The Real Crime Scene That Was Used To Film Parts Of Lost
In many ways, Lost, the television series created by J.J. Abrams that ran from 2004 to 2010, was kind of like life: mysterious, exciting, and full of unanswered questions ... but it had to end sometime. When Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse took over as showrunners after season 1, they used the next five seasons to explore metaphysical ideations, time travel, alternate realities, and the afterlife. If that sounds a little heavy for a weekly network TV show, well, it was.
"When you tackle unanswerable questions, like, 'What is the nature of existence? What happens after you die? What is the meaning of our lives?', there are not empirical answers," Cuse told Esquire in 2014, "but we tried to show how our characters were wrestling with those questions."
And tackle those questions they did, guiding audiences through character arcs that developed on island and off, weaving together flashbacks, flash-forwards, and even flash-sideways to an ultimately polarizing, purposefully ambiguous end. But as the saying goes, truth is often stranger than fiction, and there were times when the circumstances surrounding the filming of Lost were as chilling as the plot lines themselves.
A real crime scene was used for filming Lost
According to Screen Rant, the cave scenes where viewers meet "Adam and Eve," the skeletons the Lost survivors encounter in season 1, were filmed on a soundstage in Hawaii that had a few skeletons of its own. Apparently, the set was built out of an abandoned warehouse, which had been vacant since a tragic mass shooting in 1999. The "Xerox murders," so named because they took place in the Xerox offices inside the building, remain the worst mass shooting in the state's history (via Hawai'i Public Radio).
The convicted murderer, Byran Uyesugi, is currently serving a life sentence in an Arizona prison. On November 2, 1999, he was a service technician working for Xerox, and was allegedly upset about a potential dismissal from the corporation, according to Hawaii News Now. Uyesugi used a 9 mm handgun to kill seven of his co-workers before engaging in an hours-long standoff with police.
According to a transcript from The Official Lost Podcast, Lost showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were aware of the building's history when they turned it into a set for the TV series five years later. They went so far as to conduct a ritual to bless the space before filming commenced.