Krasue-style flying heads trailing entrails turn up in 9 belief systems, all in Southeast Asia. Living sorcerers who turn dangerous appear on every continent.
Yes, and not only in Thailand. Our data holds 32 belief systems, 44 kinds in all, that describe beings from the same family as the krasue, the krahang and the phi pop: living people who practise sorcery, flying heads, and spirits that possess people and eat their organs. The krasue-style head that detaches and flies with its entrails appears in 9 belief systems from 7 peoples: Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Malay, Balinese, the Dayak of Kalimantan, and Filipino. Outside Southeast Asia we found no flying heads at all.
Living people who turn dangerous through sorcery, on the other hand, turn up on every continent. 25 belief systems in this set give that origin, from the witches of the Akan in Ghana to the skin-walker of the Navajo. What differs is the body. Elsewhere these people mostly turn into animals or stay in human form. Only in Southeast Asia does the head come away from the body and fly off with the guts.
The Thai krasue, krahang and phi pop
Thai sources say the krasue lives inside a woman, often an older one. At night it floats out as a head with its entrails, seen as a ball of light, and goes to eat the organs of women who have just given birth, or of newborns. Villagers therefore stick jujube thorns under the raised floor of the house wherever there is a gap or hole, believing the krasue fears getting its guts snagged. How a krasue comes into being is not stated in the sources we checked.
The krahang is the male counterpart. The source says he is a man who practised sorcery until the magic turned on him. At night he uses a winnowing basket for wings and a rice pestle for a tail, and flies off to eat filth. Our sources give no way to ward him off.
The phi pop is closer to everyday life in Isan. People there believe a pop comes from someone who learned spells, or trained as a phi fa or phi thaen medium, and could not keep the knowledge in check, or who broke a taboo known as khalam. Some households believe it passes down the family, called pop chuea. The pop possesses a person and eats their organs until they die in their sleep, the death called lai tai, and it can never eat enough raw food. The remedy is a spirit doctor who performs a rite to catch the pop and shut it in a mong khong, a fish-trap basket.
Another source on Lao and Isan spirit belief tells the pop differently. There the phi pop is classed as a phi phet, the soul of someone who did evil in a past life or who died tragically, which makes it a ghost of the dead. The first source says the pop is a living person who learned spells. The two sources disagree, and we do not decide which is right.
The krasue's relatives across Southeast Asia
All 9 flying-head beliefs share one picture: a human head with guts or organs hanging below it, out hunting at night. 7 of the 9 say it is a woman, and 7 of the 9 say it hunts pregnant women, women in labour or babies. Khmer sources say the ahp is a woman whose black magic failed until the curse rebounded on her, or who let an evil spirit possess her at night in exchange for power. The ahp drinks the blood of pregnant women and eats placentas, babies and corpses, so Khmer households lay thorny branches around the house, bury the placenta deep and far from home, and keep dogs on guard.
The Malay call it the penanggalan, a living person, usually a woman, who learned black magic until she could take her head off. The head flies with its entrails dangling and drinks the blood of women giving birth until they bleed to death. The defences come in layers: thorny mengkuang pandan around the house, pineapples planted under the floor, scissors or a betel knife under the pillow, and if you find the body left behind, turn it over. The Philippines has the manananggal, a woman who detaches her upper half and sprouts bat wings, then uses a long tongue to suck the unborn child from the womb. Villagers hang garlic at doors and windows and sprinkle salt on the lower half, which then cannot rejoin and dies at sunrise. The name comes from tanggal, 'to remove or separate', the same word as in the Malay penanggalan.
In Bali the leyak is a person who trained in Aji Pengeleakan. By day an ordinary person, by night the head and guts come loose and fly off to suck the blood of unborn or newborn babies; it also eats corpses and can become a pig. The Dayak of Kalimantan have the kuyang, someone who learned black magic for immortality or power, uses kuyang oil, and passes it down the family. Meeting a kuyang's eyes is said to bring a difficult birth. The Indonesian source compares the kuyang with other spirits of the same islands, such as the poppo of Sulawesi, the palasik of Sumatra and the selak of Lombok.
