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Chapter 1: What supernatural event does the Coast Guardsman experience at sea?
Nine years old sitting in this church angry and my parents angry at these brethren in this place and now their preacher all puffed up Red-faced, bug-eyed, steps to the podium, commands us to open your Bible to Exodus 32.
Here! Brethren, Moses climbs the mountain to see God. Do the people wait patient? They do not. said they work with their forges, their ovens, with wickedness in their hearts, with evil. Then look right here, look here, look here, look here. They pull a golden calf from the flame. What do they do then? The very worst thing you can do. They call this thing, this abomination, a god.
Who needs that other god? When this one gleams golden, Then they bow their heads before it, blast me. But know this, brethren, there's no surer way to summon the Lord than to mock him. The God that delivered them from slavery under Pharaoh stretches out his mighty hand and smites with fire and horror and pain for their betrayal. Remember that.
If you want to see God face to face, you remember that.
Anger has an idea. I snatch two hangers from the hall closet, bring them back to my bedroom, strip the wires from the hangers, bend them, fashion them, work it just so. Then I cover it, not with gold. I don't have any of that. Nah, instead, I wrap sheet after sheet of aluminum foil around it. pinch and shape it into a face, into horns, the body of a calf. I admire it for a moment. Beautiful.
My own graven image. Then I wait for a lull in the ever-present noise of my household, peek outside my bedroom, down the hall, push the front door open, quiet, quiet, quiet. Pad down the front steps of her trailer, aluminum calf wrapped tight with my jacket, then I run. Out to the middle of the woods, my secret, fast, fast, run, run until I reach the spot, reverently.
Set the calf down on a patch of hard earth, but doubt stops me, fear. Then the anger returns, the fury. I have asked, begged their God to reveal itself as many ways as I know. Still, it judges me unworthy of even a word, even a whisper. Answer me. This is all I have left. So I steal myself. Look to the sky one last chance. Answer me.
Then I drop to my knees, bow my head, and I pray to my own graven image. Today on Snap Judgment, we proudly present something sacred. My name is from Washington. All that glitters is not aluminum when you're listening to Snap Judgment. We begin headed out to sea to meet Jordan.
Now Jordan is fresh out of bootcamp and doing his very first unit with the Coast Guard on board a ship patrolling the waters off the East Coast. I'm gonna let Jordan take it from here.
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Chapter 2: What challenges do hula sisters face before their performance at the Merrie Monarch Festival?
It's been a pretty quiet night. I'm doing a scan with my night vision, just looking towards the front of the ship, and I see there's a person standing at the forward-most point of the bow, about 70 feet away from me, with his arms outstretched. It's the middle of the night. There aren't very many people awake at this point, and for someone to be out there in the pitch-black darkness
standing on the front of the ship. That rings alarm bells in my head. I'm concerned about the worst case scenario that this person is out there with the intent to jump off. Right away, I have to look again. You know, did I actually just see that? I pick up my NVGs again and look out and it's very clearly a person standing there. just the silhouette of a person. I can tell that it's a man.
He's got a military-style haircut. And I can tell that they're wearing the Coast Guard uniform, not by any color, just by the sort of silhouette of it. I'm yelling, hey, what are you doing out there? Hey, just trying to get their attention. The OOD, the officer of the deck, the person in charge of navigation of the ship, she's inside the bridge. This OOD has heard me screaming.
She's my boss as a seaman. And she has come out to see what the deal is. She's short, probably 5'2", blonde woman with big, like, porthole glasses, just these big round glasses that you practically can't see past when you're talking to her. So I hand her my night vision goggles. I say, there's someone standing on the bow. And I think the exact words out of her mouth were, oh, shit.
Because at this point now she's reached the same initial conclusion that I have of somebody's on the front of the boat and they might be getting ready to jump over the side. So immediately she calls to the bosun's mate of the watch, our only roving watchstander on the bridge, and tells him to go down there. I can hear him open the door.
It's a very distinct like creak and slam sound, a very heavy door. And I can see his flashlight as he comes out. He's got a life jacket on himself and he's got another life jacket in his hand in case he has to reach out and grab this person and throw him in a life jacket to prevent him from hurting themselves.
