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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesNight Marchers are Hawaiian spirit processions in which departed chiefs, warriors and ancestral or sacred companies follow remembered paths.
Also recorded as Huakaʻi pō, ʻOiʻo
The man on the Mahiki road sees a company approaching and steps behind a tree. He recognizes Kamehameha among the ranks. Thousands move together, yet he hears nothing. The silent march passes into the woods toward Waipiʻo, leaving him trembling in his hiding place. [1]
Read the manuscriptHuakaʻi pō is a night procession, also known as ʻoiʻo. The English name Night Marchers can suggest a single army, but Hawaiian accounts identify different companies: chiefs and their attendants, departed relatives, or sacred presences. Katharine Luomala’s study follows reports across Hawaiʻi, Oʻahu, Maui, Molokaʻi and Kauaʻi. Each company follows a particular route and carries its own relationships. [3]
J. S. Emerson’s account begins with an unnamed man who had lived in Waimea on Hawaiʻi Island. He is walking up the Mahiki road one evening when the ʻoiʻo appears in the distance. Believing that an encounter would mean his death, he hides behind a tree. From there he identifies Kamehameha, the conquering king, with chiefs and warriors assembled in military order. They move in perfect step without a sound, pass through the woods down toward Waipiʻo and disappear from sight. [1]
Emerson places the encounter beside a belief that this procession travels annually to an entrance of the Lua o Milu, the realm of the departed. The company has a destination beyond the frightened man’s field of vision; the account leaves him beside the road as it continues toward the valley. [1]
Lopaka Kapanui’s 2025 family account follows his pregnant mother, Angeline, resting on Kalapana’s black sand after a party. Hawaiian voices and chanting announce men and women carrying torches, six abreast. Thinking they might be family, she calls to them. Her brother Joe pulls her down and covers her mouth. Only after the last torch passes does he explain: this was the sacred march of the goddess Hiʻiakaikapoliopele, and interruption endangered her and her unborn child. Years later, Angeline tells Kapanui that he was that child. [5]
The Hoʻokahua Hawaiian Cultural Vibrancy Group places night processions along paths familiar to departed aliʻi, chiefs, and warriors during their lives. Its essay associates them especially with pō Kāne, the twenty-seventh night of the lunar month, while naming nights sacred to other gods as well. The route is a remembered use of the land; the returning company has an association with it before anyone living sees the march. [4]
The printed trail of the Waimea encounter begins earlier than Thrum’s 1907 Hawaiian Folk Tales. Luomala traces Emerson’s account to an 1883 printing and to the Reverend L. Lyons, who had told him about it. The later reprint places the reported sighting roughly thirty or more years earlier, without supplying an exact year. Repeated publication preserves one transmitted account, not a series of new encounters. [1][3]
David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities, in Nathaniel B. Emerson’s 1903 translation, supplies a different kind of record. Chapter XXXI discusses spiritual specialists and visionary experiences. Within that discussion, Malo distinguishes ʻoiʻo, a multitude or procession of spirits, from a single spirit. The translator adds a note saying that living people claimed to have seen processions of the dead on the road between Waimea and Hāmākua. The note gives a place but no named observer or developed scene. [2]
Malo and his translator also disagree within these pages. The chapter condemns a practitioner who frightens a person by claiming to have seen their wandering spirit in danger, then charges for a ceremony of reconciliation. Nathaniel Emerson questions whether the account’s language of everlasting death reflects Malo’s Christianity. This is a dispute about how religious ideas have been represented, embedded beside the descriptions themselves. The translation carries both voices, and neither can be mistaken for an unqualified statement by the other. [2]
Luomala’s collected accounts include companies heard without being clearly seen. Torches, footfalls, voices and music can be reported separately. Her examples also differ over what children perceive: one girl hears a procession but cannot see it, while another remembers hearing it distinctly and seeing the marchers only dimly. In South Kona, two boys hear drums and see torches before their mother does. [3]
In Malo’s chapter, an apparition need not be the spirit of someone already dead. He discusses visions of living people as well, and describes specialists said to perceive spirits that others cannot see. A wandering soul may be understood as endangered while its owner remains alive. The procession belongs within this wider vocabulary of spiritual presence, but its collective movement distinguishes it from the isolated wraith whose appearance provokes a warning. [2]
Nathaniel Emerson’s explanatory note imagines a journey with a point at which reconciliation remains possible. An ʻaumakua, a family or personal deity, can guide a wandering soul back to its body; beyond the final brink lies Milu’s realm. The note is concerned with departure and return, not with an army’s capacity to attack. Its separate treatment of the ʻoiʻo records the company travelling on an earthly road. The landscape holds both a soul’s perilous passage and the paths followed by a multitude. [2]
