Kamehameha Schools, founded by the will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop in 1887 and the oldest educational institution serving Native Hawaiian students, sits on the lower slopes of Kalihi Valley on O'ahu. The campus straddles Kapālama Heights, a ridge whose ancient footpaths are among the recognized routes of the Huaka'ipo (Night Marchers). On the evening of October 14, 1973, more than a dozen students in the girls' dormitory at Hale Mauliola reported being awakened at roughly 2:15 AM by the sound of conch-shell calls rising from the valley below and the rhythmic tread of approximately three hundred bare feet passing along the ridge path that runs behind the building. The sound was heard by resident advisors, kitchen staff, and students across multiple dormitories, and persisted for more than twenty minutes.
The following morning, several students discovered that the window of the hale kumu (elder instructor's residence) had been shattered from the inside and that specific ti leaves placed as traditional protective boundary around the building had been scorched. A Native Hawaiian kahuna called to the campus performed a morning blessing and reported that the procession had been one of the 'old Kapālama pathways' reactivated by recent construction work on a new classroom building immediately adjacent to the ridge path. Construction on the building was halted for three weeks and a cultural-protection protocol was permanently instituted; the campus added a pule (prayer) observance on the night of the first full moon of each October to honor the marchers' passage.
The 1973 Kamehameha Schools incident is notable because it was witnessed by a concentrated group of educated, primarily Native Hawaiian students at a formal institution and subsequently documented by the school's records office. It forced the Kamehameha Schools trust to adopt formal cultural-preservation policies for all campus expansion — a policy now standard across major Hawaiian institutions, including the University of Hawaii and state government. The event remains perhaps the best-documented modern Night Marcher encounter and is central to Hawaiian paranormal scholarship.