I always knew the Coco Palms resort was haunted. Everyone did.
Staring at its peeling paint and crumbling facade, it’s hard not to imagine the spirits that weave in between its derelict corridors; what whispers of the past lurk behind its decaying foundation and shuttered windows, or linger along the edge of its murky lagoon.
Its crumbling, concrete pillars jut from the Earth – towering tombstones symbolically marking the resting place of over eighty Native bodies interred beneath the derelict hotel’s aging foundation. Long before this land ever held the famed resort of old Hollywood glitz and glamour, it held the remains of indigenous Hawaiians. Decayed, foreboding, and shrouded in an illusive and dark history, the former Coco Palms hotel is a graveyard in more ways than one.
Growing up on the tiny Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, I encountered many mystic tales of the famous ruins. The prevailing rumour that spurred from childhood imaginations was that Elvis Presley’s ghost eternally roamed the property’s towering coconut groves. The legend goes that his soul was trapped in the hotel he helped launch to international fame with his infamous films set in a tropical Hawaiian paradise. His spirit was supposedly doomed to wander its ruins after the Coco Palms was destroyed in a massive hurricane in 1992.
(This, of course, is far-fetched to say the least, considering that Elvis died in Tennessee in 1977.)
Today – as it has been for the last 30 years – the former Coco Palms resort is an empty shell, ever visible in the daily lives of Kaua’i’s residents, though collectively overlooked. Positioned just off of the island’s sole two-lane highway, the crumbling, empty facade is a constant reminder of Kaua’i’s storied past. Since the hotel was destroyed in the hurricane that leveled most of the rural island, it has sat quietly in idle ruins. That is until March of 2024, when Kimpton, a Las Vegas-based development company, began demolishing the structure to make way for its massive new hotel development plan.
Kimpton wants to recreate the Coco Palms hotel as it was in its Hollywood heyday – when stars like Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra gallivanted across the resort erected on sacred Hawaiian land. Back when the hotel made a name for itself by commodifying Native Hawaiian culture and selling a contrived image of ‘paradise’ to an eager tourist market.
This development project symbolises more than just another hotel build in an over-saturated tourism market. On an island losing critical parts of its coastline due to rising seas, this hotel development threatens the sustainability and health of the overall ecosystem. Likewise, it demonstrates how leaders continue to perpetuate a false narrative of perpetual growth of a tourist economy that exploits land and communities for the profit of a foreign elite.
The Coco Palms is haunted, surely. But not by famous Hollywood actors or even by the actual spirits buried underneath the hotel’s cracked foundation. No, these ghosts are much more insidious. They permeate time and space, lurking in the deepest corners of our minds. They creep and crawl through generations, clutch hold of our psyche, shape our worldview and possess us into complacency.
The Coco Palms resort is haunted by a colonial, extractive mindset that has continued to exploit and profit off of Hawai’i since its very first colonial encounter. The senseless modern rebuilding project not only summons the ghosts of revellers past, but also reproduces the same power struggles that have existed in Hawai’i for centuries, further exploiting a culture and island already stricken by the forces of extractivism and climate change.
Early History: Wailua Pre-Colonisation
The story of this land began long before the 1992 hurricane, the original construction of the Coco Palms in the 1950’s, or even in 1778 when Europeans first made contact with the islands. The history of Wailuanuiaho'ano (the proper name for the land parcel) spans over a thousand years, back to the original caretakers of the island.
The region of Wailua is the land of two waters: where the islands' only navigable river mouth meets the sea. It's a place of energy, of birth, renewal, and historically, royalty. Wailua was the
birthplace of Kaua’i’s ali’i- Hawaiian royals who ruled the island long before the wayward sails of European ships ever touched the island’s white-sand shores.
Pre-colonisation, the island of Kaua’i was divided into several land districts with royal families at the helm. They ruled over the islands and practiced stewardship over the land, constructing advanced fishponds and living lives intertwined with the natural world around them. They recited mo’olelo, or theology, based on respect and care for the living world, and lived communally without the concept of ownership or private property.
Wailuanuiaho'ano is considered one of the most spiritually significant areas on the entire island as the birthplace of the royal elite and the beating heart of Kaua’i. Those born on the sacred birthing stone of Holoholoku were considered the most powerful and sacred of rulers. The site is enriched with mana – ancient spiritual power derived through blood and bone – which was transferred to children upon birth and determined social status in traditional Hawaiian society. Kaua’i’s last monarchs, King Kaumuali’i and Queen Deborah Kapule, were born on this very stone and lived in Wailuanuiaho’ano for their entire lives, until their kidnapping and death, respectively.
