Colo Colo

A dry rustle behind the wall in the dark before dawn, no larger than a mouse pulling itself through plaster, and the household sleeps on. By morning the youngest child is pale around the eyes and the mother cannot lift her arms for tiredness. The cry came in the night again, that wail like a baby just out of reach, but no one in the family wants to say so before breakfast.

This is the Colo Colo’s hour. In the territories of the Mapuche, across the rural south of what is now Chile, the creature is counted among the wekufe, the malevolent spirits that move against the order of the world and explain why otherwise healthy houses fall sick from the inside. The Colo Colo is not the largest of these spirits, nor the most dramatic. It does not eat livestock or burn fields. It only sips. But its sipping is what makes it so feared, because what it draws from a sleeping body is the very breath of the body, drop by drop, until there is nothing left of the person but a husk that coughs.

The sources disagree on what it looks like, and the variants matter. In many Mapuche accounts the creature is a serpent that has sprouted legs and feathers, a long greasy thing that moves like a rat. Others describe a feathered rodent, slick and dark, no larger than a hand. In the Huilliche south, in Llanquihue and Valdivia, the body is that of a stretched-out mouse but the head is the head of a rooster, hooded-eyed, short-beaked. The creature carries the bird and the snake and the rodent in one body, all of them held together by the cold logic of wekufe biology, which is to say none at all. What the variants share is the texture: clammy, scaled or feathered in patches, something built wrong.

It is born from a strange egg. The most widely told version begins with a snake that lays an egg, which is then brooded by an old rooster instead of a hen. From that wrong pairing the Colo Colo hatches. Other tellings reverse the parents and say it is the rooster that lays the egg and a serpent that incubates it, but the wrongness is the same either way, a thing sired by creatures that should never have come together at all. Country mothers in Mapuche territory will tell you to look under the henhouse for any egg without a hen behind it, and to burn it in the hearth fire the moment you find it. A rooster’s egg is the seed of disaster.

On most nights it does very little. It lies under the floorboards or in a gap behind the wall, breathing slowly, waiting for the lamps to go out. When the family is asleep, it pulls itself up through some crack and crosses the floor without sound, finds the mouth of a sleeper, and licks. Sometimes it licks the inside of a wooden cup or a horn spoon, the rim of a clay plate, anything the family will press to their lips at morning. The taste it leaves is bitter, but no one notices the bitterness until later, when the wasting has set in.

The signs come slow. A child who was loud the week before grows quiet. An adult complains of being tired in a way no rest will cure. The youngest stop nursing well. Coughing arrives. In the old Mapuche etiology these symptoms map closely onto what later medicine would call tuberculosis, and the Colo Colo and consumption are spoken of in the same breath. The disease lives in the walls. Pulling out the family and burning the house is sometimes the only recourse, because the creature will follow them otherwise, and any rebuilt floor will hide it again.

When a Machi is called to a house gone sick, she listens first. The wail of the Colo Colo is not loud, more a thread of sound at the edge of hearing, but she knows where it lives. She walks the rooms with herbs burning, drumming low, and names the spirit out into the open until the house gives it up. After that comes the work that families do not like to talk about: the searching, the breaking of plaster, the egg dragged out from under the boards and split open to show the curled wet thing inside.

A house with a Colo Colo in it is a house that has been listened to wrong. You can’t bargain with it.

The creature’s strength lies entirely in its discretion. It is small, it is hidden, it works by night, and the harm it causes is the kind no one suspects of being supernatural until it has gone on too long. It can take a household down without ever being seen, and even when it is seen it is often mistaken for vermin. It chooses families it can revisit, because its method is slow drainage rather than quick attack. Newborns and nursing mothers are its preferred victims, the people in any house with the thinnest reserves of life to give up. Its cry can pass for an infant crying in the next room, which is a clever cruelty, since families with infants are exactly the ones it haunts.

Against ritual it has very little. A trained Machi can drive it out. The creature cannot abide its egg being burned before the hatch, which is why old country wisdom in Mapuche country turns on the burning of suspicious eggs above all else. Fire is the threshold the Colo Colo cannot cross. Its body, hatched from a thing that should never have been brooded, can be unmade by the same heat that should have stopped it in the shell. Burning the entire house is the last resort, but it works. The wekufe is bound to the place it has settled, and when the place is gone, so is the spirit.

Country families still listen at the wall before they sleep.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Colo Colo?

The Colo Colo is a malevolent creature from Mapuche mythology, classified as a wekufe, or evil spirit, that takes the body of a feathered rat, a serpent with legs, or, in southern Huilliche tellings, a rodent with the head of a rooster. It nests inside human homes and feeds by drinking the saliva and breath of sleeping people, causing wasting illness.

Where does the Colo Colo come from?

The Colo Colo is born from a rooster’s egg, an egg laid by a snake and incubated by an old rooster, or in some versions an egg laid by a rooster and brooded by a serpent. Either way it is a creature born of the wrong pairing, and Mapuche country wisdom holds that any egg found without a hen behind it should be burned at once before it hatches.

What does the Colo Colo do to people?

The Colo Colo hides inside the walls, floors, or roof of a home and emerges at night to lick the mouths of sleeping people or the rims of cups and spoons they will use in the morning. This slow drinking drains the household’s vitality and is associated with tuberculosis-like wasting, especially in newborns and nursing mothers, who are its preferred victims.

How do you get rid of a Colo Colo?

A Machi, a Mapuche ritual specialist, is called to identify the spirit, drum it into the open, and exorcise the house. Burning any suspected rooster’s egg is the strongest preventive measure, and in cases where the creature cannot be dislodged from a dwelling, the entire house is sometimes burned to the ground to be rid of it.

Is the Colo Colo the same in every region?

No. The creature’s form changes with the region. In central Mapuche territory the Colo Colo is most often a serpent that has grown legs and feathers, while in the southern Huilliche territories of Llanquihue and Valdivia it is described as an elongated mouse with the head of a rooster. Its behavior and origin from a rooster’s egg remain consistent across these variants.

Related Entries

Basilisco Chilote, Wekufe, Peuchen, Chonchon, Cherufe, Nguruvilu, Caicai-Vilu, Trentren-Vilu, Pillan, Imbunche, Trauco, Alicanto, Camahueto