Hawaii: What is more unsettling than a monster? Someone who looks completely ordinary until you realize they have no face.

Transcript

Host:

Tonight on the Midnight Drive, every island has its ghost stories.

Some belong to the forests, some belong to the mountains, and some seem to wait beside
the road, appearing for only a moment before quietly disappearing into the night.

Tonight we’re exploring two of Hawaii’s most enduring legends.

The Green Lady, said to wander the island searching for a child she can no longer find,
the Faceless Lady, a quiet figure whose missing features somehow make her more unsettling
than any monster could ever be.

I’ve always thought that was interesting.

The stories that stay with us are rarely the loud ones.

They’re the ones that leave us just enough unanswered that our imagination quietly takes over.

Maybe that’s why every time we’re absolutely certain we saw someone standing in the darkness,
we look back, just to make sure.

I’ve always thought the faceless things are more unsettling than monstrous ones.

Give a ghost glowing red eyes, sharpened teeth, six arms, and a soundtrack that sounds like
somebody dropped a piano down a staircase, and my brain immediately files it away as
fiction.

It’s a monster.

Monsters belong in stories.

But remove someone’s face, leave everything else completely ordinary, and suddenly my
imagination starts doing all of the work.

I think that’s because we as humans spend an incredible amount of time reading faces.

Before anyone says a single word, we’re already making thousands of tiny observations.

Do you resonate with this?
Think about it.

Are they happy?
Tired?
Anxious?
Dangerous?
Kind?
Interested?
Bored?
We don’t even realize we’re doing it.

It’s automatic.

Take away the face, and suddenly the entire operating system crashes.

There’s nowhere for our brains to land.

And that’s one reason why I think stories like Hawaii’s Faceless Lady have survived
for so long.

Not because they’re especially violent, not because they’re filled with elaborate mythology,
but because they’re psychologically perfect.

The version I hear the most often is remarkably simple.

Picture it.

Someone is driving late at night, just like we are here on the midnight drive.

Sometimes they’re walking, sometimes they’re alone.

They notice a woman.

She’s standing quietly.

Nothing feels particularly threatening.

Maybe she asks for help.

Maybe she simply turns toward them.

And then they realize she has no face, no eyes, no mouth, no expression.

Just smooth skin, where every instinct insists that features should be.

That’s it.

Story’s over.

Nothing chases you, nothing jumps out, nothing explodes.

You simply leave carrying an image in your brain that your brain refuses to organize.

I’ve noticed something interesting over the years.

The older that I get, the less interested I am in asking, did that really happen?
And the more interested I’ve become in asking, why does that image survive?
Because folklore is strangely efficient.

Every generation forgets thousands of stories.

The ones that remain usually touch something deep inside of us.

Fear of the dark, fear of loss, fear of isolation, fear of becoming invisible, or maybe fear
of losing identity itself.

Faces are fascinating.

Think about how quickly we recognize someone we love from across a crowded airport.

You don’t consciously measure the distance between their eyes or the shape of their jaw.

You just know.

The face is where relationship lives.

It’s where joy shows up before laughter.

It’s where grief arrives before tears.

It’s where we apologize.

It’s where we forgive.

It’s where we quietly ask, are you okay?
Take all of that away, and something profound disappears with it.

Maybe that’s why masks have always carried so much power.

Not because they hide us, but because they interrupt recognition.

For a few moments, certainty disappears, and uncertainty is fertile ground for stories.

I’ve had moments driving at night where I could swear somebody was standing beside the
road.

Then the headlights get closer, and it’s a mailbox, or a tree, or one of those reflective
construction barrels that somehow looks like a person until the last possible second.

Our brains are constantly trying to find faces.

Clouds become faces.

The front of our car becomes a face.

An electrical outlet becomes a tiny surprised face.

We’re pattern recognition machines.

Maybe that’s why a faceless person feels so fundamentally wrong.

The expectation exists, but the fulfillment never arrives.

I’ve wondered if that’s part of the reason so many paranormal encounters happen at night.

Not because darkness creates ghost, but because darkness gives imagination room to participate.

The mind begins filling in details that daylight would politely correct.

Right?
Now, before anyone accuses me of explaining away every single ghost story ever, I should
probably admit something.

I’ve had moments in my own life that I still can’t comfortably explain.

It’s nothing movie-worthy, it’s just strange little experiences where something feels off.

You look over your shoulder.

You suddenly become aware that you’re completely alone, or maybe completely not alone.

Then the feeling disappears before you can examine it.

I suspect almost everyone has experienced that at least once.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why we continue telling these stories.

Not because we’re convinced, but because we’re curious.

The Green Lady fascinates me for almost the opposite reason.

She’s often described as searching.

Searching for a lost child.

Searching for someone who never returned.

Searching for someone and something that can never quite be recovered.

Notice how different that feels.

One legend removes identity.

The other refuses to let go of relationship.

One story asks, what happens if a face disappears?
The other quietly asks, what happens when love has nowhere left to go?
I’ve always thought that grief behaves a little like that.

People imagine grief as a straight line.

You lose someone, time passes, you heal.

But anyone who’s actually lived long enough knows that’s not really how it works.

Grief wanders.

You hear a song in the grocery store, you smell someone’s perfume, you drive past an
old house, and suddenly you’re standing in a completely ordinary Tuesday afternoon carrying
20 years of memory.

Maybe that’s why ghost stories so often involve people searching, looking, waiting, returning.

Not because they refuse to leave, but because love rarely follows a schedule.

Maybe folklore understands something psychologists eventually discovered.

