La Tunda (also La Tunda; regionally simply Tunda)

At the hour when the light turns copper over the mangroves and the whole river smells of salt and warm rot, a boy hears his mother calling him from the edge of the trees. She uses his name, and the particular tired music she saves for suppertime. So he goes. What he does not notice, because children never do, is that one of her feet meets the mud wrong. It does not squelch. It knocks, small and hollow and round, like the turned wooden whisk his grandmother rolls between her palms to raise foam on a pot of hot chocolate.

That is the only warning he will get, and he misses it.

The thing at the treeline is La Tunda, and she has been taking people out of the Pacific forests of Colombia and Ecuador for as long as the Afro-descended towns of the Chocó and the province of Esmeraldas have had children to lose. She is a shapeshifter and, luckily for the living, a sloppy one. She can pour herself into the shape of anyone a person loves, a mother, a sweetheart, an old friend, and she gets the voice and the face and the walk almost perfectly right. She just cannot fix the leg. Whatever else changes, one limb stays a length of wood shaped like a molinillo, and she spends a great deal of cunning keeping it in shadow, behind a skirt, angled away.

In her true skin she is nothing anyone would follow. She is a squat, ugly woman dressed in rags that hang off her like they came from a grave, and she carries a smell in front of her that arrives before she does, a green, sweetish reek of stagnant water and something underneath it that has died. The disguise hides the face. It never quite hides the stench.

Once she has a victim under the canopy she feeds them. She keeps a store of shrimp and crab and presses the food on them with a mother’s patience, and the food is the whole trap. A person who eats from the Tunda’s hand goes slack and dreamy and agreeable, loses the thread of who they are, and stops wanting to leave. The word for this in the coastal towns is entundado, and there is no dignified translation for it. It means bewitched, softened, kept. The eaten drift deeper into the forest at her heels and begin, horribly, to prefer her company to their own families’.

She does not take just anyone. The stories are specific about it, because the stories are really instructions. Unbaptized babies are hers for the taking. So are children who wander off, disobey, stay out past dark. So are men who cheat, whom she leads away to keep as lovers in the wet dark of the jungle. The lesson sits just under the surface of every telling. Stay near the town. Get the child baptized. Keep faith with your wife.

Where she came from depends on who is doing the telling. The oldest and cruelest account makes her a daughter of the devil himself, who seduced a beautiful African woman newly landed off a slave ship, and La Tunda was one of that union’s children. She is barren of anything living. Left to her own body she can bring forth only stones and sticks. So she makes more of herself by theft: a stolen girl is stuffed into a sack, the sack is hung high in a tree, and the Tunda urinates on the cloth night after night until the child inside sours and curdles into another Tunda. She cannot make her own children, so she takes other people’s.

For grown men the tale turns sharper still. Loggers and hunters working the far cuts, days from any house, meet a beautiful stranger who wants them to come just a little further in. Those who follow do not come back the same, or at all. In these versions the seduction drops its mask fast, and the lovely woman becomes the reeking thing that drains a man’s blood and drinks it, or falls on him and devours him the way a wild animal would.

When a family works out that one of theirs has been entundado, they go in after them, and they go in loud. A rescue is a small army: the godparents, a priest, the neighbours, everyone who can carry something. They beat the cununos and the bombos, the deep skin drums of the coast, until the trees shake with it. They burn gunpowder and fire rifles into the air. They pray and, in the same breath, curse the Tunda in language that would shame a saint, because filth and noise are things she cannot abide. They bring dogs, which she fears, and they keep tobacco burning, because its smell disgusts her as thoroughly as her own smell disgusts everyone else. Drummed and cursed and smoked out, she lets go, and the entundado is carried home to be washed and blessed and fed real food until the fog lifts from behind the eyes.

Her powers are exactly the powers of temptation, and so are her limits. She can be anyone; she can make the forest feel like home; she can hold a soul for as long as it keeps eating from her hand. But her borrowed shape always keeps one wooden foot, her stink always precedes her, and she has no defence at all against noise, prayer, gunpowder, dogs, tobacco, or the plain water of baptism. She is strongest with the credulous and the alone, and close to useless against a crowd that has come for a fight.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is La Tunda?

La Tunda is a shapeshifting forest spirit from the Afro-Colombian and Afro-Ecuadorian folklore of the Pacific coast, especially the Chocó and Esmeraldas regions. She disguises herself as a victim’s loved one to lure people, particularly children and unfaithful men, deep into the jungle and keep them there in an enchanted stupor.

How does La Tunda trap her victims?

La Tunda takes the shape of someone the victim trusts, then leads them into the forest and feeds them shrimp and crab. The food places the victim in a docile, forgetful trance called entundamiento, and a person under it, known as an entundado, loses their sense of self and no longer wants to leave her.

How can you tell La Tunda apart from a real person?

No matter whose form La Tunda borrows, one of her legs is always a piece of wood shaped like a molinillo, the whisk used to froth hot chocolate, and she works hard to keep it hidden. She also gives off a powerful stench of stagnant water and decay that her disguise cannot mask.

How do you rescue someone taken by La Tunda?

Families reclaim an entundado by entering the forest in a loud, blessed group that includes the victim’s godparents, a priest, and neighbours. They drive her off by beating cununo and bombo drums, firing guns and gunpowder, praying, hurling insults, bringing dogs, and burning tobacco, all of which La Tunda cannot tolerate. Once freed, the victim is washed, blessed, and fed ordinary food to break the spell.

Where does the legend of La Tunda come from?

La Tunda belongs to the Afro-descendant communities of Colombia’s and Ecuador’s Pacific coast, whose ancestors were enslaved Africans who took refuge in the dense jungle. In the darkest origin story she is a daughter of the devil and an enslaved African woman, and because she can bear only stones and sticks, she creates new Tundas by stealing and transforming other people’s children.

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