The one about an army of beefy Hawaiian ghosts and what to do if you run into one.
In this episode we look at Hawaii's night marchers, spirits that shepherd souls along the island at night, and we chat about unified paranormal theory. What a fun topic to look at, we're definitely gonna cover more on future shows!
Linkies:
Loose Transcript:
Hi Everybody thanks for tuning in an welcome or welcome back to another episode of nightmare now the show where we hunt down horrors and harrowing historical happenings, hailing from the Himalayas, the Holocene and in this here helping, haunted hawaii!
My name is erik byrne and I’m the horrible host, here to bring you a heaping hoard of awesome stories from the fiftieth state in the union all alone in the pacific!
I hope everyone is doing well today when you listen to this and when you’re not listening to this, I’m having a pretty busy week but what else is new there you don’t want to hear that. Big congratulations to my good friends Dan and Asia on their wedding that was a blast, I don’t know if I brought that up last episode, and looking forward, a huge early congratulations to Maddie and Caleb on theirs this coming weekend, I’m so excited!
Kitty cat is good, needs his nails clipped but we’re hanging in there and we’re glad to have you here with us today. The idea for this episode comes from one of my friends on twitter going by Koa ah nooeh nooeh, I’m probably butchering that pronunciation, and I will continue to do so throughout the show, just by virtue of being a white guy trying to figure out how to say stuff in hawaiian. I better learn quick though because we’re booking a trip out there after the wedding, and I’m trying to be at least the second most ignorant person there, as long as I’m not the biggest a**hole I’m happy with that. So they reached out and I asked if they had anything cool they wanted me to cover, and they provided me with a couple of links on a phenomena that is both uniquely hawaiian but also has ties to high strangeness the world over. That is of course the night marchers, or as they are known in hawaiian as hoowa kai e po.
Again if I mess up all these words, at least I tried, which is more than can be said for a lot of the haunted hawaii clickbait articles I came across this week so cut me some slack. What do the night marchers do? What makes them interesting? you may be asking. Well they certainly don’t run in daylight.
The night marchers as the name suggests are spirits that march, at night. Not a very imaginative title but hey it’s a translation. Folks are always saying, look at them marching at night, nobody asking why. Or how?
More interesting by far are those latter two descriptors. Let start with what and then move on to why and how.
So you’ve just got done with a long day of surfing, ok maybe that’s a stereotype but whatever, most of my cultural knowledge of hawaii comes from Surfs up, Moana, and blue hawaii plus a bunch of pearl harbor trivia. 1959 50th state, almost 20 years after the japanese attack on pearl harbor. Oh man do we have some great WWII content coming down the pipe for you guys, I feel like when you hit thirty lawrence fishburne shows up with sunglasses two pills
Red is WWII history and Blue is just like model trains, and before you ask taking both pills and building WWII model train stations is generally not an option in polite society. Pretty sure that’s some kind of watchlist.
I don’t know what pill leads to a podcast but here we are.
Anyway, model trains aside, you’re done surfing and you hit your tent for the night to get some shuteye and off in the distance in the jungle you hear some chanting and the faint sound of drums growing ever closer. You look up to see a brilliantly illuminated full moon and turn your gaze back to the island paradise you’ve set up camp on. A dense fog has rolled in and obscured much of the far off road. In the distance you see a faint bobbing light, getting closer than another and another and maybe 20 more. They’re torches, and out of the gloom figures begin to emerge. A scent of death, decay and fresh blood lingers in the air
Floating just off the ground, they would march quite literally through the jungle and anything else for that matter, cars, houses, trees, stones, nothing physical could halt their procession.
Well there was. Hawaiian lore say that they don’t like the ti plant. Apparently that s**t is like a citronella candle to these guys, they hate it like vampires and garlic. So they will keep goin through your condo association but if your apartment has a ti plant in it they will just kind of take a sharp 90 degree turn and then go around it, probably scaring the f**k out of old tito in the apartment next door. As the ghostly entourage comes closer you see their rippling, bronzed muscles, some of the articles were pretty d**n horny. Six 4, rippling abs, traditional tattoos, I thought I stumbled into some erotica for a minute there.They carry torches, spears and other traditional weapons, and generally take no notice of the living. The chants continue past your tent and you shrink back behind the tent flap further, fearing the ethereal battalion passing by your campsite. It grows cool and your fire goes out as they approach, continuing to chant all the while.
A figure come into view, apparently escorted by the entourage. Legends say it could be a god, the spirit of an old hawaiian king or perhaps some great warrior or even a newly deceased native hawaiian of noble ancestry. As he appears you see his elaboate headgear and mask turn to your direction.