So the OD, she sends the bosun's mate of the watch down and a couple minutes later, he comes up on the radio and he says, there's no one up here. Right away, my heart sank. My immediate thought was that this person had jumped over the side or fallen over the side and we didn't see it happen. I expected that we're gonna be looking for a man overboard throughout the night.
But I immediately pick up the night vision and I see right away that the person is there still. I hand him to her, she can still see him there. So now I'm thinking that the BMO probably had to walk through like a lit up space to get out there. And so his natural night vision just isn't adjusted enough to see this person.
We're on the radio, I'm yelling, we're trying to guide him to where this person is standing. We can see him shining his flashlight right in the spot where the shadow is. And we see the BMO walk up right where this person is standing. We're telling him the whole time, he's right there, he's right there, he's right in front of you. How do you not see him?
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Chapter 3: How does the Coast Guardsman describe the eerie figure he sees on the ship?
So the next day I'm sitting on the mess deck between meals, kind of just wasting some time. But at the same time, I'm thinking about this shadow that I saw last night. Ghost stories are very common on these boats. I've always been a sort of what I would call maybe a loose believer, but I've never seen one. So how can I possibly say one way or the other?
And then the OOD from that night comes up and sits down. That's abnormal behavior. Officers don't sit on the enlisted mess deck. They have their own sort of eating area cloistered from the rest of the ship. And traditionally officers aren't supposed to sit there unless they ask you. And so for her to come over here and sit down, she clearly has something on her mind.
Really, before I had a chance to say anything, she said, I saw it again. After I got off watch, I went to my room and it was standing in the hallway. She just described it as just a black man-shaped figure. Right away, I just got chills. My hairs on my arms stood up. It wasn't just this figure that stood on an unreachable part of the ship, you know, 70 feet away from me.
It's now something that I could turn the corner and see at any given moment. Within the next few days, you know, I started hearing stories about, I went out on the fantail to smoke in the night and I saw someone standing there and raise my phone up to their face to see who it was and there just wasn't anybody there.
Or about seeing a shadow of a man while they were making their rounds before they went to watch. That they were in the gym and saw just this shadow of a person. At this point, I felt pretty afraid that I was going to now run into this thing anywhere that I went. It's capable of moving around the ship. What else is it capable of? What is it going to do the next time I run into it?
About a week after that initial incident, we're having what we call quarters where we all get together and the executive officer and the commanding officer, they discuss our upcoming plans, they make announcements. The executive officer stands up and he goes, oh, and we've got a burial at sea that we need volunteers for. I'm thinking, what? What are you talking about? Burial at sea?
Nobody's dead. Nobody died on this boat. Come to find out, since we left Florida on our way back up to New England, we have been carrying this urn on board. And it's been tucked away in one of the officer's staterooms for safekeeping. And the urn belonged to a former electrician's mate in the Coast Guard.
The electrician's mate had been in the Coast Guard in the 80s on board this particular ship, responding to search and rescue. What he requested was to be buried at sea in the vicinity of where his first SAR case was. At this point, it starts to make sense. This was probably the man that was walking around the boat.
Anytime you run into an old veteran, one of the first things they want to do is take a look at the ship that they used to be on, see what's changed and see who's working and how things are going. I think he was just trying to get his bearings and see what's changed, see what stayed the same, reminisce in a way.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the shadowy figure to the Coast Guardsman?
The original score for that piece was by Lauren Newsome. It was produced by Zoe Frigno. On Snapchat Returns, we wake up the gods. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Something Sacred episode. Featuring amazing stories from Snap's evil twin podcast, Spooked. Our question, how do you wake a god? Our next story begins on a spring night in 1986.
Thousands of people have gathered in Hilo, Hawaii, not just from around the islands, from the four corners of the earth to witness the largest, the most prestigious hula competition in the world. As the sun sets over Hilo, revelers pack into Kanakaole Stadium. The rafters. Air tastes rich with the smell of Kahlua pork and the sound of ancient drums. And in the distance, dark clouds roll in.
Snap judgment.
Good evening and welcome to the 23rd Annual Merry Monarch Festival Hula Competition. We are here live in Hilo. Tonight, the Kahipo Competition, where 30 halau's will be sharing the ancient dances of Hawai'i.
Leanne Durant is backstage with the other dancers in her halau, or hula school. After nine months of practice and preparation, they're about to take the stage and perform their rendition of the three windstorms of Hina.