J. S. Emerson’s Location of the Lua o Milu names an entrance at Keoni, by the mouth of Waipiʻo Valley, where sand has concealed the passage. He associates the annual ʻoiʻo with that destination. Yet the story printed immediately before it, Hiku and Kawelu, places an entrance out at sea opposite Holualoa. Emerson states the difference instead of forcing the two places into one geography. [1]
His appended discussion adds other collected descriptions. One imagines streams and broad kou trees in the country of the dead; another distinguishes welcome and comfort from an unhappy descent below. Nathaniel Emerson’s note to Malo instead describes a barren, waterless twilight inhabited by hungry spirits. The disagreeing details belong to different explanations of the departed’s condition. They also change the meaning of the journey: arrival can suggest reunion, exclusion or continuing need. [1][2]
W. D. Alexander’s 1891 history names another company in the Maui valley he calls Honokahau. Its leader is the headless Kanihonui, whom Alexander describes as a chief executed by Kamehameha for adultery. This brief notice says that an ʻoiʻo in the valley left several men dead along its track. It supplies no names for those men or a date for the encounter. Unlike the Mahiki traveller’s remembered passage, this is a terse report of a lethal aftermath. Alexander places the two companies beside each other, preserving distinct leaders and outcomes. [6]
Hiku and Kawelu gives the printed procession account an immediate background in love and return from death. It is a separate story. Hiku, a young demigod raised on Hualālai by his mother Hina, descends to the coast and meets Kawelu. She falls in love and detains him, eventually shutting him inside her house. Remembering his mother’s warning not to stay too long, he escapes through the thatch. Kawelu refuses food in her grief and dies. Brought back by messengers, Hiku resolves to recover her spirit. [1]
Her companions help him gather long vines and prepare a rope. He takes a coconut shell split into matching halves and coats himself with rancid oils so that he will smell dead. From canoes above the entrance, his helpers lower him on a swing into Milu’s cavern. The gathered shades complain about his extraordinary smell, but the disguise succeeds. Kawelu recognizes him and joins him on the swing with Milu’s permission. [1]
Hiku signals the people above, who begin hauling them up. Kawelu notices the distance opening beneath her and tries to escape. He closes the shell around her spirit and carries it back to her body at Holualoa. The return is difficult: her spirit resists, and he forces it into the body through an opening in her foot. As he rubs upward, circulation and breathing resume. Kawelu wakes without remembering the underworld and returns to the hurt that preceded her death, asking why he left her. [1]
That final question unsettles an easy reading of the rescue. Hiku has crossed into the realm of the dead, yet Kawelu’s remembered pain remains the separation at home. Beside this intimate return, the ranks on the Mahiki road move together toward Milu. The same printed chapter lets the departed have a collective destination without making a loved individual disappear into the crowd. [1]
Kapanui names his mother and aunt as his teachers and explicitly limits his authority to their family’s traditions. He challenges internet depictions of pursuing killers, grass-skirted warriors and destructive beams from their eyes. His Kalapana account instead gives danger a sacred identity and a brother’s intervention. [5]
Hoʻokahua’s account emphasizes continuing relations with ʻohana who have died. Knowing one’s family and genealogy is part of maintaining those connections. The essay also allows a spiritual sign to be quiet, such as light rain after prayer. Encounter need not mean spectacle; a family’s recognition can give an otherwise ordinary moment significance. [4]
Emerson introduces the Waimea observer as a man known for truthfulness. That appeal to reputation tells us how the report was presented, while the observer himself remains unnamed. The printed account establishes what was related; it supplies no independent witness to the scene. Its most precise ending is also its limit: the company goes into the woods and is lost to his view. The surviving report cannot travel farther than the man who watched it. [1]
J. S. Emerson supplies the Mahiki encounter and its Hiku–Kawelu setting. Malo’s translated chapter and notes distinguish spiritual presences; Alexander records the Maui company. Luomala examines transmission and variation; Hoʻokahua and Kapanui provide contemporary Hawaiian cultural and family accounts. [1][2][3][4][5][6]
J. S. Emerson · Thomas G. Thrum / A. C. McClurg / Project Gutenberg · 1907
Hawaiian Folk Tales V, pp. 43–50; Oio pp. 48–49
The earlier 1883 printing and Lyons’s role are known here through Luomala; the narrative followed is Emerson’s 1907 reprint.
Checked 2026-10-11
David Malo · Hawaiian Gazette / University of Toronto scan / Internet Archive · 1903 · Translated by Nathaniel B. Emerson
Chapter XXXI, body §§1–20 pp. 150–153; notes pp. 153–154
Checked 2026-10-11
Katharine Luomala · Pacific Studies / Brigham Young University–Hawaiʻi · 1983
Pacific Studies 7(1), pp. 1–33; adopted pp. 1–2, 8, 28–29 and note 2
Checked 2026-10-11
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑Hoʻokahua Hawaiian Cultural Vibrancy Group · Kaʻiwakīloumoku / Kamehameha Schools · 2014-10
Complete web essay
Checked 2026-10-11
Lopaka Kapanui · Office of Hawaiian Affairs / Ka Wai Ola · 2025-10-01
Public essay; Filtering Out Misunderstandings and family-account sections
Checked 2026-10-11
W. D. Alexander · American Book Company; Hawaiʻi DLNR Aha Moku digital copy · 1891 · English
Funeral Rites; Doctrines of a Future State, pp. 77–79, especially Ghosts on pp. 78–79
Checked 2026-10-13