Vampire Folklore By Region - Asia

Asia

Rooted in older folklore, the modern belief in vampires spread throughout Asia with tales of ghoulish entities from the mainland, to vampiric beings from the islands of Southeast Asia. India also developed other vampiric legends. The Bhūta or Prét is the soul of a man who died an untimely death. It wanders around animating dead bodies at night, attacking the living much like a ghoul. In northern India, there is the BrahmarākŞhasa, a vampire-like creature with a head encircled by intestines and a skull from which it drank blood. Japan has no native legends about vampires. Japanese vampires made their first appearances in the Cinema of Japan during the late 1950s.

Legends of female vampire-like beings who can detach parts of their upper body occur in the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia and Indonesia. There are two main vampire-like creatures in the Philippines: the Tagalog mandurugo ("blood-sucker") and the Visayan manananggal ("self-segmenter"). The mandurugo is a variety of the aswang that takes the form of an attractive girl by day, and develops wings and a long, hollow, thread-like tongue by night. They use an elongated proboscis-like tongue to suck fetuses off pregnant women. They also prefer to eat entrails (specifically the heart and the liver) and the phlegm of sick people. The manananggal is described as being an older, beautiful woman capable of severing its upper torso in order to fly into the night with huge bat-like wings and prey on unsuspecting, sleeping pregnant women in their homes. The tongue is used to suck up blood from a sleeping victim.

The Malaysian Penanggalan may be either a beautiful old or young woman who obtained her beauty through the active use of black magic or other unnatural means, and is most commonly described in local folklores to be dark or demonic in nature. She is able to detach her fanged head which flies around in the night looking for blood, typically from pregnant women. Malaysians would hang jeruju (thistles) around the doors and windows of houses, hoping the Penanggalan would not enter for fear of catching its intestines on the thorns. The Leyak is a similar being from Balinese folklore. A Pontianak, Kuntilanak or Matianak in Indonesia, or Langsuir in Malaysia, is a woman who died during childbirth and became undead, seeking revenge and terrorizing villages. She appeared as an attractive woman with long black hair that covered a hole in the back of her neck, which she sucked the blood of children with. Filling the hole with her hair would drive her off. Corpses had their mouths filled with glass beads, eggs under each armpit, and needles in their palms to prevent them from becoming langsuir.

In Cambodia, the Ab ((Khmer)), similar to the Penanggalan is either a young or an old woman which detaches her head at night through windows of houses looking for lungs, hearts and blood of dead or alive animals and returns back to her body in the day. Married Abs go to bed quickly and starts detaching their heads. Most of them do not allow anyone to go into the room and their husbands are afraid of them, some might even run away from the house. In movies, women turn into abs through a special holy water but according to local legends it is passed through heredity. Abs are considered to be afraid of humans but will run after them if they are afraid of her. She might get her intestines stuck into thorns. The Abs like a river go along a certain path and remembers it very carefully.

Jiang Shi (simplified Chinese: 僵尸; traditional Chinese: 僵屍 or 殭屍; pinyin: jiāngshī; literally "stiff corpse"), sometimes called "Chinese vampires" by Westerners, are corpses that are usually reanimated due to magical reasons. In ancient China, people always had the preference of being buried in their hometowns, and when a person dies in a land that is not their hometown, their family members hire a sorcerer to bring back their deceased family member. The family commissions the sorcerer in their village to travel to the place of the person's death, locate the corpse, and to write a spell and stick it upon the corpses's face, in which the spell-paper contains their name, birthdate, and some other words to reanimate the corpse. Once the paper is stuck upon the corpses's face, the newly created Jiang Shi would follow the sorcerer by hopping around, in which the sorcerer would lead it back to its hometown for burial (this was often a last-resort choice used by families with not enough money to hire a cart to carry the corpse back). Usually, the sorcerer would travel by night, and would at least have around three Jiang Shi traveling with it. But when the written spell-paper falls or is pulled off of the Jiang Shi (in the case the sorcerer is not paid the agreed amount for his doings, he might rip off the Jiang Shi's spell-paper), it gains its own consciousness, and all the power that the sorcerer formerly had over it would be lost. Instead of being an obedient corpse that followed the sorcerer, the Jiang Shi would be rampant and dangerous. The freed Jiang Shi would begin killing living creatures to absorb life essence (qì) from their victims. They are said to be created when a person's soul (魄 pò) fails to leave the deceased's body. Some unusual features of the Chinese vampire include its long, curved fingernails, perhaps derived from the appearance of growing fingernails on corpses due to flesh recession, and its greenish-white furry skin, perhaps derived from fungus or mould growing on corpses.