The women's chant, Kimo, speaks of the goddess Hina from Molokai and her three devastating winds that were able to bruise skins and devastate lands. And so we should get from these dancers, male and female, very strong, emotional, kahiko, ancient dancers. Should be very interesting this evening. And we were all ready to go and we're standing in a circle.
And then all of a sudden, the lights went out. It's pitch black. The storm is going crazy. That's when the dread really comes, like, I had bad feelings from the very beginning of learning the dance. I was like, okay, what do we do to stop this?
Leigh-Anne has been dancing hula for almost as long as she can remember. As a girl growing up in Honolulu, she learned to dance a version of hula called hula awana. It's an instrumental style of hula that became popular after the Hawaiian language was banned in the islands.
I grew up in the generation where Hawaiian language, hula, was not accepted. During the overthrow of our monarchy, we were illegally taken by the United States. And once that happened, as a people, we weren't allowed to speak our language. Ancient hula was underground because we were not allowed to dance it.
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Chapter 5: How do the hula sisters prepare for their performance amidst unexpected weather?
But it was just really a fun time. It was a really bonding time. Each halal would have their own fundraiser with their own little signature to it. And because even though we were in competition, we would support each other. We would go to each other's fundraisers. We would help them. They would help us. It was like a huge, huge family. But it was a lot of work. We'd make our own costumes.
We'd make our own lei. We'd have to raise money to... get there and be able to pay for our hotels, our vans.
Not to mention the hours each week spent practicing the dances they were going to perform.
They would have a dance of your choice, and then whoever the committee was would choose a dance where every halal danced the same, but each kubu brought their own spirit to it.
They'd start rehearsing their dances in September and work on them all the way through to the competition in the spring. But for Leigh-Anne and the other dancers in Halau, Mohalla, Ilima, the point of all this hard work wasn't just to win. Although, in her first five years with the group, they did win. Three times.
What we would strive for was to share our hula and our interpretation with everyone.
And then came 1986 and the three windstorms of Hina.
It was about the goddess Hina. She's one of the oldest goddesses in Hawaii. And she was the female that could generate force in Hawaiian cosmology. And she was kind of a protector of the land, too. She had this gourd, and if the people wouldn't take care of the land, she would open her gourd just a little bit.
When she opened that gourd just a little bit, the rain got stronger, the wind started to pick up, and it was kind of like a warning to the people that you better take care of business. And so as the chant goes on, the people still don't heed her call or, you know, pay attention. So she opens her gourd a little more.
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Chapter 6: What feelings arise in the dancers as they prepare for the competition?
I sat on the sidewalk kind of along the fence. I would just keep kind of just taking a deep breath. I would always just tell myself, just let it go. Just let it go. Once you get on that stage, you're going to forget all your worldly worries.
The Snap Judgment Something Sacred episode continues right after the break. Stay tuned. Welcome back to Snap Judgment. The Something Sacred episode. Featuring amazing stories from Snap's evil twin podcast, Spooked. Snap Judgment.
As she sat there, breathing in and out, Leanne could hear the first women's group take the stage inside the stadium and start to perform Hina's chant.
We welcome you, the people, throughout the state of Hawaii, from all of the Hawaiian islands. And now, from Las Vegas, Nevada, under the direction of Kumu Hula, Wayne Panokei. This is our first opportunity to see the Wahine competition chant, which will always be performed first. And then as I could hear the chanting on the stage, it started to rain. It came so fast.
Pretty soon it was pouring rain. At first I didn't think anything because Hilo is unpredictable. It always does things like that, you know? So I went in and I started dressing. And then my hula sisters came. We dressed under the bleachers so we could hear what was going on on the stage.
Making their first appearance at the Mary Monarch Festival, another opportunity to see Hina and her devastating wins. As I was dressing my hula sisters, I kept watching the rain and I was noticing like the gutters of the tennis stadium was, the water was just gushing out and it was coming really quickly. All of a sudden, I just felt like this is the story.
The rain kept coming and the rain kept coming. It seemed like every time I heard the chant, the rain got worse and worse and worse. I was just like observing and thinking, wow, this is like the first storm. Clouds were really dark and heavy and I could hear the chanting and I would see lightning or hear the thunder. And then I went to, this is like the second storm.
