#tiyanak

The Aswang

An artwork of an aswang uploaded to Wikipedia by H.M.Bec

Aswangs are often considered as the most ubiquitous of the Filipino monsters. When you look up monsters from the Philippines, this may be the top result. Aswangs are often portrayed as people who transform into ghoulish creatures that feast on human flesh but especially children, babies, and fetuses. There's so many stories and variations of aswangs, however, that some of the monsters in this list are actually sometimes considered as part of the aswang category depending on the source or who you ask.

Aswangs are shapeshifters, often turning into dogs, pigs, and many other creatures, in order to stalk their prey in the middle of the night.

Aswangs are also considered as one of the main stock monsters in FIlipino media so you may see them as the villains of a lot of fantasy series and movies. They're one of the villains that Alexandra Trese faces of regularly on the folklore-inspired supernatural comic book series turned Netflix original animation Trese. They're also the main antagonist in my favorite FIlipino fantaserye series Juan De La Cruz (although I don't particularly like the lead actor anymore lol).

Here's some stuff I've heard about Aswangs from those around me.

Aswangs often won't attack their neighbors and would rather attack neighboring villages/barangays/towns. This is so they avoid detection or suspicion from their community. So, if you suspect your neighbor's an aswang, then you might just be lucky they won't target you.

Aswangs are often said to have come from the province of Capiz. It's an often common joke and stereotype that Capizeños may be aswangs themselves or know people who are aswangs. The people of Capiz are mixed on how they feel about the association with the provincial government seemingly trying to shake off the specific association to their province.

They can go to mass but cannot stay during the consecration of the holy host. Holy water and holy [coconut] oil also boil in their presence.

When you look directly into their eyes, your reflection would be upside-down. They also don't have the dent between the nose and the lips.

They could pass their curse through different ways and may depend on belief or tradition. One belief states that if a person marries an aswang, they also become an aswang.

One of the other beliefs that can turn a person into an aswang is if one makes contact with an aswang's saliva.

According to another belief, a person could also become an aswang if they ingest a black chick alive.

Similarly, an aswang cannot die until they pass their curse to another person (typically a relative). This is done by passing a black stone or chick hidden in their body to the chosen new curse holder.

They hate the typical ghoulish hated items like holy crosses, water, oils, and the classic garlic and salt, but they also hate calamansi (a small Filipino citrus fruit), and my mother had always told me that they hate suha or pomelo (a type of citrus fruit) and the smell of burning rubber.

A typical weapon used to fight against them or ward them off is the buntot pagi or stingray tail that is often sold in occultic shops around the country. You could also buy this from online stores as I've learned (x)(x)(x).

Now here's a story I've heard about them:

A story I had heard was that of the aswang bus. I had heard it repeatedly throughout the years but the basic premise is that there's a bus of a bunch of aswangs from a different province that's traveling to [province you are in] and are hunting down people at night. This is some of the more funny stories about aswangs because I keep imagining an aswang bus driver purposefully running over people and then a bunch of aswang tourists hops off of the bus to drag the body for a snack later.

I honestly might come back to the aswangs topic later since I had just learned some things from a Capizeña who works to help around our house.

The Manananggal

An artwork of an aswang uploaded to Wikipedia by Gian Bernal

The Manananggal is a ghoulish creature and is often times categorized as a kind of aswang. They are typically humanoid creatures that appear as regular people (often women) during the day, but at night their torso severs from their legs and fly away with bat wings. They often feast on fetuses using their long proboscis tongue.

These ghouls share a lot of similarities with the Southeast Asian ghoul called the Penanggal which is a similar creature but instead of their torsos separating, their heads separate from their body alongside their entrails.

Manananggals are also some of the typical stock monsters in Filipino fantasy stories. I can't think of any specific instances of the manananggal being the main character besides the softer depiction of a manananggal girl named Anna in Dayo: Sa Mundo ng Elementalia who acts as a deuteragonist to the human boy Niko. They are also featured in Trese where a tribe of manananggal is shown. They are also the main lead or love interest in some horror movies and even horror romances.

Here's some stuff I've heard about Manananggals

It's name comes from the Tagalog word "tanggal" which means "to remove" or "to separate" and specifically means "the remover" or "the separator". This of course is a reference to the fact that it removes its torso from its legs or separates its body in half.

Unlike the typical aswang which transform back during daylight, the manananggal needs to find their way back to their body or else die by sunlight.

The unattached legs of the manananggal is their weakness. If found by a person, they only need to sprinkle salt or smear crushed garlic on the legs in order to destroy them.