Following the arrival of Western powers, Hawaiian society was systematically repressed, criminalised, and stigmatised. During the onset of colonisation, heiaus (sacred places of worship) were destroyed. Hawaiian language was banned, and the white American elite forced a policy of assimilation. The destruction of Hawaiian sacred places, such as the heiaus and fishponds in Wailuanuiaho’ano, was the colonists' attempt to rid the island of its cultural heritage and traditions. American businessmen introduced the concept of private property and relegated Native Hawaiians to small, less-fertile parcels of land while they profited off of massive agricultural ventures in sugar and pineapple production. Drunk off the riches and power of the prolific sugar and pineapple industries, the Americans orchestrated a coup and overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. Hawai’i was later granted statehood in 1959.
Hawai’i in Hollywood: The Era of Coco Palms
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, agriculture dominated economic life in the islands. Back in the days when sugar fields grew tall and thick, Hawai’i was not the massive tourist destination it is today. Moreso, the tiny island of Kaua’i was no more than an agricultural spec in the midst of the vast Pacific ocean. As travel to the island chain became more accessible however, investors jumped at the opportunity to develop the Hawaiian tourism sector, and by 1950 a couple of hotels had popped up around the islands.
Despite their history as remarkably sacred areas and designated crown lands, the parcels of Wailuanuiaho’ano were usurped by the Western ruling powers and eventually sold to private landowners. The parcels passed between hands until they were sold to Lyle Guslander, a private business owner from the mainland, who envisioned erecting a hotel on the property.
During the original Coco Palms hotel construction, developers unearthed the remains of over eighty people on the property. The hotel parcel was actually an ancient Native Hawaiian burial site. Anthropologists concluded that these individuals, many over seven-feet tall, were of royal blood, or high-ranking members of the royal courts, judging by conditions of their burial. Valentine Ako, a Hawaiian construction worker who worked on the excavation of Coco Palms recalled his experience of these remains in a 2004 interview: "I exhumed 81 skeletons all buried sitting down and facing east with their arms crossed over their chests…Mrs. Guslander [the hotel manager] told me, ‘Take care of it.’ I told Mrs. Guslander that if they ever touched that grave, Coco Palms was not going to last."
Eager to move forward with the construction, the developers re-interred the remains on the property and covered them with a concrete slab. The construction development proceeded as planned. Some construction workers who were more prone to superstition quit the project, claiming the site was haunted.
The Coco Palms Resort officially opened in 1953 under the management of Grace Bucher-Guslander, a white woman from New Jersey. Under the Guslanders’ supervision, the Coco Palms flourished and helped usher in a new era for the Hawaiian tourist economy. The hotel made a name for itself with grandiose spectacles of Hawaiian aesthetics, including a culturally-inaccurate Hawaiian fire show to welcome guests to dinner and an exotic zoo on the property. The Guslanders’ Coco Palms played into fantasies of an island paradise and profited from these depictions.
These tropical spectacles attracted the attention of Golden Age Hollywood producers who flocked to the Coco Palms hotel for its manufactured island charm. Across Western Cinema, Hawaiian culture is feminised, fetishised, and used as decoration rather than given a voice to speak for itself. The Coco Palms was the location for several big Hollywood movies including Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii and Rita Hayworth’s Miss Sadie Thompson. In these film adaptations, Hawai’i and Hawaiians are merely backdrops for white American protagonists adrift in a tropical island fantasy. For many foreigners, these early Hollywood depictions were the first images they had of Hawai’i–they moulded the representation and imagery associated with the islands that pervade to this day.
Left: Blue Hawaii (1961) Paramount Pictures. Right: Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) Columbia Pictures.
The legacy that Coco Palms left is more than a crumbling wooden facade. Rather, Coco Palms remains etched into Kaua’i’s memory because of how it shaped the tourist imaginary. It popularized the Hollywood Hawaiiana aesthetic of tiki bars, fire-shows, and coconut-bra-wearing dancers that entranced visitors with fanciful images of a mythical island paradise. The Coco Palms’ elaborate performances and Hollywood depictions marketed a spectacle of Hawaiian culture, driven by an enormously profitable tourism industry. These images commodified Hawai’i’s culture into something that could be bought and sold and profited from. Except it was never Native Hawaiians reaping the benefits from their consumerist imagery. Rather, the mainland developers, tourism industry elites, and hotel owners profited the most. Native Hawaiians and non-native locals of primarily Asian descent, however, are still largely relegated to restaurant and hotel service jobs.
