Compendium · Ancestor Procession / Walking Dead

Nightmarchers (Huakaʻi Pō)

Huakaʻi Pō, the marchers of the night, are the warrior dead of old Hawaiʻi walking the ancient trails by torchlight, beating drums and blowing conch shells. They march on the lunar nights sacred to the four major gods, with Pō Kāne (night 27) the favoured night. The Catholic-convert Hawaiian historian Kepelino recorded in 1868 the survival rule: if a marcher ancestor recognises you, you live. If you do not know your genealogy, strip naked and lie flat on your back so the procession takes you for mad.

Nightmarchers (Huakaʻi Pō)
Type Ancestor Procession / Walking Dead
Origin Hawaiian
Period Pre-contact oral tradition; first written ethnography Kepelino 1868, published Beckwith 1932
Primary Sources
  • Kepelino (Zepherin Kahōʻāliʻi Keauokalani). *Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi* (manuscript 1868). Trans. and ed. Martha Warren Beckwith. *Kepelino's Traditions of Hawaii*. Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 95. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1932. Appendix 'The Marchers of the Night.'
  • Beckwith, Martha Warren. *Hawaiian Mythology.* New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940; reprint Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1970.
  • Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert. *Hawaiian Dictionary*. Revised and enlarged ed. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1986.
  • Luomala, Katharine. 'Phantom Night Marchers in the Hawaiian Islands.' *Pacific Studies* 7, no. 1 (1983). Brigham Young University–Hawaiʻi, Institute for Polynesian Studies.
  • Kapanui, Lopaka. 'Nā Huakaʻi o ka Pō.' *Ka Wai Ola* (newspaper of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs), 1 October 2025.
  • Kaʻiwakīloumoku Hawaiian Cultural Center, Kamehameha Schools. 'Pō Kāne: When Spirits Haunt the Night.' Essay.
  • Kapiʻolani Community College Library. 'Lunar Days — Traditions of Oʻahu.' Research guide.
Protections
  • Lie face-down on the ground in silence, eyes covered.
  • Recite your moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy) aloud so an ancestor among the marchers may recognise you and shout 'Naʻu' ('mine'), claiming you as kin.
  • Plant a hedge of kī (ti leaf, *Cordyline fruticosa*) around the home.
  • Kepelino, 1868: if you do not know your genealogy, strip off your clothing and lie flat on your back so the marchers think you mad.
Related Beings
Walking Dead
Night Terror
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The procession is heard before it is seen: drums beating somewhere along the ala loa, the long foot-trail; a conch shell carrying across the valley; sometimes the chant of an oli, sometimes only the wind. Then the torches appear on the ridge, moving in a line. The marchers are warriors, sometimes aliʻi at their head, sometimes a deity. Their feet do not touch the ground. They leave no track on the earth they pass over. The witness on the trail has a small set of options, all of them ancient.

When they walk

The Hawaiian month is lunar and each night carries the name of the god to whom it belongs. The Huakaʻi Pō walk on the nights sacred to the four major gods. Pō Kāne, the 27th night, is the one most consistently named as the marcher night across the cultural-practitioner accounts, alongside Pō Lono (the 28th), the four Pō Kū nights (the 3rd through the 6th), and the three Pō Kāloa nights (the 24th through the 26th). Some accounts add Pō Akua, the 14th, which is the first night of the full moon. The lunar table here is the one the Polynesian Voyaging Society uses for the Hōkūleʻa voyaging programme. The Kamehameha Schools’ own Hawaiian Cultural Center, the Kaʻiwakīloumoku, publishes an essay called “Pō Kāne: When Spirits Haunt the Night,” which is one of the clearest institutional acknowledgements that the belief is current and not a tourist anecdote.

What the survival manual says

The witness lies face down on the ground in silence, eyes covered. The posture is read by the procession as proper respect and deference, and the marchers pass by. If a family ʻaumakua is among them and recognises the prostrate body, the ancestor calls out Naʻu, “mine,” and the procession leaves the witness alone. Reciting one’s moʻokūʻauhau, the long genealogy, aloud is the way to invoke that recognition. A traditional household practice is to plant a hedge of kī, the ti leaf (Cordyline fruticosa), around the home; the procession is said to divert around the hedge.

