Babi ngepet

Also Known As: Indonesian *babi*, “pig”; also *babi jadi-jadian*, “the made pig”, and *siluman babi*, “pig-demon”
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Indonesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A living person who takes the body of a pig in order to draw money and gold out of houses without ever entering them.
Role in Mythos: It is the working end of *pesugihan*, the Javanese bargain that trades something beloved for wealth that arrives without labour.
Relation to Humans: It is not a stranger to the village but a neighbour, which is the entire point of the story, and the wealth it brings home is money the people next door have just lost. Believing in it has cost real pigs their lives and at least one man his liberty.

In a dark house in Central Java a woman sits over a basin of water with a candle burning in the middle of it. She has been told not to doze. The air indoors is dead still and the flame stands straight up, and for as long as it stands straight her husband is somewhere out in the lanes on four trotters, working his way along the back wall of a neighbour’s house.

He does not go in. He has no need to. The creature takes money by scraping its flank along the outside wall, bristle dragging on whitewash, and inside the house the coins and the gold and the folded notes simply stop being there. Nobody wakes. In the morning the family will turn the mattress over and blame each other, and a few streets away somebody will have had an unaccountably good night.

That is *babi ngepet*, and the second half of the name is Javanese while the first is simply the Indonesian word for pig. It belongs to *pesugihan*, from *sugih*, rich: the family of Javanese bargains that deliver wealth without work in exchange for something the buyer cannot afford to lose. Suwardi Endraswara, professor of Javanese language education at Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta, files it in his survey of the Javanese ghost world among the dangerous animal-spirits that people keep on purpose, alongside the white soft-shell turtle and the *kutuk lamur*, and he is blunt about what they are kept for. A person who keeps a *babi ngepet* becomes rich suddenly.

The Javanese telling sends the buyer to Gunung Kawi in Malang, East Java, a mountain with a long trade in this sort of arrangement, to meet the pig-spirit and put terms to it. The price is a *tumbal*, a sacrifice, and it is usually named as the child the buyer loves most. After that the buyer must eat the spirit’s dung in order to be able to take its shape, and the *kuncen* who keeps the site hands over a black cloth. The work then needs two people, most often a husband and wife who have run out of both sense and faith. He becomes the pig. She keeps the candle. Some tellings note, without much comment, that occasionally it is the wife who goes out.

Betawi Jakarta tells it slightly differently. *Cerita Rakyat Betawi*, published in 2004 by the city’s own culture and museums department, has the creature coming down from the mountain and the knowledge coming from a mountain *kuncen*, with the sacrifice taken from the seeker’s own family. There the transformation needs no dung and no bargain at a shrine: the buyer puts on a vest, prostrates, and gets up as a pig. The wall-scraping is the same in both.

What neither version supplies is a face. No source gives it tusks out of proportion, or a size, or a colour, or a smell that would let anyone pick it out of a line of ordinary boars. It looks like a pig because it is meant to look like a pig, and the horror of it is administrative rather than visual: any animal that wanders into a kampong after midnight might be a person, and there is no way to tell by looking. Witnesses at Depok in 2021 said the one they caught had changed shape in front of them. It had not.

Where the belief came from is a better documented question than where the pig came from. Kuntowijoyo, in *Muslim Tanpa Masjid*, put wealth-magic beliefs of this kind down to the logic of an agrarian society, where a farmer cannot get richer without taking land and therefore making another farmer poorer; wealth that appears without visible labour has to have been taken from somebody, invisibly. Christopher Reinhart, a historian at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, has traced the term itself to the *Cultuurstelsel*, the Dutch forced-cultivation system of 1830 to 1870, which produced a class of suddenly rich traders in villages where everyone else could still see exactly how much work everyone else was doing. The accusation, he argues, did useful work for the accusers. It marked the new rich as dangerous and told the poor to stay away from them.

A tempting piece of evidence gets waved about here and should not be. Majapahit-era pig-shaped money boxes survive in some number, the Javanese *celengan*, from *celeng*, boar, and they are regularly produced as proof that Java has associated pigs with hoarded wealth since the fourteenth century. Prapto Yuwono, who taught Javanese culture at Universitas Indonesia and once headed its Javanese literature programme, has pointed out the flaw. There are elephant-shaped ones too. Archaeologists regard the whole class as unremarkable, and the link to *babi ngepet* is mythology, not archaeology.

Its powers are narrow and entirely fitted to the bargain that produced them. It can wear a pig. It can pull portable wealth through a solid wall by touch. It can do this repeatedly, in a settlement where everyone knows everyone, without ever being recognised. Beyond that it has nothing: no strength worth reporting, no cunning, no speech, no ability to threaten anyone directly.

The weaknesses are just as tightly drawn. The whole operation hangs on a candle standing in water in a room the pig cannot see. When the flame begins to shudder, the creature is in trouble, and the watcher has to put the flame out at once, which snaps the pig back into a man. If she is slow, or asleep, the villagers get there first. And the price was paid up front, before the first coin was ever taken, in a child.

The last of it is not folklore at all. In April 2021 residents of Bedahan in Sawangan, Depok, caught a pig in the small hours, decided it was a *babi ngepet*, and killed it, partly to stop a crowd forming. The head of the neighbourhood association told reporters it really was one. A zoologist at LIPI, Taufiq Purna Nugraha, said there was no such thing and that a DNA test would return a pig. Police then established that the whole episode had been staged by a local preacher, Adam Ibrahim, who had supplied the animal and who wanted to be famous in his own village. The Depok district court gave him four years in December 2021 for spreading false news. Five years earlier, in Mojosongo in Solo, hundreds of people had gathered over another captured pig until the local official explained that a truck carrying sixty of them to Jakarta had lost one on the way.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a babi ngepet?

A babi ngepet is a person who has taken the form of a pig in order to steal money, in Indonesian folklore best known from Java. The transformation is part of *pesugihan*, a bargain for sudden wealth, and the creature takes coins, gold and notes out of houses by rubbing its body against the outside walls rather than going in.

How does the babi ngepet ritual work?

Two people are required. One takes the pig’s body and goes out at night; the other stays home and watches a lit candle standing in a basin of water. If the flame starts to shake, the pig is in danger and the watcher must extinguish it, which returns the pig to human shape. In the Javanese version the pact is made at Gunung Kawi in East Java and paid for with a *tumbal*, usually the practitioner’s most loved child.

What does a babi ngepet look like?

It looks like an ordinary wild pig. No source describes any feature that would distinguish it from the boars that come down from the hills into villages, which is precisely why stray pigs in Indonesian settlements have been caught and killed on suspicion.

Was the Depok babi ngepet real?

No. In April 2021 residents of Bedahan in Sawangan, Depok, caught and killed a pig they believed to be a babi ngepet. Police found the incident had been staged by a local preacher, Adam Ibrahim, who wanted attention in his village. He was sentenced to four years in prison in December 2021 for spreading false news.

Where does the babi ngepet belief come from?

The historian Kuntowijoyo linked beliefs of this kind to agrarian society, where wealth was expected to come from visible labour and sudden riches implied theft from someone. The historian Christopher Reinhart has traced the term to the Dutch forced-cultivation period of 1830 to 1870, when a new merchant class in Javanese villages grew rich in ways their neighbours could not see.