Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal
I first learned about this phenomena while researching a haunting in a Kona, Hawaii firehouse. One of the clients informed me of the legend...mentioning that many of his relatives claimed to have witnessed the procession on the nearby beaches. He believed that the firehouse was haunted by a restless phantom warrior from the 18th century. The structure was fairly old and needed a lot of renovation. In fact, some parts of the structure were in total disrepair from what I gathered from witnesses. Despite the effort, the strange activity never really ended...not until the firehouse was eventually razed for a new building. So far, there hasn't been any reported activity that I am aware of.
Anyway...or the last century or so published and unpublished accounts have surfaced of people encountering the marching apparitions of chiefs, chiefesses, dead relatives, gods, goddesses, along with their entourages on roads they had once ceremonially traveled to attend to ritual ceremonies. Hawaiians call the phantom parade huaka‘i po.
The legend evolved from a cultural matrix that encompassed information passed on orally or from writings about non-phantom Hawaiian daytime and nighttime processions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries following Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778. Foreigners continued writing about the traditional and the transitional culture into the 19th century. In the marches were living human beings, some of whom were led by a man or woman of such high rank as to be considered divine, and by men carrying images of gods of both sexes. Hawaiians believed that marchers might include gods, goddesses, family guardian gods, and spirits of dead kinfolk who assumed either material or spectral forms visible to human onlookers.
Here is a story told in 1970 by a Hawaiian fisherman of Pepe‘ekeo, Hawaii, about the time he and his companion heard the phantom night marchers and saw their torches. The limpet picker related his story as follows:
One night when I was fishing for ulua Mahu-kona side, I was sitting listening to the waves crash on the rocks. I was with Keoki. We started talking story after sliding fresh puhi [eels] down the line. It was about ten o’clock. Suddenly I heard the sound of a conch shell blowing in the distance. Keoki heard it too. I thought it was the wind. Then a little while later we heard it again. This time it was a little louder. It was spooky because we didn’t see anything, Then we heard it again. We looked toward Ka-wai-hae side and then we saw it. It looked like a procession.At first we saw a line of torches in the distance. The procession was moving along the coastline. The conch shell blew again.
I took out my knife and Keoki got the rifle. We went seaward and laid down on the lava rock. We knew about night marchers from other fishermen. We knew you aren’t supposed to look upon the marchers and to lay on the ground face down. We did this. The marchers passed about fifty yards in front of us on the sand path. As they passed we could hear the sound of a drum pounding beat by beat. We didn’t look up until they were farther down the coast. All we could see now was the line of torches, and all we could hear was the far away sound of the conch shell.
We didn’t know if they were going to come back that night, but we didn’t want to stick around and see. We got our sleeping bags and made it to the car and went to Spencer Park to spend the rest of the night. In the morning we went back and picked up our rigs and equipment we left behind. -ojs.lib.byu.edu
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I first learned about this phenomena while researching a haunting in a Kona, Hawaii firehouse. One of the clients informed me of the legend...mentioning that many of his relatives claimed to have witnessed the procession on the nearby beaches. He believed that the firehouse was haunted by a restless phantom warrior from the 18th century. The structure was fairly old and needed a lot of renovation. In fact, some parts of the structure were in total disrepair from what I gathered from witnesses. Despite the effort, the strange activity never really ended...not until the firehouse was eventually razed for a new building. So far, there hasn't been any reported activity that I am aware of.
Anyway...or the last century or so published and unpublished accounts have surfaced of people encountering the marching apparitions of chiefs, chiefesses, dead relatives, gods, goddesses, along with their entourages on roads they had once ceremonially traveled to attend to ritual ceremonies. Hawaiians call the phantom parade huaka‘i po.
The legend evolved from a cultural matrix that encompassed information passed on orally or from writings about non-phantom Hawaiian daytime and nighttime processions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries following Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778. Foreigners continued writing about the traditional and the transitional culture into the 19th century. In the marches were living human beings, some of whom were led by a man or woman of such high rank as to be considered divine, and by men carrying images of gods of both sexes. Hawaiians believed that marchers might include gods, goddesses, family guardian gods, and spirits of dead kinfolk who assumed either material or spectral forms visible to human onlookers.
Here is a story told in 1970 by a Hawaiian fisherman of Pepe‘ekeo, Hawaii, about the time he and his companion heard the phantom night marchers and saw their torches. The limpet picker related his story as follows:
One night when I was fishing for ulua Mahu-kona side, I was sitting listening to the waves crash on the rocks. I was with Keoki. We started talking story after sliding fresh puhi [eels] down the line. It was about ten o’clock. Suddenly I heard the sound of a conch shell blowing in the distance. Keoki heard it too. I thought it was the wind. Then a little while later we heard it again. This time it was a little louder. It was spooky because we didn’t see anything, Then we heard it again. We looked toward Ka-wai-hae side and then we saw it. It looked like a procession.At first we saw a line of torches in the distance. The procession was moving along the coastline. The conch shell blew again.
I took out my knife and Keoki got the rifle. We went seaward and laid down on the lava rock. We knew about night marchers from other fishermen. We knew you aren’t supposed to look upon the marchers and to lay on the ground face down. We did this. The marchers passed about fifty yards in front of us on the sand path. As they passed we could hear the sound of a drum pounding beat by beat. We didn’t look up until they were farther down the coast. All we could see now was the line of torches, and all we could hear was the far away sound of the conch shell.
We didn’t know if they were going to come back that night, but we didn’t want to stick around and see. We got our sleeping bags and made it to the car and went to Spencer Park to spend the rest of the night. In the morning we went back and picked up our rigs and equipment we left behind. -ojs.lib.byu.edu
MORE AT SITE
