Chonchón

Also Known As: also Chon-chon and Tue-Tué, after its cry; Alejandro Cañas Pinochet records chaihue as another Chiloé name for the same bird
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Mapuche Mythology, Chilean Mythology, Chilote Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A sorcerer who has taken the shape of a night bird, flying on moonless nights and crying tué, tué, tué as it goes.
Role in Mythos: It is the travelling form of the kalku, the Mapuche worker of harm, and later of the brujos and brujas of colonial and rural Chile, the shape in which malice covers ground.
Relation to Humans: To hear it overhead is to be told that a death is coming to the household, and the country remedies against it are practical rather than pious: a cross scratched in the dirt with a knife standing in it, or green canelo thrown on the fire. A court in 1749 heard sworn testimony from a woman who said she had done real injury to a neighbour while wearing this shape.

The sound arrives first, and it arrives from directly overhead. Tué, tué, tué. Thin, flat, repeated with a patience that is worse than urgency, on one of those southern Chilean nights when the moon has gone out completely and the only light is whatever the house is burning. Everyone under the roof knows the call. Somebody goes for a knife.

That cry carries the whole reputation. When Rodolfo Lenz assembled his etymological dictionary of Chilean words drawn from indigenous languages, published in Santiago across the first decade of the twentieth century, he gave the word chonchón a definition of admirable economy: a fateful night bird that sings tué tué tué. He shelved it among the owl-words, beside chucho and chuncho, and recorded without comment that some of his informants said it was simply those birds under a different name.

The oldest voice Lenz quotes belongs to a colonial Jesuit, Miguel de Olivares, who called the creature a kind of owl of querulous and ill-boding voice, and added that the Indians held various superstitious fancies about it. He was dismissing the belief and preserving it in the same breath, which is how a great deal of this material survives at all.

What the fancies amounted to is set out plainly in the Chilean National Library’s account of colonial sorcery. Witches were held to be able to take many animal and bird forms, but the favourite was an owl called the chonchón, and the way in was through the neck: the sorcerer’s head came away from the body and took the bird’s shape, the ears serving as wings. The body stayed where it was. Only the head went out.

Alejandro Cañas Pinochet, working on the speech of Chiloé and writing at the end of that decade, gives the field version rather than the courtroom one. His chonchón is a bird the size of a dove, ash-grey, with wings out of all proportion to it, croaking with a certain persistence on dark nights, and taken by country people for a witch-bird. He notes that it is commonly confused with the coo, the island’s own rufous-legged owl. So the sources put two pictures side by side and do not always agree on which is which, a grey bird and a head wearing a bird’s shape, and the honest position is that both are attested and neither cancels the other.

Nobody in the record says where the first one came from. There is no origin story, no first sorcerer who discovered the trick, no myth of a head that failed to come back. What the tradition preserves instead is a procedure and its consequences, which suggests the belief was never about a founding event. It was about your neighbours.

The 1749 case makes that concrete. A woman brought before a colonial court testified that she had turned herself into a chonchón and, in that shape, loosed a spell at another woman in the form of an invisible arrow, in revenge for the wrongs she had suffered from that woman’s husband. The court wrote it down. There is something clarifying about a supernatural bird whose attested motive is a grudge, and about a legal record in which the flight is treated as the least remarkable part of the story.

In Chiloé the chonchón sits inside a whole ecology of flying witchcraft. The Voladora, the flying woman, carries messages between sorcerers across the islands, and her passing is read as a forecast of deaths, plagues and misfortune. Men are said to have a different arrangement, the macuñ, a magical waistcoat that lets them fly without giving up their heads, and the sources are firm that this one is theirs alone. The coo lends its claws for scoring the backs and limbs of sleepers. The chuncho, the smallest and by all accounts the most vicious of Chile’s raptors, sings from inside a house and somebody in that house dies. The chonchón is one specialist among several, and its speciality is announcing.

Its powers follow from what it is. A head unhitched from a body can go anywhere, and it travels at night and by preference on nights without a moon, so that the sound outruns the sight. It carries the full malice of the sorcerer who launched it, and that malice can be aimed: the arrow of 1749 was not metaphorical to the people who testified about it. Above all it carries information, since the cry is not incidental noise but the message itself, delivered to a household in advance of the loss.

The limits are just as specific, and they are all domestic. When you hear it cry, Lenz’s sources say, you scratch the Cross of Solomon into the ground and plant a knife upright in the middle of it, the edge turned toward wherever the sound is coming from, and the chonchón will not dare come closer. Some households used a particular blade for it. Others reached for the fire instead and burned branches of canelo, the tree the Mapuche hold sacred, and drove the thing off in a cloud of green smoke. A creature that can cross a province in the dark is stopped by a knife stuck in the dirt of a yard.

The word itself went ordinary, which is its own kind of ending. By Lenz’s day a chonchón was also a boy’s kite made of paper with no sticks in it, a flat bottle of liquor sized to fit a coat pocket, and a rough tin lamp with a wick burning in the open air. Call a man a chonchón and you meant he was ugly, unpleasant, or bad luck to have around. Two farms in the department of Cauquenes carried the name. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, writing about the road from Valparaíso to Santiago, noted that the midnight service was known as the tren chonchón, and it is difficult to think of a softer landing for a demon than becoming a nickname for a late train.

It did not stop being believed. Fieldworkers recording oral texts along the Biobío and Araucanía coast between 2007 and 2009 came back with a legend about witches as birds, built around the chonchón and its twe-twe, told to them by people who had grown up hearing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Chonchón?

The Chonchón is a night bird of Mapuche and Chilean folklore that is really a sorcerer in another shape. In the witchcraft tradition the sorcerer’s head detaches from the body and flies with its enlarged ears serving as wings, while nineteenth and early twentieth century Chilean sources describe it more plainly as an ash-grey bird the size of a dove with oversized wings.

What does the Chonchón’s cry mean?

Its cry is a repeated tué, tué, tué, which is why the creature is also called the Tue-Tué. Hearing it overhead is understood as an announcement that death is coming to that household. Rodolfo Lenz’s dictionary records the cry as the defining feature of the bird.

How do you protect yourself from a Chonchón?

Two remedies are recorded in Chilean folklore. You scratch the Cross of Solomon on the ground and stand a knife upright in the centre of it with the blade turned toward the sound, after which the Chonchón will not approach, or you burn branches of canelo, the sacred tree of the Mapuche, to drive it away.

Is there any historical record of belief in the Chonchón?

Yes. In 1749 a woman testified before a colonial Chilean court that she had transformed into a Chonchón and, in that form, cast a spell shaped like an invisible arrow at another woman in revenge for injuries done to her by that woman’s husband. The belief was still being collected from living storytellers on the Chilean coast in the late 2000s.

Is the Chonchón the same as an owl?

The sources genuinely disagree. Rodolfo Lenz filed the word alongside chucho and chuncho, the Chilean owl-words, and noted that some people considered them the same bird, and Alejandro Cañas Pinochet observed that in Chiloé the Chonchón is commonly confused with the coo, the local rufous-legged owl. The eighteenth-century Jesuit Miguel de Olivares simply called it a kind of owl.