Pele’s Hitchhiker

Pele is the Hawaiian deity of volcanoes and fire, called Pelehonuamea, “Pele of the red earth”, and Tūtū Pele, a name that shows family affection. The National Park Service describes her as creator and destroyer of land, living in Halemaʻumaʻu crater at the summit of Kīlauea. For many Hawaiians she is not a ghost or a character but a living presence and, for some families in Puna and Kaʻū, an ʻaumakua, a deified ancestor. It is customary to ask her permission before travelling through her land. That is the context for the stories below, which are best read as a living tradition rather than a spooky tale.

Within that tradition, Pele is said to be able to take other forms: a beautiful young woman, an old woman with long white hair, or a white dog. The modern roadside version is a vanishing-hitchhiker story with a Hawaiian twist. A driver sees an elderly woman walking along a lonely stretch of road, sometimes in white or red, sometimes with a small white dog, and stops. She climbs in, and later the seat is empty. Kindness is rewarded; drivers who pass her by are warned that bad luck, a crash or even the next eruption may follow. Alternate versions ask the driver to warn others about an eruption.

The tale is hard to date. Scholars of the wider vanishing-hitchhiker legend have traced it back across many cultures, and the Hawaiian form appears to belong to the age of the automobile. A local history column on Kauaʻi recorded a mid-1960s belief that Pele appeared as an aged Hawaiian woman walking the road between Anahola and Moloaʻa, vanishing after she got out of the cars of drivers who gave her a lift, though it names no witnesses. In 1995 the Seattle Times, in a guide to island ghosts, noted that Pele is said to appear on Maui and the Big Island as a long-haired old woman with a black dog. The Saddle Road setting seems to be a more recent detail in a story that changes with the teller.

Folklorists place this story within the worldwide vanishing hitchhiker tradition, in which a roadside figure disappears from a car. In the Hawaiian variant the roadside figure is not a ghost but a goddess in disguise, who is said to reward those who treat her kindly. For that reason many people treat it less as a haunting than as a story about hospitality and respect for Pele and her land.

Drivers describe an elderly woman, sometimes in white or red with long white hair and sometimes with a small white dog, who asks for a ride, speaks of fire or the volcano and then vanishes from the car. Some say a refused ride is followed by a crash or misfortune.

Lonely stretches of road on Hawaiʻi Island such as Saddle Road and the roads of Kaʻū, Kona and Puna near Kīlauea, with variants reported on Maui and Kauaʻi.

Stories of Pele appear in Hawaiian chants, hula and moʻolelo that predate any road story. The modern hitchhiker tale is told by students and local drivers and has been recorded in the USC folklore archive. Pele’s sacredness is also why visitors are asked not to take lava rocks from the national park.