We're dancing about the story and the story is coming true. Everybody's on stage, like they're chanting and their energy is there and they're bringing this to life. So I felt very uncomfortable and I did not want to go on that stage. What if we were the ones that she decided then and there, let's open the gourd the third time and it would be destruction of man. And the stadium was full of man.
So I really felt dreadful. but I was not going to disappoint my kumu or my hula sisters. Like, I didn't want to be the one that was like, I don't want to do this, you know. Because not performing on Kahiko night automatically disqualified us from the competition. And we've worked so hard, you've sacrificed. You know, we've had girls sacrifice being in sports, going to proms.
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Chapter 7: What decision do the hula sisters make regarding their performance during the storm?
And I just kept thinking in my mind, We need to break the cycle. We have to do something to stop, to stop the momentum of this storm. And the only way I knew how to break the cycle would be to not dance. And then one of my hula sisters that was standing next to me, she told me that she was afraid and she didn't want to go out and dance. And several other people came up and told me that.
I went into care, nurturing mode. So I said, okay, I'll go talk to Kumu and see what happens. So I left the circle and I went up to her and I said, Mopu, I have to tell you something. We don't feel good about dancing. There was no anger. She just said, okay. So she came to the group and she talked to us and said, do you not want to dance?
You know, of course, everybody's kind of like, oh, what should I say? And then I just said, well, I don't want to. And then the majority of the girls were like, yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to.
Meanwhile, out in the audience, somebody had started to sing.
I don't remember what song, but just to take the tension off, I think, someone started to sing, and then everyone was singing. So despite the festive mood, it was haunting, if not coincidental, to think that the night's intense lightning and thunderstorm literally shook Edith Kanaka Ole Indoor Tennis Stadium. The storm caused a 40-minute blackout. Eventually, the lights went on.
With the storm raging against the black sky, the announcer got on the mic.
He says, I'd like to announce our next halau, halau mo, halau iima, under the direction of Ma Puana de Silva. She comes up, goes up the ramp by herself, goes to a mic in the middle of the stage. And nobody knew what she was going to say. But then she said, we have decided that our girls will not be performing this evening. My concern and care is first for my ladies. Thank you.
Then everybody was clapping. I think they were clapping because she made her students number one. It mattered. What we felt mattered to her, and that we were willing to be disqualified. As soon as Mapuana came back from being on stage and making that announcement, the rain just stopped.
As we were undressing and putting our costumes away and taking care of everything, it went back to being a light mist with a little breeze. And it was no rain for the rest of the competition. I don't know what would have happened if we went up. There were a whole bunch of halau after us. They dance, no problem. But I felt it's not meant to be danced by us.
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Chapter 8: What impact does the storm have on the Merrie Monarch Festival and the dancers' performance?
Tell me about it. Spooked at SnapJudgment.org because there's nothing better than a spooked story from a spooked listener. Spooked Studios stands centered between this world and the next, cloaked by KQED in San Francisco. Don't seek to find it. Let's it seek to find you.
No Snap Studio content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission.
On Team Spooked, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51, and Spooked is brought to you by the team that loves to hula dance, except for Mark Vistage. No, Mark prefers to dance with the devil. Pale Moonlight.
There's David Kim, Zoe Ferrigno, Eric Yanez, Marissa Dodge, Regina Berriaco, Miles Lassie, Taylor Ducat, Sui Chu, Evan Stern, Eve Jeffcoat, Ishael Lopez, Jack Darrell, Doug Stewart, Nicholas March, the Spook theme song is by Pat Massini-Miller. My name is Gunn Washington. And you know, on the way to my auntie's house, my auntie's place, I'm contemplating my little quest for the divine.
A search I know she would think was silly. My auntie, she always wanted kids of her own. I think she did. I think that she did. But it never happened that way for her. So I believe this was my personal stroke of good fortune because
When I was in the crazy at my house, she could sometimes be the escape, the respite, the hug, the hot meal, the field trip fee, the couch to sleep on, the kind word, the new kicks, the gas money, the good book, the screaming from the stands at the graduation, the address to write down when I didn't have an address. Emergency contact. Well, I didn't have an emergency contact.
All these little things, I think about this, walking to her tiny apartment, busy searching for the divine, but here the divine is shining bright in front of me, and now the divine is cussing me out, flitting all that cold air inside, leaving her door wide open.
Never, ever, ever, ever
Never turn out the light.
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