At Immigration Station at Angel Island, some Asian-Americans are learning their family’s painful history for the first time

The wooden house on the hill is haunted, and those who once endured its wrath are now the ones holding the doors wide open.

Come inside, and you can almost hear the echoes of the suffering and smell the stench that immigration officers once blamed on the prisoners trapped inside, as a picture of what happened here less than a century ago starts to become clear.

This is the Angel Island Immigration Station, where more than half a million people took their first steps on American soil between 1910 and 1940.