Robbie’s family and his family friends used to go to Tavarua every year during Thanksgiving for a week. This island of Tavarua is a small island in Fiji that only takes about 10 minutes to walk all the way around. It is known for being very haunted. The main haunting is known as a “Hold Down.”
Robbie said that he and a big group of family and friends, about 40 people, were all out one night having dinner. The weather was super windy. By the time it was 10:30-11:00, everyone went back to their burrow to sleep. Robbie falls asleep not too long after. At exactly 2 am, Robbie randomly wakes up, without knowing what exactly woke him up. He said he can’t explain what did it, but it felt like he took shots of caffeine. He had a bunch of adrenaline: he was breathing heavily and his heart was pounding. He tried to calm himself down by walking around, and eventually lies in bed, attempting to close his eyes and fall back to sleep. At 2:10, he hears his sister scream at top of her lungs. Everyone in the family wakes up to see what has happened. Robbie’s sister is crying and sobbing, in a state of complete panic. She was saying that she was held down and paralyzed, stuck in a sleep position, all she could see were white images flashing through her eyes of her past memories. The family did not know what to make of this besides being a night terror of some sort. Eventually, they all go back to sleep.
When they woke up, they started asking around Tavarua island about the experience Roxy had at 2:10. People on the island said that it happens all the time, they even have a name for it: “hold down.” Robbie’s dad asks a maid about it. The maid said a Hold Down happened to her daughter at 1:50 in the morning that same night, so only twenty minutes a part.
The story behind the Hold Down, is that the island used to be a carnivorous island. Every animal and person who lived on the island would eat meat, and sometimes would cannibalize. It is said that many spirits of people who were cannibalized or improperly buried haunt the island. One woman in particular is associated with the Hold Down. She has been doing it to guests and people living on the island for years.