Soucouyant

The soucouyant is the vampiric witch of the folklore of Trinidad and Tobago, and her name arrived with the French Creole that was spoken on the islands before English. The tale describes her as a common old woman, just another neighbor during the day, who at nightfall locks herself in, sheds her skin like someone taking off a dress and leaves it rolled up in a mortar or hidden in a corner of the house. Without skin she becomes a ball of fire that crosses the sky, and therefore any strange light moving at night over the rooftops is attributed to her. The creature is born from the crossing of African traditions brought by slavery, European beliefs about witches and the practices of Caribbean obeah.

Already turned into a flame, she enters the houses through the cracks and through the open windows and searches for the sleeping ones. She perches on the victim and drinks her blood slowly, without waking her; whoever wakes up with purple marks on the arms or neck and an unexplained weakness knows what visited her. She prefers small children and the elderly, and if she drinks too much the victim dies. Some versions add that she keeps the blood to stay young or to sell it to other obeah practitioners. Her fiery form is at the same time her advantage and her betrayal: she can enter wherever she wants, but anyone who looks at the sky sees her coming.

Sus two weaknesses are those of an obsessive creature. The first is the skin: if someone finds it while she is outside and rubs it with salt and pepper, upon returning she cannot put it on, she writhes in pain and dawn surprises her exposed. The second is the count: if rice or sand is scattered before her door, the soucouyant is obliged to collect grain by grain before continuing, and the night ends up counting for her. It is a remedy that appears in the folklore of half the world applied to nocturnal creatures, and here it becomes the domestic defense par excellence. At the first sun, trapped outside her skin, she burns and is reduced to ashes.

The soucouyant is not alone: it belongs to a Caribbean family that shares the trade with different names. The Old Higue from Guyana does the same, and the loogaroo (whose name comes directly from the French loup-garou, werewolf) appears in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad and even in Mauritius, where it arrived by the same colonial routes. All share a revealing pattern: they are elderly women, live alone and are neighbors of those who fear them. As in so many cases of witchcraft, the figure served to point out older women without family to protect them. In contemporary Caribbean literature that background has been re-read, and the soucouyant appears today both as a monster and as an image of the woman whom the community expelled.