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Apparitions · Phantom armies and battles

Huakaʻi pō – the Night Marchers of Hawaiʻi

When
since c. 1940 traditional date – cannot be verified
Where
Oʻahu, Hawaii, United States
Verdict
Legend

On certain nights the ghosts of ancient warriors march with torches to sacred places. Anyone in their path must lie face down on the ground.

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21.44°, -158.00° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

In Hawaiian tradition the huakaʻi pō, the “night marchers,” are the spirits of ancient warriors who form the vanguard of a procession escorting a sacred chief or chiefess. They emerge from burial places or rise from the ocean and travel along old trails to battlefields and sacred sites – most often on the nights dedicated to the gods Kāne, Kū, Lono or Kanaloa, from sunset to dawn. Their approach is heralded by drums, chanting, the blast of conch shells, the sound of marching feet, a smell of death and torches that grow brighter as the procession draws near. Anyone who stands in their way and looks the warriors in the eye may die. The way to survive is to lie motionless face down, or to have an ancestor among the marchers who calls out “Naʻu!” – “mine!” – and takes the person under protection. Ti plants grown around a house are said to ward off evil spirits and make the procession pass the property by. Stories of encounters with the huakaʻi pō are told on every island and remain very much alive, especially on Oʻahu.

Witnesses

Hawaiian oral tradition; in modern times accounts collected by Rick Carroll (Hawaiʻi’s Best Spooky Tales, 1996) and Lopaka Kapanui (Haunted Hawaiian Nights, 2005), among others.

Explanations and hypotheses

This is part of a living Hawaiian religious and family tradition, which folklorists describe respectfully as part of beliefs about the sacredness of chiefs (kapu) and ancestral spirits. Folklorist Martha Warren Beckwith discussed beliefs about processions of the dead in her classic Hawaiian Mythology (1940). The year attached to this story is the date of that scholarly description, not the beginning of a tradition that is much older. Modern accounts of encounters are personal and cannot be verified; many come from popular collections of ghost stories. For many Hawaiians this is not a “scary story” but a matter of respect for ancestors and sacred places.

Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.

Sources

  1. Martha Warren Beckwith, Hawaiian Mythology (Yale University Press, 1940)
  2. Rick Carroll (red.), Hawaiʻi’s Best Spooky Tales (Bess Press, 1996)
  3. Lopaka Kapanui, Haunted Hawaiian Nights (Mutual Publishing, 2005)

More: Wikipedia (en)