Patasola

Also Known As: also La Patasola, Pata Sola, “one leg”; the masculine variant Patasolo is reported in parts of Antioquia
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Colombian Mythology, Latin American Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: She appears as a beautiful lost woman, then reveals a single leg, a felid’s fangs and a hunger for blood and flesh.
Role in Mythos: She is the guardian and the terror of the forest edge, punishing the men who go alone into the timber.
Relation to Humans: She hunts loggers, hunters, miners, muleteers and herders who stray from their companions after dark. Country belief also credits her with defending the trees from the axe and the game from the gun, which makes her a warning as much as a monster.

The men have been cutting since first light and the smell of raw sapwood is still on their hands when the light goes orange and then goes out. Somewhere past the last cleared row, where the plantain gives way to timber that nobody has measured, a woman is calling. She calls one man by name. He is the one who has drifted furthest from the others, and he does not think this is strange, because thinking is not what a voice like that is for.

That is where she works. Not in the deep forest and not in the village, but at the seam between them, the ragged line where a smallholding stops and the mountain begins. She shows herself at dusk, in the gap between the last light and full dark, and she has been showing herself there since at least the eighteenth century, when mining and timber camps in the mountains of Antioquia and Caldas filled up with men who were away from their wives for months at a stretch. The Colombian folklorist Javier Ocampo López put her birth in those camps. It is not a mysterious origin. Take a few hundred lonely men, surround them with forest that swallows anyone who wanders, and a creature like the Patasola assembles herself out of what they are already afraid of.

Her name is a plain description: one leg. The leg is long and thick and ends in a rounded, cloven hoof, a cow’s or a hog’s, and on it she covers ground at a speed that no sane animal should manage, bounding rather than limping. The rest of her is worse. Country accounts give her one breast, a hooked nose, eyes that bulge and burn, a mouth too wide for the face it sits in, and the eye teeth of a jungle cat. Her hair hangs forward in short greasy hanks, and there is a suggestion in some tellings that it hangs that way on purpose, to keep the face hidden a moment longer. She is the most feared spirit in the Colombian countryside, ahead of the drowned and the headless and the burning, because the others announce themselves and she does not.

How she came to be depends on who is telling it, and the versions do not agree in their details so much as in their verdict. The best travelled account, rooted in the Tolima Grande, has her as a farmhand’s wife, young and beautiful, who took up with the landowner while her husband was away selling the harvest. The husband invented a journey, hid in the plantain patch, and watched the landowner walk up to his door and take his wife in his arms. He came over the fence with the machete already up. The landowner’s head came off in one stroke. The wife turned to run and the second stroke took her leg off at the hip, and country people will tell you it fell away like a cut branch. Both of them were dead within the hour. Other tellings make her a mother who killed her own child, or a cruel woman whose neighbours held her down and hacked the leg off and burned it, or a witch punished by God, or an indigenous woman murdered by a landholder and left in the trees. What survives across all of them is a woman punished in the body for what she wanted, and a punishment that did not take.

The encounter itself follows a shape so consistent that men in the coffee country could recite it. She sits on a rock or at the foot of a tree, apparently lost, sometimes wearing the face of a woman the traveller loves. She speaks sweetly. She beckons and moves back into the trees, and the man follows, and the trees close, and at some point he understands that he no longer knows which way the camp is. Then the voice changes. In another version she does not seduce at all but weeps, and the men who hear her call out to help a woman in distress, and the weeping gets more piteous and much nearer, until the thing arrives among them. She goes for the throat, drinks, and breaks what is left with those teeth. Some who fled said what saved them was calling on the Virgin. Others simply ran better than the man beside them.

She is not only an appetite. Her older face, the one the Antioquian record preserves, is a deity of the forest itself. She keeps watch over the timber against the axemen who fell it, shields the game from hunters, and terrifies dogs, and she is said to steal children and abandon them far up the mountain. Tomás Carrasquilla, writing of the Antioquian mining country, described the Patasolo coming out of the woods in three strides, stripping the fruit trees, flattening fences and caving in roofs with that single split hoof, and added that nobody knew of anything that worked against it. That last part is an exaggeration, but not by much. The remedies people did trust are small and specific and tell you what the fear was made of. Keep domestic animals around you, above all dogs, which are counted blessed and which she cannot face. Show her the instruments that took her leg, the axe, the machete, the comb. Stay with your companions, and do not be the man who wanders off when a stranger calls him by name in the dark.

Her limits are the limits of her own story. She cannot cross into the cleared ground where the household and its animals are, which is why she works the border and never the yard. She is bound to the hours of low light and to the forest that punished her. And she can only take a man who agrees to be taken, one step at a time, of his own accord, away from the fire and the noise of other people.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Patasola?

The Patasola is a one-legged female spirit of Colombian folklore who haunts the edges of forests, mountains and jungle. She appears as a beautiful woman to lure lone men deeper into the trees, then reveals a monstrous form with fangs and a single hoofed leg and devours them or drinks their blood.

Why does the Patasola have only one leg?

The most widely told origin says she was an unfaithful wife whose husband caught her with the landowner and cut her leg off at the hip with a machete. Other versions say she killed her own child, or that villagers amputated the leg with an axe and threw it into a fire. In every version the missing leg is a punishment that followed her past death.

Who does the Patasola attack?

She hunts men who work alone in the wilderness: loggers, hunters, miners, muleteers, herders and travellers. She is most dangerous to a man who has separated from his companions at dusk, which is exactly the moment she chooses to appear.

How do you protect yourself from the Patasola?

Country tradition says to keep domestic animals close, especially dogs, which are considered blessed and which she will not approach. Showing her the tools associated with her mutilation, an axe, a machete or a comb, is also said to drive her off, and some accounts say a man who calls on the Virgin can escape her.

Is the Patasola evil, or a protector?

Both, depending on who is telling the story. She devours men who stray into the forest, but the same tradition credits her with guarding the trees from woodcutters and the animals from hunters, which made the belief a practical restraint on hunting and logging in the Colombian mountains.