Vietnam is a little different. The ma lai is a person who becomes a ghost at night, reduced to a woman's head with organs hanging below. But the source does not say it hunts women in childbirth; it says it goes out to eat excrement and pull out entrails. In the legends of peoples in north-western Vietnam, the ma lai is a female night ghost hungry for flesh. Looking at the defences, 3 belief systems use something thorny: Thai jujube thorns, Khmer thorn branches and Malay thorny pandan.
| Name | People | Who it is | What it does | Protection |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Krasue | Thai | A spirit living inside a woman, often an older one | Floats at night as a head with entrails; eats the organs of women after childbirth or of babies | Jujube thorns under the raised floor |
| Krahang | Thai | A man whose sorcery turned on him | Flies at night with a winnowing basket for wings and a pestle for a tail; eats filth | Not stated in the source |
| Phi pop | Thai (Isan) | Someone who learned spells and could not control them, broke a khalam taboo, or inherited it | Possesses people and eats their organs until they die in their sleep | A spirit doctor traps it in a mong khong basket |
| Phi pop | Lao and Isan | A phi phet: the soul of someone evil in a past life or who died tragically | Causes trouble for people | A spirit doctor performs a rite |
| Ahp | Khmer | A woman whose black magic failed and rebounded on her | Drinks pregnant women's blood; eats placentas, babies and corpses | Thorny branches round the house, placenta buried deep and far away, guard dogs |
| Ma lai | Vietnamese | A person who becomes a woman's head with hanging organs at night | Eats excrement, pulls out entrails | Not stated in the source |
| Penanggalan | Malay | A living person, usually a woman, who learned black magic and can remove her head | Drinks the blood of women in childbirth until they bleed to death | Thorny pandan round the house, pineapples under the floor, scissors under the pillow, turning over the abandoned body |
| Leyak | Balinese | Someone trained in Aji Pengeleakan; an ordinary person by day | Head and guts fly off to drink the blood of unborn or newborn babies; eats corpses | Not stated in the source |
| Kuyang | Dayak (Kalimantan) | A person, usually a woman, who learned black magic; passed down the family | Removes head and organs to fly after the blood of babies and women in labour | Not stated in the source |
| Manananggal | Filipino | A kind of aswang; a woman | Detaches her upper half, grows bat wings, sucks the unborn child with a long tongue | Garlic at doors and windows, salt on the lower half |
| Pelesit | Malay | A familiar kept by a person, usually a woman, and inherited | Enters homes hidden in a grasshopper, sucks blood, sends harm | Not stated in the source |
| Tuyul | Javanese | A child spirit from an unborn or dead baby, kept by an owner | Steals money for its owner | Not stated in the source |
Spirits that are kept and handed down
The inherited pop chuea has close relatives in Malay, Javanese, Batak and Filipino belief: 7 kinds across 4 belief systems, all spirits kept by an owner who puts them to work. The Malay pelesit is a familiar kept by a person, usually a woman, fed with blood from the owner's fingertip every full-moon night and handed down as an inheritance the Malay call saka. The hantu raya must also pass to an heir, and if it is not fed it turns on its owner. The Batak begu ganjang, the 'long ghost', grows taller the longer you stare, leaves blue bruises on its victim's neck, and is used by the Batak to explain mysterious illness and sudden death.
Another line keeps spirits for money. The Javanese tuyul comes from a baby that was never born or that died; its owner sends it to steal money, a kind of illegitimate wealth the Javanese call pasugihan. Historians link the belief to the income gap between farmers and traders, and the word tuyul became popular around 1929, during the Depression. Malay borrowed the word as toyol. To guard against a toyol, the source says, leave toys or mung beans near your money to keep it distracted, or keep a climbing perch in a fish tank. Our notes compare the toyol to a malevolent version of the Thai kuman thong.
Is there anything like it outside Southeast Asia?
