Penanggalan

The Penanggalan is one of the most feared creatures of Malay and Indonesian folklore: a woman who by day passes for an ordinary neighbor, often a midwife or practitioner of occult arts, and who at night becomes a flying head that drags her viscera. According to the accounts collected by Walter Skeat in Malay Magic (1900), her condition is born from a beauty ritual or black magic that is executed badly, or from a pact that forces the woman to detach her head every night to seek blood. The most characteristic detail of the legend is what she does upon returning: she submerges her entrails in a jar of vinegar so that they shrink and fit again inside the body before dawn, and that is why it is said that it smells of vinegar wherever she has been. The same creature reappears with other names in neighboring cultures, which reveals a shared archetype throughout Southeast Asia: it is the Leyak in Bali and the Krasue in Thailand. The legend condenses the rural fear of secret female rituals and of the woman who seeks a beauty that does not correspond to her.

By day the Penanggalan is indistinguishable from any other woman of the village, with the entire body and normal appearance, which makes it almost impossible to identify it. At nightfall, the head separates from the body taking with it the stomach, the lungs, the liver and the intestines, which hang below forming a moist and shiny cluster. Many accounts describe those viscera emitting a faint phosphorescence, greenish or whitish, which allows seeing it cross the sky in silence like a wandering light. The face is pale and terrifying, framed by a long black mane that waves in the air, and the eyes shine with a sickly red. The decapitated body remains hidden at home, inert, waiting for the return of the head. That double nature, impeccable woman by day and dismembered horror at night, is the core of the terror it inspires: anyone could be it.

The Penanggalan flies without noise using its own hanging entrails as ballast and rudder, and it slides through the narrowest openings, the cracks in the walls and the gaps under the roof of the houses built on stilts. Its favorite prey are the women who have just given birth and the newborns: it drinks the blood and feeds in the trance of childbirth, so that the hemorrhages, the puerperal fevers and the crib deaths that traditional medicine could not explain were attributed to its visit. In some accounts it emits a soft moan, similar to the cry of a baby, to attract its victims or to locate them in the dark. It attacks only at night and must return to the body before dawn; if it does not succeed, or if the body has been altered, it dies with the first light. That is why the Penanggalan is, above all, a symbol of the danger that lurked for the mother and the child in the villages before modern medicine.

The defenses against the Penanggalan attack precisely what makes it vulnerable: the exposed viscera and the need to return to the body. The most widespread remedy is to surround the house, and especially the windows and the space under the floor where a woman in labor rests, with thorny plants: pineapple leaves, jeruju branches (sea thistle) or rattan spines, which catch on the hanging organs and tear them when the creature tries to enter. Garlic is also attributed with repulsion, which is hung on doors and windows. The way to kill it, however, involves the body it left behind: if someone finds it during the night and fills the neck hollow with glass, or turns it over, or directly burns it, the head cannot reunite with it and is consumed at dawn. These customs, which Skeat describes among the Malays, turn the discovery of the decapitated body into the key to ending it.