Author and historian Nanette Napoleon was getting the eerie feeling that someone wanted this story to be told.

As she made her way through the California grass and kiawe trees, searching for an old grave marker on a Keolu hillside, it was almost as if a guiding hand was at work.

That hand sent Stan Omizo her way, walking his dog by the unassuming graveyard, and ready to tell unexpected tales.

First, Omizo described the Hawaiian family that comes to the Keolu cemetery each Memorial Day to clean the two marked graves (and clear the ground for the half-dozen bodies buried here).

Then — and here's the spooky part — he let slip that his late brother was buried in another nearby cemetery. One Napoleon just so happened to have been researching.

Just yesterday, he'd been in the garage and ran across old snapshots of the family at that very grave. Should he get them for her?

Halloween, when little coincidences make your skin tingle and every whisper of wind sounds sinister, is the time to consider graveyards that sneak up on you. O'ahu holds sites that you draw near, then leave you wondering: That couldn't be a cemetery in the middle of the mall parking lot, could it? Those can't be grave markers next to a million-dollar home?

Oh, but it could. And they can.

Napoleon was out before Halloween, trekking through the Enchanted Lake hillside to find one of those very tucked-away cemeteries. She'd visited this one a quarter-century ago, before the Keolu Hills subdivision was built. Back then, Napoleon had to park at the bottom of the hill and hike a trail into a clearing. The site used to be marked by two large coconut trees with a small heiau across the way, but since her last visit, one tree has fallen. No matter — a paved road now takes you right to the spot.

Omizo pointed out crushed aluminum cans and explained how young people sometimes use the site to drink beer, and, one suspects, tell ghost stories.

LEFT BEHIND

It's not as if cemeteries like these were placed in the middle of developments, but malls, airfields and subdivisions grew up around these little chunks of land that hold the remains of their day.

They stood their ground, but progress and population didn't, and before you know it, houses are nearby, or a highway goes around one — as happened to the Aiea Plantation Cemetery, inside a twisty tangle of on-ramps.

"Oh, that one!" laughed Rex Mitsunaga, program manager for the sanitation branch of the state Department of Health, which oversees state-run cemeteries. "I've always looked at it but never really thought about it. I figure the state just condemned property but left the cemetery there out of respect."

In truth, his department mainly keeps track of where the bodies are buried: Other state departments are responsible for care and upkeep of the handful of cemeteries under public jurisdiction.

When graveyards start to fall into decay and get fewer and fewer visitors, it's likely that respect for the dead falls prey to market forces. That's what happened when a developer recently moved a cemetery to make way for a Kahuku condominium.

"Eventually, some kind of development is going in," said Mi-tsunaga. "It becomes an issue of, should you let the dead have a nice scenic location, or should you have the living have a nice scenic location?"

MALL SURPRISE

Privately maintained cemeteries are also subject to odd juxtapositions.

One of the most unexpected locations for a cemetery on O'ahu has to be inside a parking lot, an honor that falls to the St. Ann's-owned cemetery, locked in on three sides by Windward Mall.

As historian Napoleon explained it, the church used to be there but moved to the opposite side of Haiku Road, leaving the cemetery where it was.

"The property became abandoned, overgrown," she said. "If you were driving that way, it was totally jungly."

These days, it's on the 'ewa end of the mall.

"A lot of people park there all the time and don't realize there's a cemetery there," Napoleon said.