The most striking specific rule is older and is recorded by the Catholic-convert Hawaiian historian Kepelino around 1868 in his manuscript Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi, preserved by Martha Warren Beckwith in Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 95 in 1932, in the appendix titled “The Marchers of the Night.” If you do not know your genealogy, Kepelino writes, strip off your clothing and lie flat on your back, so the marchers think you mad and pity you. It is the most specific and the most physical rule in the corpus. The 20th-century anthropologist Katharine Luomala, in her 1983 Pacific Studies article “Phantom Night Marchers in the Hawaiian Islands,” records an alternative folk protocol that involves the removal of clothing and the application of urine for repulsion.

Where they walk

The trail corridors run along the old foot-paths that connected the ceremonial sites of pre-contact Hawaiʻi. The corridors named in 20th- and 21st-century accounts on Oʻahu include Moanalua Valley, the Kalihi area, Waialua, Mokuleʻia, Kawaihapai, Kailua, the Nuʻuanu Pali, and the central plateau around Schofield Barracks. The native Hawaiian storyteller Lopaka Kapanui, in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs paper Ka Wai Ola for October 2025, records a 1963 sighting at Iwilei and Kūwili in Honolulu by a man named Joshua, and an account from his own mother Angeline Kapanui of a procession witnessed at Kalapana on the Big Island.

The Kamehameha Schools’ Kapālama campus on Oʻahu is acknowledged in the school’s own cultural-centre publications as visited by the marchers. The original interstate H-3 freeway routing through Moanalua Valley was redirected away from the corridor on opposition organised by the Moanalua Gardens Foundation, which used oral histories collected by Gertrude McKinnon Damon from 1902 onward. The freeway eventually went through Haʻikū Valley, where construction workers later reported hearing drums and seeing torchlights along the line of the cut.

Why the rule about genealogy matters

The Huakaʻi Pō are specific named people, the ancestors of specific living families on specific islands. The genealogy-recital rule sits on top of the deeper Hawaiian understanding that the dead are family, that the family extends through the moʻokūʻauhau into deep prehistory, and that the trails the dead walk at night were once their roads in life. The ancestor among the marchers who calls out Naʻu, “mine,” is doing what an ancestor does, which is to know whose grandchild this is on the trail.

The clean parallel in the broader Polynesian record is not as tight as one might hope. The Maori taniwha is a guardian water-being, not a marching procession; Tahitian tūpāpaʻu are spirits of the dead but not in the named-trail-procession sense. The Hawaiian Huakaʻi Pō is its own thing, the product of a particular warrior-aliʻi history and a particular long-trail system that connected the ceremonial sites of pre-contact Hawaiʻi. The belief survived missionisation and statehood. It is acknowledged today by an Indigenous-run K–12 school system and by the agencies that route freeways on its islands.

On the night of Pō Kāne, on an old foot-trail in the Hawaiian Islands, with the drum coming up out of the valley, the move is to lie face down and keep your eyes closed. An ancestor among the marchers may then recognise you and the procession will pass on. For everyone else, Kepelino’s rule waits.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

  • Kepelino (Zepherin Kahōʻāliʻi Keauokalani). Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi (manuscript 1868). Trans. and ed. Martha Warren Beckwith. Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii. Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 95. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1932. Appendix ‘The Marchers of the Night.’
  • Beckwith, Martha Warren. Hawaiian Mythology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940; reprint Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1970.
  • Pukui, Mary Kawena, and Samuel H. Elbert. Hawaiian Dictionary. Revised and enlarged ed. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1986.
  • Luomala, Katharine. ‘Phantom Night Marchers in the Hawaiian Islands.’ Pacific Studies 7, no. 1 (1983). Brigham Young University–Hawaiʻi, Institute for Polynesian Studies.
  • Kapanui, Lopaka. ‘Nā Huakaʻi o ka Pō.’ Ka Wai Ola (newspaper of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs), 1 October 2025.
  • Kaʻiwakīloumoku Hawaiian Cultural Center, Kamehameha Schools. ‘Pō Kāne: When Spirits Haunt the Night.’ Essay.
  • Kapiʻolani Community College Library. ‘Lunar Days — Traditions of Oʻahu.’ Research guide.

