Night Marchers at Kamehameha

Informant: Female/16/mixed ancestry

Location: Kamehameha School, Oahu campus

I was walking back to Kapuaiwa dormitory at Kamehameha one night around 9:00 p.m.ish when my flower blew out of my hair. I chased it all the way to the bottom of the dorms. I made my way back up to Kapuaiwa but took a wrong turn and ended up walking to the cafeteria. When I got there it was real quiet and it started creeping me out, so I went the back way to get into the dorm when all of a sudden got to I started hearing the beats of the pahu.

I thought it was the hula team practicing, but they were all the way down at Keku, so I decided to follow the beat of the pahu. It led back down to the front door of Kapuaiwa.

I got to the bottom of Kapuaiwa and realized the sound got really loud at Lunalilo dorm, so I walked around a bit and noticed that the sound was coming out of nowhere. As I got closer to the lounge at Lunalilo, it started to get real hot (and it was a cool night) and the pahu was getting louder, so I freaked out and started to walk back up. I heard something, so I turned around and saw that a fire had started. I called campus security but by the time they came, the fire was gone and it seemed like there wasn't even a fire at all. Security told me go back to my dorm and just get some rest because they said I looked real tired.

I got back up to my dorm, took a shower, did my homework and stuff and then decided to go to bed. I woke up around 2:00 a.m. and was real thirsty, so I decided to go down to the lounge to get a drink of water. When I got there, I heard the beat of the pahu again and chanting. I remembered the article I read earlier that day about the night marchers and started to wonder if that’s what I was hearing.

I sat down on the couch to drink my water when I saw a torch coming down the hall outside. I thought I was seeing things so I just closed my eyes. When I opened them again and I could see night marchers walking down the hall and as they walked, the pahu and the chanting got louder. I ran back up to my room scared and hid under the covers. I looked out my window that over looks the whole dormitory and on the main road, there were the night marchers walking the campus.

Night marchers are so scary because they take people with them if they get in their path. I told my friend's about what I saw the next day, and they said that some of their roommates had to go to the nurse in the middle of the night because they we're sleep walking outside.

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The Tale of Whistling Shirley

Informant: Female/61/Portuguese-mixed ancestry

Location: Kapaa, Kauai

This story comes from my mother. I've heard it enough to tell it to you properly, I feel.

When my mother was a little girl, there was a terrible accident in her community. A little boy had drowned in a nearby reservoir. Shortly after his death, they started to hear rumors that his younger sister was able to communicate with him in the afterlife through whistling. She would speak, and he would whistle back.

It wasn't just a whistle the sister could hear, everyone nearby could also hear the whistling. People started to go to the house to see this "miracle" as they called it. My grandma forbade my grandpa from going to see it because she did not believe it was a miracle like everyone else believed (she was a very staunch Catholic). But my grandpa went anyway with my mom in tow.

When they got there, he told my mom and her cousin (who was also with them) to stay in the car while he went to the house. Not only did my grandpa hear the whistling in the house, my mother also heard it in the car.

My grandpa realized that something was not right and quickly returned to the car. They started to drive away and could still hear the whistling. They drove a few houses away and could still hear the whistling. They could hear the whistling all the way back home, as if it was in the car with them.

Needless to say my grandma was furious, and I think it's safe to say that my grandpa learned his lesson.

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Bloody Mary

Informant: Female/23/Korean-Portuguese ancestry

Location: Kaimuki, Oahu

It was a children’s game; something that you played at slumber parties, or birthday parties. In fact, that’s exactly where I read it. In the “games to play at a slumber party” section of The Daring Book for Girls that I got for Christmas. My friends were recalling things we enjoyed doing as kids, and I suddenly remembered. 

“Did you guys ever play Bloody Mary?” Everyone was silent in thought for a second, but the general consensus was, yes, but nothing ever happened. 

There were different variations of the game, depending on who you played with or where you were from, I guess. Some people said to say her name three times, some said 10. The book that I had said 13 times. The instructions said to go into a dark room with a mirror, like a bathroom, and hold a flashlight up to your face and say “Bloody Mary” into the mirror 13 times, and she would appear. 

We were a bunch of 20 somethings who no longer believed in these silly children’s tales, but we were feeling nostalgic for our childhoods, and were excited to try this game. Maybe this time it would work, who knows? 

Me, my friend, my roommate, and my boyfriend shuffled into the bathroom. We elected my boyfriend as the one to stand in the mirror and summon Bloody Mary, mostly because we know that weird shit has happened to him in the past, and he would be most likely to illicit a response from the dead. He stood in front of the mirror with the flashlight, while the three of us sat at the edge of the bathtub, facing the door, and facing him. 

