Meet the Manananggal

The whole journey into Kalibayan really began with me reminiscing about a particular monster my family used to tell me about when I was growing up in the Philippines. My family had ZERO qualms about scaring the shit out of the children in the family, no matter the age. I don’t remember the exact age the scary stories started, but they’re among some of my earliest memories. I immigrated to America when I was 5 years old and returned for a visit when I was 7, so that should give you some idea of how young I was when I first started hearing ghost stories.

The Manananggal sticks out because, 1.) she’s fucking terrifying, 2.) she’s gross, 3.) I recall watching something on TV about her that scarred me. After trawling through the internet for shows and movies that were released from 1986, the year I was born, to 1991, before I immigrated, the one that tugged at my memory the most is the 1989 film, Impaktita, directed by Teddy Page and written by Leonard Ambrose and Rodolfo Dabao, Jr.

I mean, look at this:

Yeah, I know. My parents are cool! To this day, I still enjoy watching (and sometimes torturing myself with) scary movies. Horror is supreme!

What is the Manananggal?

The Philippines has over 7,000 islands, yet everyone presents a unified front when describing this monster. She’s a subspecies of the Aswang, which is an umbrella term for various shape-shifting evil spirits in Filipino folklore, like vampires, witches, cannibals, human/beast hybrids, ghouls, etc.

The word “manananggal” comes from the Tagalog word “tanggál,” meaning “to separate” or “to remove.” This brings us to the Manananggal’s defining characteristic.

The stories go that, during the day, she walks around as a beautiful young lady, charming the pants off of everyone she crosses paths with. But at night, she detaches her torso from her bottom half, entrails trailing beneath her, sprouts large, bat-like wings, and flies around looking for victims. Once she finds you, she snakes a long, proboscis tongue into your body and sucks out your insides. Awesome!

Historically, the manananggal targeted pregnant women and newborn children. Wikipedia says she also targeted newlyweds, lovers, and grooms who were abandoned before marriage. Most sources on the internet agree with the pregnant women and newborn children bit.

The reason for this is COLONIALISM.

Historians have traced the birth of the mananggal to the arrival of the Spanish in the Philippines. What’s left of historical records that the Spanish didn’t destroy shows that pre-colonial Filipino women enjoyed positions of power in society as well as quite a bit of sexual freedom.

There is evidence that women were “shamans, priestesses, mediums, healers and midwives in ancient Philippines.” The Spanish created the manananggal, a female monster that preyed on pregnant women and children. If at any time a miscarriage happened in the village, those very women who at first were sought out to help, gradually became suspects. The very act of separating the manananggal’s torso from her lower half has come to be seen as a way for the Spanish to symbolically separate the sexually free pre-colonial Filipino woman from her sexual organs.

No doubt, you can see how witch hunts come for women, no matter where they are in the world. There’s nothing scarier than women you can’t control!

Interestingly, and something I didn’t know until doing this deep dive in manananggal history, is that there are global equivalents. In Malaysia, we have the penanggal. In Thailand, the krasue. These don’t separate from their torso, however, but from their heads.

So how do you vanquish a manananggal? It involves a lil bit of a treasure hunt!

You have to sprinkle salt, ash, or garlic on the bottom half of its body. That will prevent it from reattaching its torso. Then, when the sun comes up, POOF! Dead. But good luck finding the lower half. They’re probably really good at hiding that shit.