Tiyanak

Also Known As: also tianak, tianac; from the older Spanish-era Tagalog patianac, patiànac; cognate with the Malay pontianak
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Philippine Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: It imitates the cry of an abandoned infant with enough accuracy to make a stranger pick it up, then drops the disguise.
Role in Mythos: The tiyanak is the roadside predator of Philippine lower mythology, a small malevolent spirit that punishes ordinary decency and, in its older form, was blamed for obstructing childbirth.
Relation to Humans: It hunts travellers on forest paths and lone walkers caught out after dark, taking them through their own compassion rather than by force. Filipino households have countered it for centuries with practical remedies, from armed vigils over a woman in labour to turning a shirt inside out to break its hold.

The cry comes out of the bamboo at the hour when the light turns from amber to grey, thin and wavering and pitched exactly where a human infant pitches it. The path back to the barrio is still an hour off. There is wet leaf litter underfoot, the smell of rain landing on hot ground, and somewhere down among the roots a baby is screaming, and no decent person walks past that.

That is the entire mechanism. The tiyanak does not need teeth until the last second.

What happens after the bundle is lifted depends on which province the story comes from, but the shape holds. The weight settles into the crook of an arm, and then the weight changes. In the most commonly told version the thing keeps roughly the proportions of a baby while its hands lengthen into claws and its gums fill in with something that was not there a moment earlier. In the version Maximo Ramos set down, the disguise drops away entirely and what remains is a little old man: skin gathered in folds, a long beard and moustache, a flat nose, eyes the size of coins. One of its legs is shorter than the other, so it cannot properly run. It leaps, or it crawls. A creature built like that could never chase anything down, which is precisely why its voice does all the work.

Other districts describe it differently enough to be worth keeping. Around Pampanga the tiyanak are small and nut-brown and do not walk so much as hang in the air, with heavy noses, wide mouths, fierce eyes, and voices sharpened to a point. A telling from Mindoro ends with the creature turning into a black bird and going up through the canopy, which is an odd note to finish on and is probably an old one.

Where they come from is disputed, and the disagreement is part of the subject rather than a gap in it. The Mandaya of Mindanao held that a tiyanak is the spirit of a child whose mother died before it could be delivered, so that it was born into the ground instead of into the world. That single detail explains a great deal about the creature’s behaviour: it arrives already cheated, and it works the treeline looking for someone to carry it.

The oldest surviving note on any of this was written by a Franciscan in 1589. Juan de Plasencia, cataloguing Tagalog belief in order to abolish it, recorded that when a woman died in childbirth she and her child were held to suffer punishment, and that she could be heard at night, lamenting. The Tagalogs called this patianac. Notice who is doing the crying in that sentence. In the earliest record the patianac is the mother, or something bound up with her death, and the infant that lures travellers off the trail is what the word grew into over the following centuries. A few hundred miles to the south the Malay pontianak kept the original sense and is still a woman who died giving birth.

By the 1740s the friar Francisco de San Antonio was describing the countermeasure in enough detail that his irritation shows through. When a woman went into labour, men of the house stripped bare, took up shields and catans, and posted themselves one in the crawlspace beneath the raised floor and one straddling the ridge of the roof. There they fenced with the empty air, cutting at nothing, for as long as the birth lasted. San Antonio writes that he broke up several of these vigils by punishment, and that the men told him it was to keep the patianac and the aswang off the woman, since such things came to obstruct the birth and to draw the souls out of children. Sixty years later Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga found the same practice reduced to one room: the door barred, a fire lit, the husband naked and swinging his sword until the child arrived. Two observers, two centuries, one gesture. A man fighting something he cannot see while his wife labours on the other side of the room.

Spanish Catholicism reworked the creature rather than removing it. Under the new arithmetic an infant who died before baptism could be buried in no consecrated ground and could go nowhere that baptised children went, and the tiyanak became what such a soul was said to turn into: unnamed, unclaimed, kept out of the churchyard and out of heaven on a technicality. Missionary preaching was supposed to have ended the belief. It did not. It gave the belief a filing system, and the creature has been at least half Catholic ever since. The twentieth century added one more layer, recasting the tiyanak as an aborted or discarded child returning for the people who made the decision, which moves it out of the forest and into the house.

Its powers are narrow and brutally well matched to its purpose. It can sound like a child, and it can pass for one long enough to be lifted, and in many accounts it can foul a traveller’s sense of direction so that the same stretch of path keeps arriving again. It kills people for being kind.

Its limits are correspondingly unglamorous. A walker who has been led in circles is supposed to pull off his shirt and put it back on inside out, at which point the tiyanak finds the sight funny enough to let him go and returns to the trees. Sustained noise drives it out of a neighbourhood, which is one reason a Philippine New Year is fought rather than celebrated. Naming an unnamed dead child is said to settle it, and a white candle lit on its behalf is said to show it the way out. Garlic and the rosary arrived later, borrowed wholesale from the defences against the aswang, of which the tiyanak is generally reckoned a smaller and more specialised cousin. None of these are heroic remedies, and none of them need to be. A limping goblin that cannot outpace a walking man was never much of a threat on its own. It only ever needed the one sound.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tiyanak?

The tiyanak is a small malevolent spirit in Philippine folklore that takes the form of an infant and imitates a baby’s cry to lure travellers off forest paths. Once picked up, it sheds the disguise and attacks. Older accounts describe its true form as a wrinkled little old man with a flat nose, coin-sized eyes, and one leg shorter than the other.

Where does the tiyanak come from?

Accounts vary by region. The Mandaya of Mindanao described the tiyanak as the spirit of a child whose mother died before delivering it, so that it was born into the ground rather than into the world. After Spanish colonisation the creature was recast as the soul of an infant who died before baptism, and in modern Philippine belief it is often understood as an aborted or discarded child returning for revenge.

How do you escape a tiyanak?

The best-known remedy is to turn your clothing inside out, which the tiyanak reportedly finds funny enough to release its victim and go back to the forest. Loud sustained noise is also said to drive it away, and giving an unnamed dead child a name, or lighting a white candle for it, is believed to settle the spirit. Garlic and the rosary were added later from the countermeasures used against the aswang.

Is the tiyanak the same as the pontianak?

They share a root but are not the same creature. The Malay pontianak is a woman who died in childbirth, which matches the oldest Philippine sense of the word: Juan de Plasencia’s 1589 account describes the patianac as a mother who died giving birth and could be heard lamenting at night. In the Philippines the meaning shifted over the following centuries from the mother to the infant.

What did Spanish friars record about the tiyanak?

Franciscan and Augustinian observers documented both the belief and the rituals against it. Francisco de San Antonio, writing between 1738 and 1744, described men stripping naked and fencing the air with shields and cutlasses from beneath the floor and the roof ridge for the whole length of a woman’s labour, to keep the patianac and the aswang away. Martínez de Zúñiga recorded a similar practice in 1803 with the husband alone in a barred room, swinging his sword until the child was born.