Nuʻuanu Pali Lookout

The Nuʻuanu Pali is a gap in the Koʻolau Range where trade winds funnel through a cliff pass about 1,200 feet up in the Koʻolau Range. For centuries it was the trail between Honolulu and the windward side of Oʻahu; the first road across the pali was built in 1845, and the modern Pali Highway and its tunnels replaced it in the late 1950s. Hawaiian tradition treated the pass with care. Travelers once left offerings at two stones, Hapuʻu and Ka-lae-hau-ola, said to guard the way, and the wind there is still strong enough that visitors lean into it.

The place is most famous as the end of the 1795 Battle of Nuʻuanu. Kamehameha I brought an army of roughly ten thousand from Hawaiʻi Island, took Maui and Molokaʻi, and landed on Oʻahu. The defenders under Kalanikūpule were driven up Nuʻuanu Valley and trapped at the cliff, where many fell. Estimates of the dead run to about 400, though other tellings give more. In 1898, workers widening the road reportedly found some 800 skulls, widely taken to be the warriors from the battle. That memory of mass death is the root of the ghost story: that the fallen still linger below the cliff, and that visitors at night hear fighting and shouting with no one there.

Alongside the battle stories sits a body of older Hawaiian folklore. A moʻo wahine – a lizard spirit in the form of a beautiful woman – was said to lure male travelers to their deaths; meeting a dog on the pali was an omen to turn back; and Night Marchers, the processions of dead warriors and chiefs known across the islands, are placed in the area in some tellings. The best-known modern rule is that you must not carry pork over the Pali, especially at night, because it risks stirring the old rivalry between the pig god Kamapuaʻa and the volcano goddess Pele. Some drivers say their cars have stalled until the pork was thrown out; another version has an old woman and a dog appearing until the meat is given up.

The most-quoted modern test came in November 2007, when Honolulu television reporter Walter Makaula carried pork buns and pork hash over the line with storyteller Lopaka Kapanui for a KHNL segment. Makaula described chicken skin, and both of their flashlights went dark and then came back on. These are accounts from tour guides and a news segment, not investigations, and many local people treat the pork rule as a courtesy to tradition rather than a haunting. Visitors should treat the wayside as the historic and culturally important place it is: stay behind the railings, because the wind is real and the cliff is steep.

Storytellers and visitors report the sounds of shouting and fighting at night, a sense of being watched, stalled cars when pork is carried across the pass, flashlights failing, and encounters with an old woman and a dog. Some tellings place Night Marchers on the old road.

The lookout and the old Pali Road, the Pali Highway and its tunnels, and the cliff base below, mainly after dark.

The Pali features in Glen Grant’s Honolulu ghost-tour tradition, in Lopaka Kapanui’s Mysteries of Hawaiʻi ghost tours, as described by Honolulu Magazine, and in the USC folklore archive. The pork story is one of the best-known pieces of living Hawaiian folklore among local drivers.