Of the 32 belief systems, 19 lie outside Southeast Asia, and nearly all of them describe living sorcerers rather than flying heads. In Africa, the Akan of Ghana believe most witches are women who band together in the spirit world and attack only members of their own family; the abosom can expose them. The Swazi believe the ancestors punish but do not kill: death comes from evil-doers called batsakatsi. The Zulu have the lightning bird, a blood-drinking familiar of a witch that passes from mother to daughter.
In the Americas, the Aztecs had the nahualli, a person who could turn into their own animal counterpart. The Navajo have the skin-walker, a witch who turns into or disguises as an animal, but the community rarely discusses it with outsiders, so the source records only that it exists. Haitian Vodou has the lougawou, people who join night-time sorcery rites and eat human flesh, and the sousè, a kind of lougawou that draws people's blood from the corner of a house without going inside. In the Andes, 3 belief systems, Inca, Quechua and Aymara, describe the same figure, the pishtaco, who cuts victims' throats to take their fat.
In Europe and northern Asia, Slavic belief counts sorcerers among the dead who become the upyr, a corpse that rises to drink the blood of people and cattle and must be staked through with aspen and burned. The Sakha, or Yakuts, believe the souls of sorcerers and of people who died early or unnaturally become the üör. In the past they were shut in a birch-bark vessel on the roof beam of the tent and fed from time to time, much like shutting a pop in a mong khong. As for the Neuroi who turned into wolves for a few days each year, we know of them only through Herodotus, who passed on what Scythians and Greek settlers in Scythia told him, and he wrote himself that he did not believe it.
This part of the data holds nothing from Burma, China or India. Beliefs with large bodies of scripture, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Chinese religion, get more detail in the sources than others. But if a country is missing from our data, that does not mean it has no spirits of this kind, only that the sources we checked did not record them.
When the belief points at a neighbour
What sets this group apart from ghosts of the dead is that the people believed to be them are still alive, and several sources talk about what happened to real people. The source on the pop records the anthropological explanation that the belief works as a mechanism of distrust within a community, and that people accused of being a pop were driven out. The Swazi have a diviner, the tangoma, name where a death came from. The Akan have had anti-witchcraft movements. And the Andean pishtaco story is tied to the colonial era, when conquistadors were said to use fat from Indigenous corpses on their wounds, and later to the eras of railway building and mining. We report this as the sources give it, and do not say who is or is not one.
What they really share
Across all the continents, these beings are usually someone close by, not a stranger. Akan witches harm only their own families. The pop chuea, the kuyang, the pelesit, the hantu raya and the Zulu lightning bird are all handed down within a lineage. And they are often used to explain deaths with no visible cause, from the pop's victims who die in their sleep, to the sudden deaths the Batak blame on the begu ganjang, to the deaths the Swazi attribute to the batsakatsi rather than to the ancestors. The remedy looks alike too: a specialist has to deal with it, such as the spirit doctors of Thailand and Laos, the yuta of Ryukyu, the Zulu sangoma and the Swazi diviner.
Not what you might expect
In the Thai source the pop is someone from the same community, but the Andean pishtaco is an outsider: the source says he is often a white or mixed-race man. And the flying head that the source says eats excrement is the Vietnamese ma lai. On the Thai side, the one that eats filth is the krahang, while the krasue eats the organs of new mothers and babies.
Back to the jujube thorns
If you ever heard older relatives talk about jujube thorns under the house, Khmer and Malay households have the same thing, thorny branches and thorny pandan around the house. The only difference is the name of the spirit they fear: the ahp and the penanggalan.
Frequently asked
Where does the krasue come from?
The Thai sources we checked say only that the krasue lives inside a woman, often an older one, without saying how it arises. Its relatives next door are clearer: the Khmer ahp is a woman whose black magic failed and rebounded on her, and the Malay penanggalan, the Balinese leyak and the Dayak kuyang are people who learned black magic.
What is the krasue afraid of?