Some primal instinct awakens within you and drives your gaze downward, good thing too, you’re not sure why but, when you later look into the legend or listen to nightmare now and leave a 5 star review you learn that the old stories talk about ancient traditions where warriors would escort their king or nobles into an area with drums chants and blasts from a conch yeah I’m going conch shell and if you made eye contact with the king or tribal leader or whoever it was great disrespect. A disrespect met with a dire punishment. Making eye contact as a commoner meant the warriors would execute you right there. Or in the case of the night marchers much later, you might just have a death curse placed on you. It's kind of unclear if the ghosts straight up kill you or just make you get hit by a car the next day or something.
Either way you were smart enough to avert your eyes this time. The procession continues past you without further incident, the drums fading off into the distance, you’ve survived, but you’re changed by the experience. You finally get the courage to look outside and you see a trail of large glowing footprints fading in the direction of the torches, now ascending a mountain without any trail or road or the like.
Hawaiians and people coming to the island have reported this phenomena as early as 1883, there wasn’t really a written language on the island before that but stories were passed down long before that in oral traditions.
I guess that kind of covers most of the why, spirits of ancient warriors escorting the gods or nobles around to where they need to be. Reminds me of a service project my fraternity used to do where you could call a number and one of our fat nerds would walk you home from a party so you didn’t have to drive or go home alone. They probably would have had a lot more luck with that if we all looked like the rock but whatever that was before my time.
As for how I kind of misspoke and yet also cover that they float through stuff and where they come and go and when it happens, the night marchers march at night. As for what you should do, if you smell the decay, hear the chanting and drums, and worse yet see the bobbing of torches and muscular, tan, glistening man meat what you need to do, and this may save my life when I’m over there, and might save your life too some day so I’ll say it twice. Definitely not procrastinating and running out the clock. When you become aware of the night marchers they say to throw yourself facedown in the dirt and a quote “project an aura of submission and respect” That’s right face down in the dirt and be submissive to the hulking pillars of chiseled ancient warrior spirits. You know what on second thought, a make d**n sure it’s night marchers otherwise that’s a good way to get robbed or sexually assaulted. It’s one of those phenomena that you need to call an audible and do it live. If it’s ghosts bend over, if it’s an army of crackheads or something, do literally anything else.
I don’t have much of an outline for this but I kind of want to spitball some thoughts on all this lore and how it ties to the paranormal and spirituality as a whole, if Nightmare Now is your first foray into the world of the scary, crazy, unexplained or weird, then welcome! Again great to have you! But for those of you looking for another paranormal fix or researching this s**t for some time you can probably see where we can go with this.
*I believe in ghosts, 100% without a doubt.
I’ll do an episode on persona experiences and phone it in eventually
I believe looking into this stuff makes it look into you, see MIBs
It’s all unified.
*multiple phenomena
*Literal spirits
*Recordings
*orbs
*Scenarios are different and can include multiple types like this one
Think about all the different spectral armies throughout history.
I wanted to dip into volcano spirits, fueds with hog gods and the pygmy bigfoot cousins the menehune, whomst I could potentially link to a larger phenomena of small pacific hominids, from bigfoot in the northwest, the menehune in hawaii and all the way over to rock apes in vietnam and the orang pendak out in sumatra and the so called hobbits from flores indonesia. WHAT ARE THEY HIDING take out the tropics and you have small hominids the world over. Gnomes, and elves in scandinavia, LEprechauns and fairies, the hildefolk in iceland and then you have the similarities of all those legends and their methods when compared to modern encounters with Grey aliens. But I think ya’ll aint ready for that conversation yet. I don’t think I’m ready for that conversation to be honest, not without a couple of long island ice teas, that’s when I really start connecting dots and look like charlie in always sunny trying to figure out where the mail goes to.
This one is running longer than I wanted so I’m gonna call it but we’ll definitely be revisiting hawaii on the show, Literally for the honeymoon, and definitely for volcano gods, haunted hotels, pearl harbor and probably more. Thanks so much to Koa ah nooeh nooeh, and if you have something you want me to look into deeper hit me up on any of the socials, nightmarenow.com or nightmarenowpodcast@gmail.com
As always it’s great to have you, I feel like I’m finally hitting my stride a little bit and I don’t have any plans of stopping, I’ll throw links to all the stuff I talked about and some of the stuff I didn’t get to in the show notes for your reading leisure pleasure. I’d say sweet dreams but we all know It’s only gonna be nightmares now. Catch ya next week.