Some Hawaiian Folklore: Legends and Ghost Stories for a Dark and Stormy Night
It's a cold dark blustery night and I'm all alone in my one room house out on the plain of Mauna Kea. Sounds like a good time for some ghost stories! First let me admit that I am a folklorist but that I haven't done any kind of rigorous collecting since I've been here. And frankly I'm sort of stymied-- I doubt that I could collect anything even if I wanted to. If I dare generalize, one of the more beautiful and subtle charactaristics of Hawaiian culture is its understatedness. Great slack-key masters defer to young doofuses, kupuna in church sit back and let the younger ones talk and talk and talk. You have to listen very carefully, for a very long time, and even then. Being taught is a priveledge, not a right. So that being said, here are a few glints and glimmers of Hawaiian ghosts that I've heard in the last couple of years: The Wind Our young neighbor Pono is hanai-ed into the Hanohano family and lives with Auntie Val and her older son and his wife (Pono...