Thai sources say the krasue fears snagging its guts on thorns, so villagers put jujube thorns under the house. Khmer households use thorny branches against the ahp, Malay households plant thorny pandan around the house and pineapples under it against the penanggalan, and Filipinos use garlic and salt against the manananggal.
What causes a phi pop?
People in Isan believe a pop comes from someone who learned spells, or trained as a phi fa or phi thaen medium, and could not keep it in check, or who broke a khalam taboo. Some households believe it runs in the family as pop chuea. But another source on Lao and Isan belief classes the phi pop as a phi phet, the soul of someone evil in a past life or who died tragically. The two sources disagree.
What is the phi pop afraid of?
Our sources do not name anything the pop fears. They only give the way to deal with it: a spirit doctor performs a rite to catch the pop and shuts it in a mong khong basket.
What is the difference between the krasue and the krahang?
The krasue lives inside a woman and floats out as a head with entrails to eat the organs of new mothers or babies. The krahang is a man whose sorcery turned on him; he flies with a winnowing basket for wings and a pestle for a tail, and eats filth.
What is the krasue called in other countries?
In our data the Khmer call it the ahp, the Vietnamese the ma lai, the Malay the penanggalan, the Balinese the leyak, the Dayak of Kalimantan the kuyang, and Filipinos the manananggal, which detaches its whole upper half rather than just the head.
Does the krasue eat excrement?
The Thai sources we checked say the krasue eats the organs of women after childbirth or of babies, and do not mention excrement. The one that eats filth is the krahang, and the flying head the source says eats excrement is the Vietnamese ma lai.
Are the krasue and the phi pop real?
Mythsensus does not judge whether spirits exist. What we can say is that krasue-type beliefs appear in 9 belief systems from 7 peoples in Southeast Asia, and that the source on the pop records the anthropological explanation that the belief works as a mechanism of distrust within a community.
Sources for the traditions cited (24)
All 32 traditions
Asia (15) · Thai folk belief (phi, khwan, Yama) · Vietnamese folk religion / ancestor worship (Đạo Ông Bà) · Philippine Anitism (Tagalog / Visayan) · Balinese Hinduism (Agama Hindu Dharma) · Scythian and Saka religion · Ryukyuan religion (Ryūkyū Shintō) · Batak religion / Ugamo Malim (Parmalim), North Sumatra · Đạo Mẫu (Vietnamese Mother Goddess religion, Tứ phủ) · Kaharingan (Dayak religion of Borneo; afterlife data mainly Ngaju) · Kejawèn (Javanese religion / kebatinan) · Khmer folk religion (neak ta spirits, Pchum Ben, rice mother) · Lao / Isan spirit religion (Satsana Phi, the phi and thaen cults) · Malay folk belief (bomoh/pawang, semangat, hantu, Main Puteri) · Tagalog and Visayan native religion from Tagalog/Cebuano sources (anito, Bathala, babaylan) · Sunda Wiwitan (Sundanese native religion; Kanekes/Baduy and others)
Africa (4) · Akan religion (Ghana) · Zulu traditional religion · Kongo religion · Swazi traditional religion
Europe (4) · Aztec (Mexica) · Scythian and Saka religion · Sakha (Yakut) traditional religion — Aiyy · Slavic paganism (East, West and South Slavs)
Americas (11) · Aztec (Mexica) · Inca (Andean) religion · Haitian Vodou · Quechua (Andean) religion · Aymara religion · Palo Monte (Regla de Palo / Palo Mayombe) · Revival Zion (Zion Revivalism) · Winti · Navajo (Diné) traditional religion · Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) religion · Hawaiian religion (traditional)
How we counted: 370 traditions from every continent, living and ancient, from sources in dozens of languages. One tradition, one vote, and only where a source confirms it. A tradition missing here is not evidence it lacks the belief, only that we found no document. Scriptural religions (Buddhist, Hindu, Chinese, Jewish, Christian, Muslim) are described in more detail than oral ones, and some records come through missionaries or outsiders. This page does not judge which belief is true.
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