The light from the hallway outside glowed under the bathroom door. I focused on it while my boyfriend chanted “Bloody Mary” into the mirror as my roommate counted them off dramatically. When he got to 13, he put the flashlight under his chin and yelled to scare us, and of course nothing happened. But then my roommate said, “Wait. just wait. Shhh…”

We all fell silent. And then, as I looked at the light under the bathroom door, it went black. 

BOOM

I’d never seen my boyfriend move so fast. In the blink of an eye he was in the corner of the bathtub behind me, clutching the flashlight like he just won his first Oscar. 

We all heard it. We all heard the banging on the door. I clutched my friend's arm so hard I was certain I drew blood with my fingernails. The light under the door went black, but not like a black out. It went black as if someone was walking in front of it, but someone wearing a long dress, because there was one long stretch of black that passed across the door. In my mind, it was someone in a gown. Queen’s wear gowns. 

My roommate locked the bathroom door and turned on the light. We sat there in utter shock, trying to digest what had just happened. Naturally, our first reaction was to hiss accusations at my boyfriend, screaming that he hit the door on purpose to scare us. He sat in the tub, barely able to get a word out, still clutching the flashlight, shaking his head vigorously denying it. But then we realized, even if he had banged on the door, that doesn’t explain how the light outside went out. 

Finally we realized that we couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever, and we opted to leave. I unlocked the door, and my roommate held the flashlight behind me like a bat. 

We checked the entire apartment, but nothing was there. We checked closets, under the beds, cabinets, even the fridge. But there was nothing there. Nobody else was in the apartment at the time. We just could not explain what happened. 

After a while my boyfriend decided to walk back to the dorms. He was fine before he left, and it was only about a five minute walk from my apartment. He called me after he got there and said, “Hey, so, I don’t want to freak you out but...there’s a mark on my arm that wasn’t there when I left your apartment.” He snapped me a blurry picture, and I saw shallow red scratches. He said, “I don’t know, it kind of looks like a W.” 

But I knew that it was really an M.

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Don't Go In the Bathroom Alone!

Informant: Female/19/mixed
Location: Chaminade University, Oahu

Rumor has it that the dorms on the campus I attend are haunted. I didn't believe in that at first, but the thing about rumors is that they are often true.

There was something odd about the community bathrooms on my side of the dorms. No idea why, but you always got the creeps while in there. One afternoon I went in for a routine pee when I heard a sniffling noise coming from the stall next to me. Without shame I leaned over and stuck my head under the division to see no one was there. I let out a small cough to get anyone's attention, see if there was someone else in the bathroom with me. No reply, no shuffle, nothing. No one was there with me. After a few more moments the sniffling continued but shifted from a crying sniffle to a full on sniff, like trying to smell me out. So, I bolted. Don't worry I washed my hands at the bathroom down the hall. Later that evening I told my roommate about the incident and she said she had had a similar experience where it feels like there is someone in the stall next to you, but when you look no one is there. We shrugged it off only to be shocked the next week.

I was finished taking a shower. I opened the partition curtain for my shower stall to go brush my teeth at the sink 5 feet away. When I turned around, the shower curtain was closed. I was a bit puzzled because I was SURE I had opened the thing. I shrugged went back and opened the curtain again to remove my belongings and go fiddle with my hair for a bit in front of the mirror. When I turned around again, the shower curtain was closed. There was no one else in the bathroom but me, so I was a bit freaked out by this. I again told my roommate who told me that some of her shower supplies had been moved around or were missing. I joked saying that maybe the ghost wanted to take a shower too.

Minor stuff like that continued through out the year. My hairbrush would be moved out of my shower kit, slippers and clothes rearranged, and every now and then my entire shower kit would be moved over to the other side of the shower stall. I just chucked it up to a helpful ghost until the last night I showered in that bathroom. I was washing my hair and went to rinse the foam off my hands when all of a sudden I felt something gently pull my hair. I thought, "wtf?" And when I reached my hand up there was a spike of hair on top of my head as if someone had pulled my hair up. Yeah, that was the fastest shower I have ever taken and I have never been back to that bathroom again.

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Pele Sighting at Kilauea

Informant: Female/16/Mixed ancestry
Location: Volcanoes National Park, Big Island

My hula sisters and I went on a hula retreat a few years ago up at Kilauea on the Big Island where, of course, Pele lives. We were walking around the Volcano park one night when something started following us; we could hear footsteps. So my friend was like, "Hey, you guys hear that?" My other friend said, "It's probably a weasel or something," so we just kept on walking. Then we heard barking and we were all scared and didn't know what to do. We walked a little faster, and then it started to get warm. Very, very warm. As we got closer to one of the look outs, we could hear chanting and all of us were freakin' out like crazy.

