Pontianak

The smell arrives first. Frangipani, sweet and heavy, the perfume of graveyard trees, drifting through a sleeping kampung where nothing is in bloom. Then a baby cries somewhere out in the dark. If the cry is faint and far off, she is close. If it rings out loud and near, she is still a long way away. By the time a villager has worked out the trick of it, the sweetness has curdled into the reek of meat left in the sun, and the Pontianak is already at the door.

She is the ghost of a woman who died carrying a child, or in the act of bearing one, and the name keeps the memory of it. Pontianak is worn down from *perempuan mati beranak*, the woman who died in childbirth. Across Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia she answers to other names too, kuntilanak and matianak among them, sometimes clipped to the almost affectionate kunti. What she wants is never quite settled. Some stories give her a plain hunger for blood. Others give her a grievance, a rage pointed at the living, at pregnant women and newborns and above all at men, the ones who leave and the ones whose violence put her in the ground.

The oldest careful account splits her in two. When the English official Walter Skeat wrote down what Selangor Malays told him at the close of the nineteenth century, he recorded not one spirit but a pair, joined by a single death. The langsuir was the mother, a woman of dazzling beauty who died from the shock of hearing that her baby had been born still, and who flew off into the trees as a kind of night-owl. The pontianak, in that older telling, was the dead child itself. Over the century since, the two have run together into one figure across most of the region, and today the name usually means the mother: the beautiful revenant, not the lost infant. The stories disagree on this, and they always have.

What she looks like depends on which century is doing the describing. Skeat’s langsuir wore a robe of green and let her jet hair fall to her ankles, her nails tapering to an unnatural length, beauty everywhere except for the one thing the hair was grown to hide, a hole in the back of her neck through which she drank. The Pontianak of modern film and rumour is paler, wrapped in a grimy white shroud, her black hair loose over a bloodless face. Both versions agree on the nails, long and sharp as a handful of knives, and both agree that she can put on loveliness like a garment and shrug it off again. She comes toward a man as someone worth following into the dark. The face only slips when it is too late to run.

By day she keeps to the banana trees. The spirit is said to fold itself into the pokok pisang and wait out the sun among the broad wet leaves, which is why some old households watched their banana groves more closely than seemed reasonable, and why a length of thread knotted around a trunk at night was thought to hold a wailing thing bound inside it until morning. After dark she unfolds and goes looking.

A man walking home late meets a woman at the roadside, alone, lovely, her back half-turned to him. He slows. Perhaps he speaks. She turns, and there is nothing behind the beauty but appetite, and the long nails go into his belly and open it, and she takes what is inside. She feeds on organs and on blood, on the soft parts, and she is said to crave the unborn most of all, tearing them from pregnant women with those same nails. This is the plain fact under all the atmosphere: she disembowels people and eats them.

Her powers follow from what she is, a mother’s death turned inside out. She flies. She trades her face between rot and radiance and back again. Her hearing and her hands are built for the one purpose, and the frangipani sweetness that hangs about her works as both lure and warning, depending on how much the person breathing it in already knows. The inverted cry is a cruelty of its own design, because the instinct to relax at a distant sound is exactly the instinct that gets a person killed.

She is not unstoppable, and the remedies are as strange as she is. The old cure is a nail, driven into the hollow at the nape of her neck. Do it, and the Pontianak is said to fold down into an ordinary woman, beautiful, quiet, a wife who will keep a house and bear children and give no trouble at all, right up until someone works the nail loose again, at which point she remembers everything and becomes what she was. For the Indonesian kuntilanak the nail goes into the crown of the head instead. To keep a woman from becoming one in the first place, Skeat’s Malays filled the mouth of her corpse with glass beads so it could not shriek, tucked eggs beneath the armpits and pushed needles into the palms so the arms could not beat like wings. It is a folklore obsessed with sealing the body shut.

There is a city that carries her name. Pontianak stands on the equator in West Kalimantan, at the delta where the Kapuas River meets the sea, and the story of its founding is a story about her. When Sultan Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie came to settle the site in 1771, the legend runs, the ground was thick with these spirits, and he had his men fire cannon into the dark to drive them off before he would raise a single beam. A mosque and a palace went up where the guns had stood. Every year at the close of Ramadan the descendants of that gesture still touch off great carbide cannons hollowed from logs, a rolling thunder along the river that is half celebration and just as surely a message to whatever still waits in the banana trees.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Pontianak?

The Pontianak is a vampiric female ghost of Malay and Indonesian folklore, the spirit of a woman who died while pregnant or in childbirth. She returns as a beautiful, pale, long-haired revenant who lures and kills the living, and is also known as the kuntilanak or matianak. Her name comes from the Malay phrase *perempuan mati beranak*, “woman who died in childbirth.”

How do you stop or kill a Pontianak?

The traditional way to subdue a Pontianak is to drive a nail into the hole at the nape of her neck, which is said to turn her into a docile, beautiful wife until the nail is removed. In the Indonesian kuntilanak version, the nail is driven into the crown of the head instead. Older Malay practice also tried to prevent the transformation at burial by filling the corpse’s mouth with glass beads and placing needles in the palms so it could not shriek or fly.

Why does the Pontianak cry like a baby?

The Pontianak announces herself with the sound of a crying infant, a lure that plays on the instinct to help. The cry works in reverse of ordinary sound: a loud, clear cry means she is far away, while a soft, faint one means she is dangerously close. Her arrival is also signalled by the sweet smell of frangipani, which sours into the stench of a rotting corpse as she nears.

What is the difference between the Pontianak and the langsuir?

In Walter Skeat’s nineteenth-century account of Selangor folklore, the langsuir is the mother who died of grief at her child’s stillbirth and became a night-owl spirit, while the pontianak was originally the dead stillborn child itself. Over time the two figures merged in popular belief, and today “Pontianak” usually refers to the vengeful mother rather than the infant. The two remain closely linked as spirits born from the same death.

Is Pontianak a real place?

Yes. Pontianak is a city on the equator in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, at the delta of the Kapuas River. According to legend it was named after the ghosts that were said to haunt the site when Sultan Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie founded it in 1771, driving them off with cannon fire, and the city still fires carbide log-cannons at the end of Ramadan.

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