14 Men Try in Vain to Catch 'Ghost' on Rented Jap Farm

When Tack Sakaguchi rented his farm to the Colacurcio brothers, Frank, Sam and Bill, he mentioned casually that the place was equipped with a private chost. Harmless though, said, Sakaguchi, and interesting to watch.

It's the last time the Colacurcio boys will take the word of anyone else about a "ghost." For three months they've been trying to trap the wraith, enlisting all the stouthearted help they could muster, and casualties have not been light.

The 28-acre, spirit infested farm lies near Bellevue, and somewhere in a Japanese relocation center Sakaguchi is probably wondering how his tenants are doing.

They are not doing so well, according to Frank Colacurcio, eldest of the brothers, who works on Produce Row.

"We've done everything we can think of to corner that thing," Frank said gloomily. "It keeps slipping away from us. We've taken as many as 14 men out there and blanketed that farm. Still no soap."

Most of the staff at Boitano's Produce, Inc., 1122 Western Ave.--a courageous lot--have at one time or another participated in the apparition-cornering, and it's getting so they expect to find a banshee under every bunch of carrots.

"This ghost," said Frank, "is kind of a milky shadow. Generally it is wailing and hollering. When we go after it, it either disappears or runs. Maybe it's a real ghost, and maybe it's just some screwball around there."

The specter is also vocally versatile. Sometimes it taunts its pursuers with a yowl, sometimes with a catlike screech, sometimes with a downright ghost sound which is unidentifiable. The effect is invariably chilling, according to Frank.

Once while loping hard after a retreating "milky shadow," Frank Colacurcio was struck by a thrown rock.

Another Boitano employee who "got too close" was Michael Rosella. Sprinting in pursuit of the shade, he declares, he was suddently knocked on the head and flung bodily across a fence into some brush.

Women's Screeches Fail

As it became apparent to the witch-plagued brothers that they were getting nowhere, it was decided to pit the intruder against feminine wiles. Edna Bramwell and Marion Miller, also of Boitano's were induced to visit the farm and "turn on the heat."

"We got within 50 feet of it," related Miss Miller: "It appeared to be sort of a light prancing through the cornfield, but it may have been a man dressed up in a sheet. It began to yell like a cat howling, and we screeched right back at it."

Apparently insulated against such lures, the ghost made its escape, but the girls say they distinctly heard the tramp of booted feet in the cornfield.

Sam Colacurcio, one of the younger brothers who spends most of his time at the farm, explained that they always went in two- or three-man squads to turn off the sprinklers.

"I don't like to hang around there along," he said. "That thing kind of floats, and it's too big for a man."

The farm produced cauliflower, tomatoes, broccoli and carrots, but thus far none of the produce has been damaged, unless by the swarms of ghost-hunters.

The nocturnal prowling, according to Sakaguchi, had been going on for some eight years prior to the rental three months ago.

The Colacurcio brothers, however, aren't quitting.

"No ghost can scare us," they stoutly aver, "and if it's a guy, we'll get him.