Batibat

Also Known As: also batíbat, the Ilokano word for a nightmare; the same affliction is bangugot or bangungot in Tagalog
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Philippine Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: It survives the felling of its own tree and goes on living inside the timber cut from it, coming out at night to crush the breath out of whoever sleeps beneath.
Role in Mythos: It supplies the Ilokano explanation for bangugot, the smothering nightmare that healthy young men were known to die inside.
Relation to Humans: A household acquires one by accident, in the ordinary business of cutting a tree and raising a house on it. The remedy is equally domestic: move the sleeping mat away from the post, and if the weight arrives anyway, bite the thumb hard enough to wake yourself.

Sleep at the edge of the room, the old advice went, but not against the post. Almost everything that can be said with any confidence about the reason comes from one man. Maximo D. Ramos, the Filipino folklorist whose *The Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology* (University of the Philippines Press, 1971) and *The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore* (Phoenix, 1990) are the record here, built his account of the batibat out of two things: a 1957 story collection by Manuel and Lyd Arguilla, and what Ilokano farmers in Zambales had told him when he was a boy. Everything else in circulation is retelling him.

What they told him was that the batibat lives in bamboo groves and in the big trees, and that it does not leave when the tree comes down. A house post is a tree with the branches taken off. The thing inside it simply stays, settling into a crevice or a hollow in the timber, and it keeps a knothole for a door. Ramos described it as nightmare-inducing and insanity-causing, and reached for the genii of the Near East for a comparison, which tells you he found nothing closer to hand in Philippine folklore.

The house goes up. The family moves in. Somewhere in the frame, the smell of fresh-cut wood not yet faded, there is a post that is not entirely furniture. On an ordinary night nothing happens at all, because nobody has put a sleeping mat against it. That is the whole of the batibat’s normal existence in the record: a presence in seasoned timber, waiting on somebody’s mistake.

The mistake, when it comes, is usually somebody else’s. In the Arguilla tale, which Ramos summarises, a small boy falls asleep next to a crooked post and his mother forgets to move him. He dreams that the batibat has settled onto his chest. He tries to call out and cannot get enough air behind the sound. What saves him is his own hand: he works it up to his mouth and bites his thumb, and wakes soaked in sweat with the thumb bleeding. That story is where the thumb-biting cure comes from, and the toe-wiggling variant sits alongside it in Ramos. It is also, as far as anyone has been able to trace, where the world got its picture of the batibat as an enormous old woman. The tale is called “The Fat Woman in the Post.”

Ramos’s own batibat was not a woman. In *The Aswang Complex* he describes the creature suffocating a tenant by stopping his mouth with its phallus and his nostrils with its testicles, which is a great deal more specific, and a great deal more male, than anything you will find repeated about it now. William Burroughs put a male version into *Naked Lunch*, where a survivor reports a little man sitting on his chest, though Burroughs was writing a novel and the passage says more about Burroughs than about Ilocos. The honest position is that the batibat’s sex is contested and the contest is one folklorist against one short story.

The affliction it names is not contested at all. Bangugot, the Tagalog bangungot, usually explained as a compound of the words for rising and groaning, is the sensation of being pinned and smothered in sleep, and in the Philippines it has been fatal often enough to reach the medical journals. Ronald Munger and Elizabeth Booton worked through Manila autopsy records for the *International Journal of Epidemiology* in 1998 and found the deaths concentrated in young adult men, most of them migrants from the provinces. Later work, including Albert Gaw’s 2011 paper in the *Philippine Journal of Internal Medicine*, has pursued the link to Brugada syndrome, an inherited cardiac fault. The same pattern of young men dying in their sleep runs through Thailand, where it is laid at the door of a widow ghost, and through Hmong communities resettled in the United States. The pressing weight in the dark is close to universal. Dying of it is not.

Around the batibat sits a belief that is much better attested than the batibat itself. Isabelo de los Reyes, collecting in Ilocos for *El Folk-Lore Filipino* in 1890, recorded the mangmangkik, tree spirits whose permission had to be asked before a tree was felled and who were vindictive when it was not, capable of inflicting grave illness. He says nothing about nightmares. So the shape of the thing was already there in the nineteenth century: the tree has an occupant, the occupant is owed courtesy, and cutting without it costs you. The batibat is that grievance carried indoors and pressed onto a sleeping chest.

Its power is entirely a matter of weight and airway, and it needs no more than that. Its limits are just as plain. It cannot follow anyone out of the wood it lives in, so it can only reach a sleeper who comes to it. It can be broken by pain, by a thumb between the teeth or a toe deliberately moved, because the whole assault depends on the victim staying under. Nobody wrote down where it came from. No source gives it a name, a parent, an origin, or an end, and no telling survives in which one is driven off, bargained with or destroyed. What survives is a warning about where to put your mat.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the batibat?

The batibat is a spirit of Ilocano folklore that lives in a tree and remains in the timber after the tree is cut into a house post. It emerges at night to sit on the chest of anyone sleeping near the post and suffocate them. It is the Ilocano explanation for bangugot, the fatal smothering nightmare.

Is the batibat male or female?

The sources disagree. Maximo Ramos, the folklorist who recorded the batibat, described a male creature and remembered Ilokano farmers calling it huge and hulking. The familiar image of an obese old woman traces to one Ilokano tale, “The Fat Woman in the Post,” published in the Arguillas’ *Philippine Tales and Fables* in 1957.

How do you escape a batibat?

By waking up. The recorded remedy is to bite your thumb hard, or to move a toe, since the attack only works while the sleeper stays under. The simpler protection is not to sleep against a house post at all.

What is bangungot and is it real?

Bangungot is the Filipino term for a smothering nightmare, and the deaths attributed to it are documented. A 1998 study of Manila autopsy records in the *International Journal of Epidemiology* found the fatalities clustered among young adult men, and later research has linked the pattern to Brugada syndrome, an inherited heart-rhythm disorder.

Where does the batibat come from?

No origin story was recorded. The batibat is simply present in bamboo groves and large trees, and it becomes a household problem when its tree is felled and built into a house. The older Ilocano belief behind it, the mangmangkik tree spirits who must be asked permission before felling, was written down by Isabelo de los Reyes in 1890.