A lot of the typical things that ward off the aswang are also typically effective towards the manananggal.

Similarly to the aswang, manananggals are also said to had come from Capiz.

The list is shorter because honestly, just take what most you've heard about the aswang and apply it here. I don't know specifically if things like the upside-down reflection or the lack of the dent between the nose and lips could apply to manananggals, however, and I don't think I've heard people claiming that about the manananggal.

Now here's a story I've heard about them:

One story I heard that I find quite funny was something my sister heard from one of her high school friends. This friend was struggling to fall asleep at night and was tossing and turning in bed when she heard bat-like fluttering from outside. She went out to inspect the source by looking out the window and was shocked to see a manananggal climbing up a coconut tree and seemingly harvesting the fruit in the middle of the night. She wasn't flying up the tree, she was climbing it.

The next day, an old woman who was selling her goods door-to-door came by their house. She was selling coconuts.

The Tiyanak

A screenshot of a tiyanak from the movie Tiyanak (1988)

The tiyanak is considered as a demonic baby that would transform itself into a regular looking baby, crying in the middle of the night in order to attract their unfortunate target who may feel pity towards the child. The tiyanak may also be classified as an aswang but is typically considered as a separate thing more often than the manananggal from my experience. This creature has noticeably a lot in common with a lot of other Southeast Asian and East Asian myths about demonic babies and toddlers like the tuyol or the tuyul.

Like the previous two, the tiyanak is also part of the typical stock monster antagonists found in Filipino media, but not as much as either the typical aswang or the manananggal. They are often used to add a bit of a scare factor into a story and isn't typically the main antagonist of a story as of recent horror movies (with only a single short B-Movie I could think of called Flight 666 from the Shake, Rattle & Roll horror anthology series. It is not a good movie but it's stupid fun). They are featured, as usual, in Trese as the main supernatural antagonists of a specific story arc. Their depiction from the comic and the Nteflix show has been changed due to the controversial nature of the comic book depiction.

When they appear in a horror series, there's often a sort of reason or lesson as to why one has appeared and typically based on the typical origins of the tiyanak.

The most common belief is that the tiyanak is the ghost or ghoulish corpse that had come from an unbaptized child.

At times, they may be a ghoulish baby that had been created after a woman gets an abortion, other times it is simply just a baby that had died before baptism often as a stillbirth or even as a joint death with their mother.

I had also heard that it may be an abandoned baby that had died to the elements.

It is also believed, the reason that they are cursed to wander the earth after death is because they were not given a name through baptism.

Because of this, when they typically appear in stories, it is often either a story about the bad that could come from abortion or child abandonment depending on the values of the writer.

The tiyanak would also sometimes lead people astray with its cries.

Speaking of its cries, there are some places that believe if the cry sounds loud and near, the tiyanak is actually farther away from you than if you hear the cries to be quieter and farther.

Here's a story I had heard about them:

A common Filipino story of the tiyanak is the parking lot story. Story goes that in certain parking lots of buildings, typically malls, you may hear a baby cry in the middle of the night when you're alone. This is a tiyanak that's trying to lure you in by seemingly tricking you into thinking that it is just an innocent abandoned baby which is sadly common in the country. It is common enough that there are some people who would often want someone to accompany them when they're alone in a parking lot at night.

Further Readings and Sources

As much as I had stated that The Aswangs Project and their handling of discussions about Filipino mythology, specifically Tagalog mythology, is dubious at best, they have a lot of good articles about aswangs that do align with local beliefs so reading through their website for monsters specifically could be a good and free resource. They had also made a documentary that you can watch for free on YouTube that covers a lot of this and more about aswangs.

For written works, I would suggest any of Maximo D. Ramos's works as I've brought up before. There's his published paper The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore which is considered as basically the holy grail of Aswang research, which, as I had stated, take up a bulk of the FIlipino monsters. It's hard to find easily accessible PDFs of the paper and I remember that I found a copy of this or a similar work by Ramos but the link has eluded me.

For a less academic and more fun fictionalized source for Filipino monsters I suggest The Lost Journal of Alejandro Pardo: Meet the Dark Creatures from Philippines Mythology by Budjette Tan and David Hontiveros which is available through Amazon here. It follows a fictional researcher and his discoveries of Filipino monsters and other creatures. It's a pretty easy read with a lot of good information about cryptids and monsters from the Philippines, owing to it's style of found media. If you've seen something like Gravity Falls's officially published Journal 3 from the show's universe, it has a similar vibe to that.