Hawaiian Halloween 

Photo by Jack Kiyonaga

With roots in the nearly 2,000-year-old Celtic Samhain festival, Halloween celebrates the strange and inexplicable, the hidden and mysterious. For Hawaii, one legend in particular fits this intersection of the historic and the supernatural: night marchers. 

Night marchers are believed to be the spirits of royal warriors, said to walk in procession through certain locations at night. This spectral phenomenon is well known throughout Hawaii.

Hawaiian cultural practitioner Kanoe Davis said she’s had first-hand experiences with them. 

“I’ve had several encounters,” Davis explained, both in Pala’au State Park and Kawela. Her grandmother also told Davis about her own meetings with night marchers in Kalamaula.

The first time Davis saw the night marchers was in high school. 

“It was dark with a lot of clouds and fog,” she remembered. “We heard noises and then saw yellow…That’s when we knew something was in the area.” 

The next time she saw them was up in Kawela. This time it was a full procession, preceded by drums and the pu. 

While Davis explained she was afraid the first few times this happened, she leaned on the wisdom of her grandmother. 

“I remember being a little scared, but also remembered what my grandmother told me and how to act,” said Davis. 

Even though the experience can be bizarre and frightening, Davis understands it as not a spiritual occurrence even, but rather an expansion of one’s own consciousness. 

“There is this belief that there are multiple things happening all at once in multiple realities,” said Davis. “Those who are aware are able to experience these things…I don’t look at it as even a spiritual thing but just normal awareness.”

For Davis, being conscious means retaining “the ability to be curious and live a life that’s exhilarating.” 

Davis also works in the mental health field, having started the Malu I Ka ‘Ulu program to help Lahaina community members who are struggling with their mental health after the 2023 fires. She explained that being open to different, less typical kinds of ideas and experiences can sometimes be labeled in negative ways. 

Witnessing night marchers has helped Davis as a mental health professional to better understand people who have been labeled as “different,” she explained. 

“You start to empathize with those folks,” said Davis. “They don’t look normal, so they get treated as such.”

Ultimately, even though Davis doesn’t think that the night marchers are spooky or macabre, she’s not opposed to leaning into that tradition. 

“There’s joy in that,” she said. 

For Halloween last Thursday, Molokai residents had a chance to celebrate some of their favorite spooky and joyful annual traditions. Some families headed down to the Molokai Community Health Center for games at HallowHim, others checked out the Glow Show at King’s Chapel, while many hit up neighborhoods in Kualapuu and Kaunakakai for trick-or-treating.