My friend and I were the ones who were most afraid and we decided to stay in one place, but we could sense something right behind us. We all looked behind us and we didn't see anything, but it was really warm, and the chants kept on getting louder and louder.

Then we heard the footsteps again.

I felt something by my feet and when we ran under the light we saw that it was white dog. When we looked out into the dark, we could see another white thing coming right at us and the chant was getting louder and louder. We ran back to our cabin as the chants kept on getting louder. When we finally got inside our cabin we looked out and the dog was right there at our door step. Our kumu said "It's madame Pele" & when i looked out of my window, that white ghost person thing was still there.

I decided to go to sleep, but I couldn't so I went back outside. I noticed that dog was still there and since I'm such an idiot, I decided to go play with it. It was very cold that night so I had to put on a jacket, pants, socks and shoes. I called the dog by me and as I looked at the dog and played with its ears, I noticed it was very hot, like hot water kine. Then the lady came up to me and asked if that was my dog (this was around 6 a.m. and the sun started to rise). I looked at her and I said "No, sorry." I looked down to play with the dog again and then looked up to ask that lady a question, but she was gone.

I kept on playing with the dog and I started to hear chanting again. I looked out where the woods were and I saw that old lady again, and as I looked at her, I looked into her eyes and they were red. I mean, RED, RED, RED! Then she called the dog and it went running to her, and I looked away for a second and turned back and they were both gone. My kumu told me, "You just witnessed something that no one has really ever witnessed." I asked him, "What is that?" and he said, "You saw Pele."

So, I get back into my bed and noticed there was a rock on it. It was a medium sized rock and it was real, real, HOT! I looked out the window and saw the dog go running and vanish. I never saw that dog ever again, neither did I see that lady.

But that rock followed me.

I put it outside, but it would always find its way back inside. When I left to Oahu, it found it's way next to my bed there. My Kumu told me to keep that rock with me no matter what. If that rock keeps on coming back to me then that means its my rock and it's a rock that only I can have an no one else can.

To this very day, I still have that rock.

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It's Only a Dream, Right?

Informant: Male/19/Portuguese, Filipino ancestry

Location: Hilo, Hawaii

I've had many weird dreams before, but this dream is by far the weirdest I've ever had in my life. In my dream I'm in the middle of an ocean, drowning. There's is no land or boat in sight. I am completely surrounded by water. I'm thrashing about wildly and quickly sinking into the ocean. My head is beginning to submerge and I am starting to choke on the water.

Now this is the part that things begin to get weird. As soon as I begin to swallow water in my dream, I wake up (actually wake up, this is no longer a dream) and I'm choking on some kind of liquid. I roll off of my bed and begin puking out water. It seems that I was choking on water.

In an article about lucid dreams for WIRED magazine, Dr. Stephen Laberge, a founder of the Lucidity Institute at Stanford University states about lucid dreams :

"the brain is working full-tilt, yet it is disconnected from the outside world. If you dream of doing a long jump, your brain reacts the same way it would if you actually did it."

Is it possible that my brain thought I was actually drowning? My brain believed that I was drowning, so much in fact that it caused me to actually expel water? And if I can almost drown because of a dream, could a dream kill me?

Everyone has heard of the myth that if you dream you are falling and you actually hit the bottom, you will actually die. Is there any truth to that? So far there has been no official documented cases of people dying from their dreams. It seems that it is only a myth.

For the full article on Lucid Dreaming, Click Here.

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Menehune

Informant: Male/25/Japanese ancestry

Location: Hanama'ulu, Kaua'i

When I was around five or six, I use to wake up in the middle of the night and see these...things. I don't remember what they looked like but they were very small, like gremlins. Anyway, I used to wake up crying, and my mom always used to say I kept on staring at something that wasn't there.

This happened quite frequently until one day, my mom was talking with some of her friends, and they advised her to sprinkle Hawaiian salt around the house, which she did. After that, I never saw anything again.

But it doesn't end there.

At the time, my mom asked me to draw a picture of what I had seen, and she said it looked like some kind of weird small monster with a weird hat. Well, a few years later, my mom was walking around the Bishop Museum and she came across one of those old Hawaiian feather capes with a helmet, and then all of a sudden she remembered my picture...

It occurred to her that what I had drawn had looked perfectly like a Hawaiian warriors helmet, just miniature. Menehune. So that's what we summarized that I was seeing.

Even to this day my mom sprinkles Hawaiian salt around the house every month to keep it cleansed.

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