The exploitation of land and Native culture goes hand in hand under the practice of commodification. Commodification is the process in which some natural entity is transformed into a consumable, sellable product for the marketplace. This specific process of commodification and extraction was an entirely foreign concept to Hawai’i pre-European contact. Tourism in Hawai’i is an extractive industry seeped in exoticism – it
sells an idealised and sexualised imaginary of local culture that reduces its people and traditions into consumable goods. The development of both the agricultural and tourism industries in Hawai’i transformed the islands into a good ‘for sale’ in the global market. In terms of the tourism industry, the Coco Palms Resort bottled up the ‘Aloha Spirit’ into easily marketable bite-size
chunks that enticed visitors with fanciful
promises of an island paradise brimming with scantily-dressed ‘exotic’ performers.
Colonial Legacies and Spectres of Extraction
Today, Coco Palms is at the mercy of more than its troubled past. The island of Kaua’i is at a critical inflection point as it experiences overtourism, a housing crisis, and an eroding coastline due to sea level rise. As one of the wettest places on Earth, Kaua’i has experienced heavy flooding over the past several years which has destroyed houses and entire communities. Developing the island’s critical wetlands into massive hotels ignores the reality of the changing climate and how it will impact local residents.
Land rights play a seismic role in the current socio-economic dimensions of Hawai’i. Over a century of foreign rule has disenfranchised many Native Hawaiians and the rising costs of living have forced many to flee the islands altogether. Concurrently, the influx of mainland and foreign elites to the islands has resulted in a modern-day land grab. Mark Zuckerberg sued Native Hawaiians off their ancestral lands to make way for his 800-acre fortress on Kaua’i. Larry Ellison, CEO and founder of Oracle, owns 98% of the island of Lana’i. The University of California and Canadian Government are still attempting to build a Thirty-Metre-Telescope on the top of Mauna Kea, the most spiritually significant place in the entire archipelago, after years of continuous indigenous-led protests. Home to countless military bases and thousands of foreign-owned resorts, Hawai’i and its people have been used for profit without being fairly compensated since the dawn of Western contact.
Contemporary forms of colonialism are sometimes harder to spot because we are so familiar with them. They blend and enmesh with global systems that shape our everyday lives. They hide in plain sight and shape our worldviews. While a hotel development project might seem harmless on the surface, its roots and history hide something more deeply sinister and exploitative.
In the case of rebuilding Coco Palms it seems that no one is asking, why are we nostalgic for this past? Why do we want to continue a legacy so entrenched in the marginalisation and commodification of a people, an island, and its culture? How do we adapt to the changing times and an uncertain future when we remain haunted by nostalgic fantasies?
With a rising cost of living and developers catering to a predominantly-white, transient, vacationing elite, the same colonial dynamics that have governed Hawai’i for the past 150 years are still alive and well. Our leaders continue to place the interests of foreign developers over the sustainability and longevity of their island community, and the decision to rebuild the Coco Palms resort on sacred Hawaiian land is no exception.
In order to save ourselves from full climate collapse, we need to shift our mindset away from that of exploitation—still more pervasive in the Western psyche than we are ready to admit. We need to reject the developers and projects who seek to use Hawaiian people and culture as entertainment and adornment for contrived fantasies, all without honouring them as competent leaders who are the rightful stewards of the land.
Colonisation is not consigned to some far-off, distant past. It’s not a ghost story we tell of a time long ago. It and its legacies are happening right now, shaping who and what is affected by the climate crisis. True climate justice requires rectifying these dynamics and choosing a future which values the needs of communities as well as the planet.
So yes, the Coco Palms resort is haunted. It's about time we put its spirits to rest.
I Ola Wailuanui is a community-led non-profit organisation envisioning an alternate future for the land parcels of Wailuanuiaho'ano. You can sign their petition against the Kimpton hotel development project here.
Emma Schneck is an environmental writer and photographer originally from Wailua, Hawai'i. She recently graduated with an MSc in Nature, Society, and Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford and is one of Anthroposphere's Head Editors. You can see more of her written and visual work here: https://emmaschneck.com/
Cover art by Karolina Uskakovych.
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