Langsuir

An owl comes down onto the ridge-pole of a house in Selangor and the talk inside stops. It is not hunting. It settles, hooks its claws into the thatch above a room where a woman has just given birth, and hoots, and the sound travels down through the roof beams into a room where everyone has gone quiet and nobody will say why. There is a woman in the trees at the edge of the compound too. She has been there since her own funeral.

Walter Skeat heard the story from Malays in Selangor at the end of the nineteenth century, and the version he wrote down is the one everything else grows out of. A woman of dazzling beauty was told that her baby had been born dead. The shock killed her. She clapped her hands, once, and then, in his phrasing, flew whinnying away to a tree, upon which she perched. The detail that makes it stick is the clap. Not a scream, not a collapse. A single flat sound, and then she was gone into the branches and was no longer a woman.

She can be recognised. The robe is green. The nails taper to an unnatural length, which in the telling is a mark of beauty and is also a set of knives. The hair is jet black and falls all the way to her ankles, and the length of it is not vanity: it hangs where it hangs to cover the hole in the back of her neck, and the hole is what she drinks through. Children’s blood, taken at the nape. Some tellings give her another shape entirely, a woman’s head afloat in the dark with the spine and entrails trailing beneath it, which looks like the penanggalan but is not the same creature and does not become one.

The bird is the part that Malay households actually acted on. Her embodiment is a kind of night-owl, and an owl on the roof of a house where there is a newborn or a woman still lying in was not a bird. The hoot carried its own reading: the cry of a mother out looking for a child she cannot find. She was said to favour certain trees, and to rest in the sakat, the parasitic bird’s-nest fern that grows out of a trunk in dark green clusters and holds enough water and rot to sit in. Woodcutters working the poisonous rengas trees went through elaborate exorcisms before they touched them, because the langsuyar was one of the things in there with them.

The defence began before there was anything to defend against. When a woman died in childbirth, the people preparing her body put glass beads in her mouth, a hen’s egg under each armpit, and needles through the palms of her hands. The reasoning is grimly practical: with beads in her mouth she cannot open it to shriek, with an egg wedged in each armpit she cannot beat her arms, and with needles through her palms she cannot open and close her hands, and she needs all three to fly. It is a burial rite designed as a restraint. The women who performed it were burying a friend and building a cage at the same time.

There were charms for when it had already gone wrong. Skeat records the leaves of the gandasuli as a strong protection. Among the Sakai of the northern peninsula a chant was used that works by naming her down into an inventory of parts, addressing her as a bird and telling her what she is made of. Your beak is stumpy. Your feathers are cloth of silk. Your eyes are crab’s-eye beans, your heart a young areca-nut, your bones twigs of the giant bamboo, your tail a fan from China. The logic underneath is that a spirit can be handled if its origin is known, and the chant knows exactly what she is, which is more than she does.

And she can be captured. Catch her, cut the nails short, cut the tresses off, and force the hair and clippings into the hole in her neck, and she goes quiet. Not banished. Tamed, and indistinguishable from an ordinary woman, and she stays that way for years. The stories say plainly that this has happened, that a langsuir taken this way has married and borne children and kept a house, and that it lasted right up until the evening somebody let her dance at a village celebration. Then she went straight back through whatever the haircut had closed, and out into the forest, and the family she had been living with was left standing in a clearing full of lamplight.

She has almost nothing that could be called a weakness in the ordinary sense. No hero kills her, no weapon is named for the job, and she does not appear to be afraid of anything. What she has instead is a set of latches. She is stopped by beads and eggs and needles, by a plant, by a chant that recites her anatomy back at her, by scissors. Every one of those is a household object. The corresponding limit is that all of it must be done in time, and by people who are, at that exact moment, grieving.

A wooden figure of her sits in a box in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, part of the thousand-odd Malay and Sakai objects Skeat handed over. She stands not much taller than a doll. The hair is long and black, the nails reach past the knees, the ankle-length baju kurung has faded to beige, and the eyes bulge and look at nothing. She is a model of a thing nobody claims to have photographed, made in the 1890s so that an Englishman could carry the shape of her home.

Belief did not stay in the 1890s. In 2013, villagers in the Pasir Puteh district of Kelantan reported a long-haired figure flying and cackling over the houses at night, and the sightings spread from village to village until people were gathering to pray together against it. The panic ended when a local shaman announced he had caught four of them. A religious officer went on the record confirming that such a spirit exists, while warning people off the magic side of it, which is roughly where the Malay peninsula has been on this question for a very long time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a langsuir?

The langsuir is a Malay revenant, the spirit of a woman who died at the news that her child had been born still. She takes the form of a beautiful woman in a green robe with ankle-length black hair and enormously long nails, and she drinks the blood of children through a hole in the back of her neck. Her other form is a night-owl.

What is the difference between the langsuir and the pontianak?

In Walter Skeat’s Selangor account of the 1890s, the langsuir is the mother who died of the shock of the stillbirth, and the pontianak was the dead child itself. The two figures merged over the twentieth century, so that today the name Pontianak usually means the mother. The langsuir keeps the older role, and keeps the owl.

How do you stop a woman from becoming a langsuir?

The corpse is prepared so that it cannot fly. Glass beads are placed in the mouth so she cannot shriek, a hen’s egg is put under each armpit so she cannot beat her arms, and needles are pushed through the palms of the hands so she cannot open and close them. All three are held to be necessary for flight, and the rite is performed at the funeral of any woman who died in childbirth.

Can a langsuir be tamed?

Yes, according to the Malay accounts. If she is caught, her nails and hair are cut short and stuffed into the hole in her neck, and she becomes an ordinary woman for years at a stretch, in some tellings marrying and raising children. The effect breaks if she is allowed to dance at a village celebration, at which point she reverts and flies back to the forest.

Why is the langsuir associated with owls?

Her animal form is a kind of night-owl, and an owl landing on the roof of a house holding a newborn or a woman who has just given birth was taken as a sign that she was attacking. The hoot itself was read as the cry of a woman searching for a lost child. She was also said to rest in the sakat, a bird’s-nest fern growing in dark clusters on tree trunks.

Related Entries

Pontianak, Penanggalan, Bajang, Toyol, Pelesit, Polong, Hantu Raya, Orang Minyak, Harimau Jadian, Krasue, Manananggal, Tiyanak, Churel, Ubume, Strix