Denizens of the Night
BY ALPER ÖZKAN (MSN/PhD I)
Vampires are ubiquitous in folklore. Just about every culture views blood as something sacred, and from there it's quite easy to move to the idea that there exists some evil creature intent on robbing human beings of their divine essence, stalking the night for sleeping prey to latch onto and drain. This being the case, it should come as no surprise that, in addition to the familiar Slavic "haunts" who fear garlic and can't cross running water, there are also Aztec vampires, Egyptian vampires, Malaysian vampires, Turkish vampires, Chinese vampires and so forth. They all have different appearances and modi operandi -- some shamble like modern zombies, some take to the skies, others assume the guise of night creatures like owls, moths and rats, and others have still more unusual methods of prey capture (such as splitting themselves in two and having the more mobile half fly around -- but I'll get to this in a minute). And since mythology is wont to host weird creatures, some of the bloodsuckers are less terrifying than expected and more on the bizarre side. This column will be about a couple of those, though I'll also try to mix in creepier ones.
First in line is the penanggalan, hailing from the Malay peninsula. Almost always female, this vampiric creature masquerades as a human during the day and only reveals its monstrous nature at night, when it detaches its head from its body, dangling guts and all, and soars into the sky in search of its favorite snack: human infants (Malaysian vampires have a rather sick tendency to love infant blood). Loathe to risk revealing herself as a vampire and thus ruining whatever position in society she has managed to attain in her daytime life, the penanggalan has an insidious method of attack: instead of latching onto the victim, the creature uses a long, root-like tongue that can pass through the smallest cracks of a house, reaching any victim in absolute silence. (I should also note that this is an ingenious way around the difficulty of having to be invited into homes.) Once revealed, however, the vampire is quite easy to kill -- all you have to do is to find the penanggalan's headless body (which has to be preserved in vinegar, so you can just follow the smell) and load it with every sharp implement you can find. At dawn, the penanggalan will come back to her house and try to reattach, with obviously fatal results.
Anyway, enough gut ripping and infant eating -- back to goofy vampires. Yara-ma-yha-who (pronounced like Fred Flintstone's catchphrase, I assume) is what passes for a vampire in Aboriginal folklore. It takes the shape of a short humanoid creature, red in color, not formed from an unhallowed corpse but merely a denizen of the living realm like the rest of us. (But then, if vampire bats are called that, and blood-sucking moths are likewise known as vampire moths, the yara-ma-yha-who rightly deserves to be called a vampire.) It's affiliated with the spirit of the fig tree -- you could think of the fig spirit as the vampire's boss, with the former even holding the power to kill the yara-ma-yha-who by passing straight through its ears, should the latter disappoint it for any reason. The creature lurks in ambush on top of fig trees and, once a suitable victim comes bumbling by, drains their blood by means of suckers on its hands and feet, and then, in a decidedly unvampirish manner, devours them whole. (I can only imagine Kirby, except less pink and more reddish.) Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), the yara-ma-yha-who can't digest humans, so it eventually has to spit them back out -- although whoever gets devoured comes back slightly shorter. And redder. And eventually, with more suckers on their hands than they'd like -- at which point it's time for the former victim to climb the fig tree as a brand new yara-ma-yha-who and look for other hapless fools to devour. In other parts of the world, when a vampire bites you, you become one. In Australia, the rule seems to be, "when a vampire eats you and spits you out enough times, you become one."
Even Turkish folklore is not free of vampires. One example is the albastı, a witch or water spirit, which is the subject of many different local stories. Even though it's not a vampire in the true sense, the single factor linking the various myths is that the albastı feeds on human livers -- which are rich in blood, so I guess it counts. One particular story is curious in that the creature, apparently not content with its rather mundane method of attack (compared to that of certain other vampires), transforms into a strand of hair and mixes herself into her intended victim's food in an attempt to be eaten and then to rip out the victim's liver from within. This sort of attack makes this variant of albastı quite similar to many types of parasites, some of which even look like strands of hair and are large enough to be easily seen with the naked eye (although it's usually the eggs that are ingested, not the adult worms). Perhaps the myth was influenced by our ancestors' observations of such parasites.
As an aside, "red haunt" would be a decent translation of albastı, if you're wondering. Anyway, this week's column is done, so I'm off into the night for, uh, research. Yeah, research -- I need to submit a paper today. I'm definitely not going out to drain blood from hapless victims or anything like that.