Memory is deeply attached to place.

Let us know what you think about all of this.

The faceless woman?
The green woman?
Let us know in the comments below wherever you might be listening.

You my friends are listening too.

The midnight drive.

I think for me, my memories are inspired the fastest by smell, then music or sound, and
then visuals.

So saying that memory is deeply attached to place for me resonates obviously with that
third bucket.

Everybody’s a little bit different.

Walking into your childhood home, an entire conversation’s come rushing back to you.

Wild, right?
If you visit an old classroom and suddenly you remember a teacher’s voice you haven’t
heard in decades, that’s what I’m talking about.

If I see something, or I smell something, or I hear something, then yeah, a lot of times
it is an audible memory that comes back to me.

So I very much resonate with the memory of a teacher’s voice.

Or if I were to walk into my old childhood home, if I close my eyes I would be able to
smell the kinds of potpourri or the candles that were burning when I was growing up.

Now if you stand beside the ocean where someone once stood with you, we’ve got visuals and
we’ve got sound with this one, and for just a moment they’re strangely right there with
you again.

Now whether that’s supernatural or simply the astonishing architecture of human memory,
I couldn’t tell you.

And tonight I’m perfectly content leaving that question exactly where I found it.

Some mysteries don’t become smaller when we explain them.

Sometimes they become more meaningful when we simply sit with them for a while.

You know what I think is disappearing from the modern world?
The ability to sit with uncertainty.

We’ve talked about this a lot on the show.

Uncertainty.

Not to solve it, not to explain it.

Just live beside it for a little while.

Every strange light needs a debunking video.

Every old photograph needs someone drawing red circles around pixels.

Every folklore story becomes an argument where one side insists ghosts absolutely exist and
the other side insists anyone who disagrees is irrational.

Meanwhile I’m over here thinking we’re asking the least interesting question imaginable.

Because whether the green lady or the faceless lady literally exist isn’t actually what
keeps these stories alive.

People keep telling them because they recognize something of themselves inside them.

I’ve started paying attention to ghost stories people tell when they aren’t trying to impress
anyone.

They’re almost never, I saw a monster.

Instead they sound like this.

I could have sworn I saw my grandfather sitting in that chair.

Or I heard my mom call after she passed away.

Or I walked into that old house and immediately started crying for reasons I still don’t
understand.

The stories aren’t really about fear, they’re about relationship.

About memory refusing to disappear on command.

Maybe that’s why I don’t particularly enjoy horror that exists only to shock.

The monster jumps out, everybody screams, the credits roll, nothing stays with me.

But tell me about a woman who still walks the same road looking for someone she loves.

And I’ll be thinking about that 10 days later.

Because I understand searching.

Everybody understands searching.

We’ve all searched for a version of life that no longer exists.

We’ve all revisited an old neighborhood hoping it would somehow feel exactly the way
it did when we were 12 years old.

We’ve all looked at an empty chair without meaning to.

Memory does strange things.

It turns ordinary places into emotional landmarks.

I wonder if that’s why Hawaii feels so spiritually rich.

Not because it’s filled with supernatural activity, but because the islands seem to encourage
relationship.

Relationship with mountains, with rain, with the ocean, with ancestors, with stories, with
the people who walked these paths long before we arrived.

You know, I’ve always found it interesting that so many indigenous cultures speak about
land almost as though it’s alive.

Not metaphorically, relationally.

The mountain is not a resource.

The river is not a product.

The forest is not empty space waiting to be developed.

It’s part of the community.

Meanwhile, modern culture tends to ask a completely different question.

What can this place do for me?
How many photographs can I get?
How many restaurants can I visit?
How many experiences can I collect before flying home?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying beautiful places, not at all.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve become remarkably skilled at consumption and surprisingly
inexperienced with reverence.

That’s one reason the Hawaiian stories keep lingering in my mind.

They quietly refuse to perform.

The night marchers don’t show up on demand.

The green lady isn’t interested in becoming a tourist attraction.

The faceless lady doesn’t explain herself.

The stories simply exist.

You can listen or not.

They don’t particularly care.

There’s something deeply refreshing about that, isn’t there?
I’ve also noticed something while putting this week together.

Every story we’ve explored has quietly pointed back to exactly the same idea.

The Pacific Ocean.

Think about it.

Monday night, the ocean became patience.

Tuesday night, the roads became respect.

Tonight, memory becomes relationship.

Different stories, different legends.

Same emotional current moving underneath all of them.

That’s usually how good folklore works.

The details change.

The values remain.

Respect, humility, attention, relationship.

Maybe that’s why I don’t think these stories are trying to frighten us.

I think they’re just trying to slow us down.

To make us notice where we are.

To remind us that not every silence needs background music.

Not every unanswered question needs a podcast explaining it.

Not every mystery needs to become certainty.

I’ve become increasingly suspicious about certainty.

It usually arrives carrying a megaphone.

Wonder almost always arrives whispering.

It says, that’s interesting.

Or I’ve never thought of it that way.

Or maybe even I wonder why.

Dot dot dot.

Those are small sentences, but they’ve changed my life far more than certainty ever has.

There’s another thing I keep coming back to.

Imagine for a moment that every ghost story is completely false.

Every single one.

No spirits, no apparitions, no unexplained phenomena whatsoever.

Would these stories still have value?
I think the answer is absolutely yes.

Because the green lady teaches us something about grief.

The faceless lady teaches us something about identity.

The night marchers teach us something about humility.

And the Pacific Ocean teaches us something about perspective.