Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Hawaiian Night Marchers

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

Get ready for some Hawaiian folklore, people. Today we discuss the Night Marchers. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, hi, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Josh. Aloha. No, wait, don't go anywhere.

I didn't mean goodbye. I was just saying hello again. You've been to Hawaii? Sure, yeah. You mean I got married in Hawaii. That's right. Hawaii. And you've been back, right? Or no?

Yes, we love it. Can't wait. I've never been still. You're gonna love it. When we went, we were not expecting it to be as great as it was, and we were just blown away. And we went back and got married, and now we go back as often as we can. And to people that are thinking, what a jerk.

Josh didn't invite Chuck to his wedding. Didn't invite anybody. Yeah, you guys kind of did your own thing, so. Yeah, we eloped. I like to think I was on the spiritual guest list. You definitely were. It was funny when we called people and said like, you know, hey, we just got married, we eloped.

And the first question from just about everybody was, well, who was there? Really? We'd say no one, and they go, congratulations. You're like, wait, why didn't you say congratulations first? Yeah, that's interesting. We need new friends and family. Who was there?

Exactly. So the thing I couldn't, we're talking about the legend of the night marchers of Hawaii. I read through a couple of things on this, and I was frustrated because I still couldn't figure out what they were. Were they real?

No. Is it a legend? Are they a ghost? Is it folklore? Yeah. And I finally, it took me like two or three articles, so I was like, okay, this isn't really happening. So wait, there was a point in your research where you thought that like people were walking around

just slaughtering innocent bystanders in Hawaii? Well, that's what confused me, is I thought maybe these were people reenacting this legend for fun. Oh, I gotcha. But then I was like, but then the murder part, there's like no one has said like, but they don't really kill you.

Right. That's awesome. So let's talk about what this is. No, I'm confused. If you have been to Hawaii, you might have heard about these night marchers. It is a, it's basically a situation where you might hear, and of course this is folklore again.

Right, right, this is folklore. Right. You'll hear these war drums in the distance. You'll hear chanting. You hear like the horn of a conch shell being sounded, and you will see the torches marching through and winding through the darkness, and you're like, oh, yes, here come the night marchers.

Right. Even if you don't know what the night marchers are, hopefully this will scare you enough to run. Yes. And not be like, oh, let me stick around and take a gander and see what happens, because here's the problem. If you are a Howley, or even a Hawaiian

who doesn't know what's going on right now, although that's probably not the case, because this is apparently a widespread cultural tradition. If you stick around and the night marchers find you, and they notice that you are gawking, they will kill you right there. They will shout something that means pierce that person, and you will be killed.

Yeah, like if you make eye contact, supposedly. And not only will you be killed, you'll be killed by supernatural beings, which I would guess is way worse than being killed under normal circumstances. That's right. So what's supposedly happening is these, I think it's the chiefs are traveling at night

to avoid being spotted, and they are, are they all chiefs or is this the chief and people in his guard sort of protecting them along the way? The latter of those two. Okay, that's what I thought. And it's not just like the supernatural, so these are the ghosts of chiefs who were protected and the people who protect them.

It's all this ghost procession through Hawaii at night. And it's actually something that used to happen in the old days because it was a longstanding tradition among Hawaiian culture that the chiefs were so divine that a normal person couldn't look upon them. And you certainly couldn't be in their presence while you had clothes on, right? Which is why if you're just kind of a tourist gawking

and you run across the night marchers and you're wearing clothes and you're looking at the chief, that's why they kill you. So in real life, historically speaking, some of the better chiefs would say, well, I can't just go wandering around from place to place in the daytime where somebody might see me accidentally and then they have to be killed.

I'll just take to the trails at night and me and my procession will travel at night. This is the ghostly continuation of that actual historical tradition. That's right. It's very much like a Scooby-Doo plot if you ask me. Oh, totally. I can't believe they never did this.

Yeah, because they went on sort of exotic vacations occasionally in some of those later years. And a Hawaiian real estate is so valuable that a real estate developer might actually go to this length to scare people off of land that he wanted for cheap. Oh, really? So yeah, I mean, it would have been perfect for Scooby-Doo. It would have been the most realistic Scooby-Doo episode

ever. Yeah, but you got to get like the three stooges out there or something. Great. Those are the stooges. With Curly Joe? Yeah. Yeah.

All right, so let's take a quick break and we will come back and talk a little bit more about what happens on this ghostly journey right after this. Oh, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So the lunar cycles have something

to do with this as well, because apparently they tend to appear usually during the last four Hawaiian moon phases when it's darkest. Yeah, Hawaii has their own lunar phases, and they're more distinct than ours. They have like 30 of them, where we have like eight. It's pretty incredible. And their last four are Keine, Lono, Mauli, and Muku.

And Ralph. And they're basically the, and Curly Joe. They're the dark, dark phases of the moon. Yeah, so it's darkest out then. They're usually marching toward some very sacred sites, or very popular and notable cultural sites. And like we said, if you hear this and you're like, oh, my goodness, let me go check this out, just don't do it.

Because you're going to die, even though it's not real. Right. If you are an ancestor, and you have some kind of family tie to someone in the march, they know to respect it, but you will also be protected. Right, so here's the thing, like if it turns out that you happen just coincidentally to be a distant descendant of one of the ghosts

on the march in this procession, they will say this person is one of my descendants, and don't kill him. And we'll just go ahead and encapsulate him. At least that last part about encapsulating him or protecting him or her comes from a kahuna, a real life kahuna, by the name of Lopaka Kapa Nui. Is he the big kahuna? I think he's just a regular kahuna.

OK. But he is a kind of a cultural historian and a kahuna, again, kind of a spiritual leader of Hawaiian culture. And he said that at one point, he encountered one of these night march ghostly processions, and he was protected ostensibly because one of his distant relatives was one of the marchers. Yeah, there's another couple of things that can save you.

One is if you have a plant, a very specific plant called the tea, I guess, Ti. I think so. It is an evergreen plant, and if you have that planted around your home, which I bet a lot of houses in Hawaii do just for maybe superstitious sake, you will be protected. And the other is if you just happen to be out there

and you come across one of these marching groups, you are to, in your accidentally make eye contact, and you're like, hey, what's up, man? And they're like, you're about to die, and they say the thing. You are supposed to strip down naked, lay down, face down on the ground, close your eyes, pee yourself, and play dead.

Yeah, just basically showing complete deference and fealty to these things, to these ghostly warriors and their king. Yeah, and the pee yourself was not a chuck joke. That's for real, they say, to urinate if you can. And they'll be like, wow, I guess that worked. We scared the pee out of them. Yeah, another piece of advice is not to whistle at night, because apparently legend has it you might accidentally summon

the night marchers. Yeah. And I don't know if there's any more advice. I think, oh, run. Yeah. That's what Lopaka Kapanui says. He says, if you start to hear those drums at night in the distance, or you hear a conch shell,

or you start to, apparently you can smell rotting flesh that's part of it. Or if you start to see those torches coming toward you, you should just run, don't stick around. Yeah, and this House of Works article has said, don't stop to take selfies like some people have done in the past, just to run. Is that all just tongue in cheek?

I don't know. I can't tell anymore. The border between real and supernatural has been completely crossed. I totally agree. I don't know if I'd need to go to Hawaii now, because I have made fun of this, and they know I'm doing so. You are going to love it, Chuck.

You got to go, and you're going to love it. OK, deal. All right, well, we'll see everybody in Hawaii, because short stuff is out. The stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's House of Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

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