning a camera light on under his bed, we see that the shoes are now pushed into the corner of the room under his bed. And this is a guy who kept his shoes aligned like he was still a recruit. He's one of those guys. So this wasn't normal. I start asking him if he'd been experiencing weird things and he said yes. The next day we asked a few others in the barracks and they also said yes. When everyone came back, whatever this was, it went away.

i take it that the ghost didn't have enough energy to haunt some 300 marines but when it was just a few of us we were prime targets this next one is from a marine who likewise shared his account with the tales from the grid square project as with the little girl on the ramp story if only one guy saw it you know but when a lot of guys over the course of several decades report seeing the same thing makes you think

Not sure if it's the same building, since most units are split up into sections, S1, S2, S3, Headquarters, Battalion, all that, and they might each be assigned to several different barracks, but this next one reminded me of a story my buddy Trip, who I met in Okinawa, shared from living in the Marine Barracks on the base in 29 Palms. And I gather that there's guys from 29 Palms who ship out to Oki and back, and...

With Trip, I mean, these two stories are so similar, his and this one, that it implies that there is some truth about spiritual entities attaching themselves to people and being transported from one place to another. And this thing seems to be moving back and forth between those two bases. Because he, the Marine in Okinawa now, writes...

I couldn't tell you exactly when it happened, just that it was on Camp Schwab at the 4th Marines barracks, probably in April, around 0200-0300 in the morning. Nothing before this would have ever led me to believe my barracks were haunted. Schwab had a handful of cats and dogs running loose, and one morning on my way in, a dog caught me off guard by barking and jumpscared the hell out of me coming over a hill. That was the extent of scary things I figured would ever happen.

I don't particularly remember what woke me up. I remember coming to and being 100% awake, no eye rubbing or yawning, just bam, awake and unable to move anything other than my head. I turned right and I could feel this presence watching me. My bed was positioned on the back wall, so it was the first thing you'd see if you entered the room. I could see the faint outlines of a shadow about the size of a person,

This thing felt evil. It felt like it was after me, and God only knew what it would do if it ever got to me. I started to pray. I'm not even religious, but I've read into a few different religions out of curiosity. I prayed to every deity that came to mind for help. Once I realized I could actually start moving my body, I finally was able to build up the courage to sit up in bed, get dressed, and pray.

go past it out of the room. My praying seemed to have held it in place while I quickly walked past it. I made it out past the duty desk and he asked me why I was awake. I proceeded to tell him thinking he would never believe me but he does.

Oddly enough, one of my buddies came up and recounted he felt tired earlier in the night, but something within himself told him he needed to stay awake a while longer. Like he had this weird intuition and that's why he came out to the duty desk as well. We all ended up going back to my room and this entity was gone by the time he returned.

I had later heard rumors of people on base throughout its long history practicing black magic, but who knows if that's true or not. I never heard from anyone else during my time on the rock if they experienced anything similar. I recently read a post about someone else at LAR having something similar happen to them. Gives me the creeps to think about it all, but at least I know I'm not 100% crazy. Huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know what you mean.

One more story from the barracks on Schwab. He writes...

I was with 3rd LAR at Camp Schwab Okinawa. Before I tell this story, I do want to mention that sometimes I have sleep paralysis. It's not always a constant thing in my life, but it comes and goes. It's maybe 6 or 7 am on a Saturday and I'm asleep in my barracks room. My bed is alongside a wall and you can see the wall lockers from it as well as the little entrance into the room where the sink would be. It has some dim yellowish green light and it's not very bright.

Anyways, I wake up at like 0600, 0700, and of course, I am now caught in an episode of sleep paralysis, and I felt something staring at me. So I look towards the entrance of the room, and I see some weird black smoke or mist, almost transparent. Right away, my entire body starts to shake and tremble, and the first thing that comes to my mind is that a demon is trying to possess me.

I'm a guy of Christian faith, so I start praying and it suddenly stops. I open my eyes and it's still there, but this time it's closer. I just lay there for several minutes with my eyes shut and I can now smell the scent of something like rotting. So I keep praying and finally it feels like it stops for good. But the moment I open my eyes is when my roommate starts talking to me.

And I look and this thing is gone, but my roommate is now staring at me and he goes, "Bro, you were sleep talking. I didn't know you spoke Spanish." "I don't speak Spanish." And I now believe he actually heard me speaking Latin. But I don't know Latin either, nor have I ever heard it spoken. And I also read somewhere that the scent of something rotting can indicate a demonic apparition. So, yeah.

Scary stuff. You don't have to look very hard to find evidence that Okinawa is a very interesting place. Reading up on other opinions about the causes for the island's paranormal track record, many people do seem to agree about the tragic history being the root cause. Around 50,000 American casualties, 100,000 Japanese, and nearly 150,000 civilians were killed during the 11-week period known as the Battle of Okinawa.

That would amount to a staggering average of 3,896 people dying every single day, which is about one person every 22 seconds for over two and a half months. And we know that's not how it happened in reality, right? The averages. Quite possibly, there were single days where the lives of tens of thousands of men, women, and children came to an abrupt and tragic end.

And even more sadly, many among the civilian casualties, especially women and children, died unnecessarily.

Traditionally speaking, Okinawans are not Japanese. The annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom by Japan happened in the 1870s. The assimilation of the Ryukyu Kingdom and the prefecture of Okinawa into Japanese imperial culture then took place, one example now being that relatively few people still speak Okinawan, the nation's original dialect, and it has recently been classified as a severely endangered language.

True, the replacement by Japanese culture was somewhat gradual during the first few decades of Japanese rule, but in an increasing effort to foster Okinawan loyalty, Japanese military culture was being more forcefully imposed on the Okinawans in the lead-up to World War II. The concept of "gyokusai" or "shattering like a jewel" was prevalent in Japanese military culture. This ideology emphasized dying honorably,

rather than facing the shame of capture. Okinawans were ultimately subjected to imperial subject education, which taught that dying for the emperor was honorable and that falling into enemy hands should be avoided at all costs. During the American invasion of the island, among all the other atrocities that war produces, the American soldiers were shocked to see Okinawan parents throwing both themselves and their children off of cliffs.

It wasn't until later when they found out why, which was that the Japanese military had either coerced the Okinawans or forced them to do it, telling them that if they allowed themselves to be captured, the American barbarians were going to brutally torture and murder their families anyway. Many civilians were given hand grenades, one to use on the Americans and the other one to use on themselves and their children.

A practice often carried out by Japanese soldiers in the face of surrendering to their enemy. Just awful battle and a staggering amount of terror and death, all taking place on a relatively small little island. And now, although the guns and screams have been silent for nearly 80 years, the evidence of that battle's brutality seems to persist in the form of spectral sightings.

Many of these sightings being reported by present-day American Marines, airmen, sailors, and their families. The island is rife with witness accounts, and these are only a few, and only those from a single base, Camp Schwab. The little girl on the ramp is the most prevalent story from the base. Considering the fact that many young women and children died during the battle to take the island during World War II,

While there are no sheer cliffs on the beaches nearby, I do have to wonder if that little Japanese girl and even the Japanese woman some Marines have reported seeing, the two of them staring so intently at what they might even know are American men and the little girl running away from them, I have to wonder if these ghosts are not a haunting testament to the atrocities that took place on where Marine Corps Base Camp Schwab is.

now sits. Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Whit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain. Production supervision by Jeremy Bone. Production coordination by Avery Siegel. Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden. Artwork by Jessica Clarkson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picotta. If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com. Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.