Common Questions

Who or what are the Huakaʻi Pō?
Huakaʻi Pō, literally ‘marchers of the night,’ are processions of the warrior dead of old Hawaiʻi, walking the ancient ala loa (long trails) between sunset and sunrise. They carry torches, beat drums, blow the conch shell (pū), and chant the oli. The procession is often led by ancestral aliʻi (chiefs and chiefesses) or by deities. Their feet do not touch the ground; they leave no physical trace. Sightings are commonly preceded by sudden wind, mist, high surf, or thunder. The standard alternate names are ʻOiʻo, ‘spirit ranks,’ and Nā Huakaʻi o ka Pō, ’the processions of the night,’ both recorded in Pukui and Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary. The earliest extended written treatment in English is the appendix ‘The Marchers of the Night’ in Kepelino’s Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi, manuscript of 1868, translated by Martha Beckwith and published as Bishop Museum Bulletin 95 in 1932. The standard modern academic study is Katharine Luomala’s article in Pacific Studies volume 7 number 1 in 1983.
On what nights do they march?
They march on the lunar nights sacred to the four major gods in the Hawaiian month, which is organised by the phase of the moon. Pō Kāne (night 27) is the night most consistently associated with the procession, alongside Pō Lono (night 28), the four Pō Kū nights (3 through 6), and the three Pō Kāloa nights (24 through 26). Pō Akua (night 14), the first night of the full moon, appears in some accounts. The lunar table used here is the one published by the Polynesian Voyaging Society for the Hōkūleʻa voyaging programme. Pō Kāne is the favoured night across multiple cultural-practitioner accounts and is the night that has been most-cited in 21st-century Native Hawaiian publications such as the Kaʻiwakīloumoku Hawaiian Cultural Center’s essay ‘Pō Kāne: When Spirits Haunt the Night,’ published by the Kamehameha Schools.
What do you do if you encounter them?
There are documented survival rules. The standard protection is to lie face-down on the ground in silence with the eyes covered; the gesture is read as proper respect and deference, and the procession passes the witness by. If a family ʻaumakua (ancestor spirit) is among the marchers and recognises the prostrate witness, the ancestor may call out ‘Naʻu’ (‘mine’), claiming the living person as kin, and the procession passes on without harm. Reciting your moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy) aloud is the way to invoke that recognition. A traditional household protection is to plant a hedge of kī, the ti leaf (Cordyline fruticosa), around the home; the marchers are said to divert around it. The most striking specific rule is the one recorded by the Catholic-convert Hawaiian historian Kepelino in 1868, preserved in Beckwith’s 1932 edition: if you do not know your genealogy, strip off your clothing and lie flat on your back so the marchers think you mad and pity you. The 20th-century anthropologist Katharine Luomala records an alternative folk protocol that involves the removal of clothing and the application of urine for repulsion.
Where do they march on Oʻahu?
Trail corridors associated with the Huakaʻi Pō include Moanalua Valley, Kalihi, Waialua, Mokuleʻia, Kawaihapai, Kailua, the Nuʻuanu Pali, and the area around Schofield Barracks (a U.S. Army installation on the central plateau). Native Hawaiian storyteller and cultural practitioner Lopaka Kapanui, in Ka Wai Ola (the Office of Hawaiian Affairs newspaper) for October 2025, records a 1963 sighting at Iwilei and Kūwili in Honolulu by a man named Joshua, and an account from his own mother Angeline Kapanui of a procession witnessed at Kalapana on the Big Island. The Kamehameha Schools’ Kapālama campus on Oʻahu is acknowledged in the schools’ own cultural-centre publications as visited by the marchers.
Is this still a living belief?
Yes. Nightmarcher belief is alive across the Native Hawaiian community and is acknowledged by Hawaiian institutions on their own land, including the Kamehameha Schools through their Kaʻiwakīloumoku Hawaiian Cultural Center. Major construction projects on Oʻahu have been routed away from suspected marcher corridors as part of broader cultural and burial concerns. The original interstate H-3 freeway routing through Moanalua Valley was famously redirected on opposition organised by the Moanalua Gardens Foundation using oral histories collected by Gertrude McKinnon Damon from 1902 onward; the rerouting through Haʻikū Valley then produced its own reports of drums and torchlights heard during construction. We have not found a strong direct parallel to the armed nighttime procession elsewhere in the broader Polynesian record. The Hawaiian Huakaʻi Pō is its own thing, shaped by the warrior-aliʻi history of the islands and the long-trail system that connected the ceremonial sites of pre-contact Hawaiʻi.
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