Soucouyant

The mortar stands in the corner of the room with something folded inside it, pale and soft and faintly warm, like laundry brought in too early. It is a skin. Its owner is out over the cane fields, a bead of orange light travelling fast against the black, and she will want it back before the sun comes up.

That is the soucouyant, and every child in Trinidad knows the shape of the story before they know the word. By day she is an old woman living alone at the edge of things, in a house nobody visits, with a face so deeply lined that the neighbours remark on it. The wrinkles are evidence. Skin taken off and put back on night after night does not sit smoothly again, and the creases are the receipt for everything she has been doing while the village slept.

The transformation happens indoors and in private. She peels herself out of her skin the way a person steps out of a wet dress, folds it, and hides it in a mortar, or under the eaves, or beneath a stone. What lifts off afterward has no body worth describing. It is light: a ball of flame about the size of a lantern, sometimes only a candle flame drifting at head height, crossing the sky at a speed nothing in the natural world matches. In a Bahamian account collected in 1904 the thing arrives looking exactly like a floating candle flame, settles onto the sleeper, and takes every drop of blood in them.

She gets in through the keyhole. Through the crack under the door, through a nail hole in a board, through the gap where a shutter has warped away from its frame. A house cannot be closed against her because there is always a hole somewhere. She finds the soft places, the inside of the arm, the neck, the back of the knee, and drinks while the sleeper dreams of nothing at all. In the morning there is no wound to speak of, only a spread of black and blue across the skin, and a child who is tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

The name crossed the Atlantic before any of this was written down. The Oxford English Dictionary traces soucouyant to a West African source, most likely Fulfulde sukunya or its Soninke relative suxuya, both words for a kind of evil sorcerer, carried over in the speech of enslaved people from Senegambia and the western Sudan. The Dominican historian Lennox Honychurch prefers a French road, from sucer, to suck. Both may be operating at once, which is how Creole words usually work. What is clear is that she did not arrive holding a single passport. West African beliefs about women who leave their bodies at night met French folklore about the loup-garou and the returning dead in the same yards and the same kitchens, and the soucouyant is what grew in that ground.

She has cousins wherever that history ran. Dominica knows her as the soucriant. In Guadeloupe, Martinique and Suriname the soukougnan or soukounian sheds skin in the same way and need not be a woman at all. Guyana calls her the Ole-Higue. Haiti, Grenada and, improbably, Mauritius use loogaroo, a name that walked out of loup-garou and kept only the flying and the blood. In the Bahamas she is simply the Hag, and when Elsie Clews Parsons collected folk-tales on Andros Island she recorded plainly that hags there could be men.

Trinidad adds a bargain to the arrangement. The blood is not only food, it is currency, traded to Bazil, the demon who lives inside the silk cotton tree, for the powers that let her burn and fly and pour herself through a keyhole. The debt is nightly. That is why she cannot settle quietly into her wrinkles and be left alone: something is waiting at the foot of the tree for what she owes.

Which is where the rice comes in. Scatter a heap of rice across the doorstep, or at the crossroads she has to pass, and she is compelled to gather it grain by grain before she can move on. None of the tellings explain why. She cannot help herself, the counting takes hours, and dawn is not negotiable. Villagers who suspected a particular old woman would sit up for the light and find her still crouched in the road with a fistful of grain and nowhere to be.

The other method goes for the skin. Find where she keeps it and pack it with coarse salt, or with pepper. When she comes home and tries to put herself back on, the fit is unbearable. She burns and itches and cannot stop screaming, and the screaming is what names her to the whole village, which by every account did not respond gently: a beating, a vat of boiling tar, or simply holding her there until the sun came up over the hills and finished the work on a body with nothing left to protect it.

Her powers all come from one idea. Flight, fire, entry through any aperture, a bite that bruises instead of tearing, and in some tellings the ability to turn a drained victim into another soucouyant, or to move into the skin of a woman she has killed. Her limits follow from the same idea. She is tied to her skin and useless without it. She cannot pass a doorstep without paying the toll of the rice. She cannot meet the sun uncovered. Every weakness she has is domestic, made of grain and salt and a container in the corner of a room, which means the cure for her was always already in the house.

Giselle Liza Anatol, who grew up hearing these stories from her Trinidadian mother, aunts and grandmothers and has spent a career studying them, has pointed out what the fear itself gives away. The soucouyant is old, female, unpartnered, living alone, and out after dark without anyone’s permission, which is a fairly exact inventory of what a woman was not supposed to be. The tales frighten children and instruct them in the same breath. Caribbean and diasporic writers have spent recent decades turning her around and letting the flight stand for something other than appetite. The mortar in the corner stays where it is.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a soucouyant?

A soucouyant is a Caribbean folklore figure who appears as a reclusive old woman by day and sheds her skin at night to fly as a ball of fire and drink human blood. She hides the discarded skin in a mortar or another container while she hunts. The name is used chiefly in Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, Grenada and Saint Lucia.

How do you kill a soucouyant?

The traditional method is to find her hidden skin and pack it with coarse salt or pepper, so that she cannot put it back on. She is said to die in a frenzy of burning and itching, or to give herself away by screaming. Villagers might also trap her by scattering rice at a doorstep or crossroads, since she is compelled to pick up every grain, leaving her exposed at sunrise.

Why does the soucouyant count rice?

Rice or sand scattered on a doorstep, windowsill or crossroads forces the soucouyant to stop and gather it grain by grain before she can continue. The stories never explain the compulsion, only that she cannot resist it. Because counting takes so long, the trick is used to keep her occupied until dawn, when she can be caught in the open without her skin.

What is the difference between a soucouyant, an Ole-Higue and a Loogaroo?

They are regional names for closely related versions of the same skin-shedding, blood-drinking fireball. Soucouyant is used in Trinidad and Tobago and the eastern Caribbean, Ole-Higue in Guyana, and Loogaroo in Haiti, Grenada and Mauritius, the last name derived from the French loup-garou. Guadeloupe, Martinique and Suriname use soukougnan or soukounian, and in these versions the figure is not always a woman.

Where does the name soucouyant come from?

The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to a West African origin, most likely Fulfulde sukunya or the related Soninke suxuya, words for a kind of evil sorcerer. The term would have crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people from Senegambia and the western Sudan. The Dominican historian Lennox Honychurch has instead linked it to the French verb sucer, meaning to suck.

Related Entries

Loogaroo, Lagahoo, Douen, Jumbee, Massacooraman, Hag, Boo Hag, Obayifo, Adze, Asanbosam, Manananggal, Penanggalan, Vampire