Asiman

Region/Culture: West Africa (Dahomey, in present-day Benin)
Mythos: Dahomey/Fon/Ewe Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Living vampiric witch and shapeshifter
Mythical Attributes: She can leave her own body, fly through the night as a corpse candle or a ball of light, drain the blood of sleeping victims, and take an animal’s shape after feeding.
Role in Mythos: The asiman is the hidden predator inside the community, an ordinary-seeming woman who explains the unexplained wasting sicknesses and failed crops that afflict her neighbors.
Relation to Humans: She lives among people undetected by day, indistinguishable from any innocent woman, and hunts them by night for their blood and vitality. Her victims feel little or nothing as she feeds, and waste away from a cause no one can see.

A light moves low over the compound after midnight, too steady for a firefly and too willful for a falling star. It drifts toward the sleeping houses, pauses at a doorway, and slips through a gap no wider than a finger. Inside, a child sleeps. By morning the child is paler and weaker, and no one can say why. Among the Dahomeans of West Africa, people knew the name for the thing that carried that light. They called her the asiman.

She was not a monster from the forest or a spirit out of the old time. She was a neighbor. The asiman began as an ordinary woman who reached for power she was never meant to hold, and got it. The stories say she became what she is by working a particular spell, a deliberate act rather than a curse laid on her from outside. Once the spell took, there was no undoing it. She kept her house, her face, her place at the market. The change lived under the skin, where no one could see it until it was too late.

What the asiman actually looks like depends on which night you catch her and which teller you ask. In her daylight form she is indistinguishable from any other person, and that is the whole horror of her. When she hunts, the accounts diverge. In some she peels off her skin entirely and leaves it folded somewhere safe, then rises into the dark as a corpse candle, a hovering flame the color of a guttering lamp. In others she simply lets her spirit slip free of her body and travels as a glowing ball of light, soft and strangely cold, the kind of glow that should be warm and is not. Either way the light is the tell. A flame that moves against the wind, that hesitates, that seems to be searching for something, is not a flame.

On a still night she rises while her body lies motionless at home, floats out over the rooftops, and goes looking for a sleeper. She finds one, settles close, and draws the blood out so gently that the victim feels nothing, or feels only a small ache they cannot place. By the time the household wakes she is back in her own bed with her skin on.

The asiman belongs to a wider family of West African witch-vampires who all share the same basic shape of dread. The Ashanti told of the obayifo, a witch hiding in plain sight who left its body at night and flew as a ball of light to drink the blood of children; the Dahomean asiman is the same idea wearing a different name. The Ewe knew the adze, which turned into a firefly and slipped through shuttered windows. These witches were said to gather where the living could not follow, and some accounts describe a pot kept among them that held the blood and vitality they had stolen. Anyone who looked into it would see only water. The theft was invisible by design. A person wasting away from a slow illness, a crop that failed for no reason, an infant that would not thrive: these were her signatures, and they were also the signatures of ordinary misfortune, which is exactly why the belief held so hard.

Her hunger was not only for blood. The same witches were said to drain the juice from fruit and the life from growing things, so that a sickness in the house and a blight in the field could be read as the same hand at work. When the people of Dahomey and their neighbors were carried across the Atlantic into slavery, the asiman went with them in memory, and her cousins surfaced in the Caribbean under new names. The loogaroo haunted Haiti, the asema took root in Surinam, the soucouyant walked the nights of Trinidad. The same old woman, the same shed skin, the same ball of fire crossing the dark. The fear survived the Middle Passage intact.

Her gifts were considerable. She could leave her own body at will and move through the air as light, pass through the smallest opening, feed without waking her prey, and once she had fed she could fold herself into the body of an animal and walk away wearing it. That last trick was also her undoing. The very shape-shifting that made her nearly impossible to catch left her exactly one weak moment. In her human form she was untouchable, no different from any blameless woman. In her flying form she was only light, hard to follow and harder to hold. It was in the animal shape she took after feeding that she could finally be killed. To destroy the asiman you had to catch her in the borrowed body, in the moment she felt safest. Miss that window and she simply went home, put her skin back on, and greeted you in the morning.

There is something almost ordinary in that, which is the most unsettling part of her. She is not a beast to be hunted in the wild. She is a woman who has decided, and who comes home before dawn.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Asiman?

The Asiman is a living vampire witch from the folklore of the Dahomey people of West Africa. She is an ordinary-looking woman by day who, at night, sheds her skin or releases her spirit to fly as a ball of light or a corpse candle and drink the blood of sleeping victims. After feeding she can take the shape of an animal.

Where does the Asiman come from?

The Asiman comes from Dahomey, a kingdom in what is now Benin in West Africa, and belongs to the Fon and Ewe folklore tradition. She is the Dahomean version of a witch-vampire found across the region, known to the Ashanti as the obayifo and to the Ewe as the adze.

How do you kill an Asiman?

An Asiman can only be destroyed when she is in the animal form she takes after feeding. In her human shape she is indistinguishable from any innocent person, and in her flying form she is just a ball of light that is nearly impossible to hold, so the animal body she borrows is her single point of vulnerability.

What does the Asiman do to her victims?

The Asiman drains the blood and vitality of sleeping people, especially children, feeding so gently that the victim feels nothing or only a faint, unexplained ache. Her victims waste away slowly from a cause no one can identify, which is why she was blamed for lingering illnesses, failed crops, and infants who would not thrive.

What is the difference between the Asiman and the Obayifo?

The Asiman and the Obayifo are essentially the same creature under different names. The Obayifo is the Ashanti name for the West African witch-vampire, while the Dahomeans called their version the Asiman. Both leave the body at night, fly as a glowing light, and drink blood, though the Asiman is especially associated with shedding her skin and shifting into an animal.