Word.ws English Dictionary

nightmarcher

nightmarcher noun: in Hawaiian folklore, a ghost of an ancient Hawaiian warrior who marches together with other such ghosts on certain sacred nights from their burial sites or the ocean to the sites of ancient battles or sacred places.

Noun

nightmarcher (plural nightmarchers)

  1. In Hawaiian folklore, a ghost of an ancient Hawaiian warrior who marches together with other such ghosts on certain sacred nights from their burial sites or the ocean to the sites of ancient battles or sacred places.
    • ... happening in, will not become confused and angry in his efforts to get out. Beds should not be placed directly opposite doorways. One keeps indoors when the Nightmarchers are abroad. On certain nights these progressions of ghosts can […]1988, John Donald Kingsley, The Antioch Review
    • The tail of that sinuous line of nightmarchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that the tomb's floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and ...1997, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Crawling Chaos: Selected Pulp Fiction

Examples of nightmarcher in a sentence

  • […] understood the vision of nightmarchers described by the Chinese man.1999, Glen Grant, Obake Files: Ghostly Encounters in Supernatural Hawai'I, Mutual Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 122:
  • "And he hide; da buggah wen hide; if you discovered by a nightmarcher, they take you, boy.2002, Rona Tamiko Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities and Cultural Politics, U of Minnesota Press, →ISBN, page 166:
  • Something from Irene's journals, about what to do if you happen across a nightmarcher on a moon-filled night.2018, J. Lincoln Fenn, The Nightmarchers, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN:

Forms of nightmarcher

pluralnightmarchers

Origin of nightmarcher

From night + marcher. Calque of Hawaiian huakaʻi pō.

Questions about nightmarcher

What does nightmarcher mean?
Nightmarcher means in Hawaiian folklore, a ghost of an ancient Hawaiian warrior who marches together with other such ghosts on certain sacred nights from their burial sites or the ocean to the sites of ancient battles or sacred places.
How do you use nightmarcher in a sentence?
[…] understood the vision of nightmarchers described by the Chinese man.
What part of speech is nightmarcher?
Nightmarcher is a noun.
What is the plural of nightmarcher?
The plural of nightmarcher is nightmarchers.

Words near nightmarcher in the dictionary

  1. nightlines
  2. nightlives
  3. nightlong
  4. nightly
  5. nightman
  6. nightmarcher
  7. nightmarchers
  8. nightmare
  9. nightmare disorder
  10. nightmare disorders
  11. nightmare fuel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nightmarcher (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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