Tlahuelpuchi

Around midnight in a one-room adobe house beneath the Malintzi volcano, a woman gets up without waking her husband and lays a small fire on the kitchen floor. Certain woods. Certain leaves. She steps over the flames three times, north to south and then east to west, saying words she has taught to nobody, and then she sits down in the fire facing north. Her body comes apart at the hips.

The legs stay behind near the hearth, where they will keep warm. What is left of her goes out over the roof as a bird.

Nobody in Tlaxcala chose to become a tlahuelpuchi and nobody could be made into one. The condition arrived with birth, unearned and unexplained, distributed by no god and no curse that anyone could name, and it lay dormant through childhood. A girl learned what she was at her first menstruation. A boy learned after three days of espanto, the soul-loss sickness, from which he woke with the hunger already in him. From that night on she had to drink human blood at least once a month, and if she failed she died. There was no cure, no confession, no priest who could take it off her.

Her preferred victims were infants between two and ten months old, and she hunted hardest in the coldest months and the wettest ones, between midnight and three in the morning, when the fires had burned down and the rooms were freezing. She travelled as a turkey most often. Sometimes a buzzard, sometimes a donkey ambling through the lanes to see which houses had babies in them, sometimes only a light moving low over the maguey. Anyone who knew what to look for could tell the difference between a real bird and a tlahuelpuchi, because the false one carried a soft phosphorescence around it and smelled faintly of blood.

Getting inside a house took care. Some said she had to fly the sign of a cross over the roof, one axis and then the other, before the threshold would let her through. Others said she thinned herself to nothing and came in at the keyhole as an insect, or seeped in as a mist that settled over everyone sleeping and held them down. Francisca, a weaver’s wife in San Pedro Xolotla, woke in the small hours of a December night in 1960 to a hard white light moving outside her window and found she could not lift herself off the mat. Later she half-woke again to a strange fog in the room, and out of the fog a blue and red bird the size of a child. Then nothing until six in the morning, when her husband shook her awake to tell her the baby was dead on the floor by the door, her chest and throat mottled purple.

The stories that circulate across the whole Nahuatl-speaking world tell it from the husband’s side. A man notices that his wife will not sleep with him, or will not eat, or keeps producing meat and blood for the table when there is no money to buy any and no animal has been killed for miles. He lies awake and watches. He sees the fire, the three passes over it, the legs set down by the hearth like a pair of boots. The next night he takes them and burns them or carries them to the authorities, and when she flies home at dawn there is nothing to come back to. She cannot walk. She cannot run. Somebody kills her, or the village does it slowly by leaving her where she is.

The oldest written traces of her are stranger and thinner than that. The Nahuatl speakers who dictated to Bernardino de Sahagun in the sixteenth century described the tlahuipuchtli as a kind of nahualli whose whole occupation was removing his legs, and said such beings walked the mountains at night throwing fire from the mouth, frightening people into madness or death, appearing as a flame on one ridge and instantly on another. A woman born under the day-sign One Rain would grow up to be mometzcopinqui, she who takes her legs off. Tezozomoc records that Malinalxochitl, the sorceress sister of Huitzilopochtli, turned into a tlahuipuchtli, and says nothing whatever about what she did afterwards. In none of it does anyone drink blood. That element enters with the friars, who arrived carrying the European strix, the woman who becomes a night bird and sucks infants in their cradles, and who set the two figures side by side until they fused. Alonso de Molina, compiling his dictionary, translated “witch who sucks blood” with the Nahuatl teyollocuani, one who eats people’s hearts, which is not the same thing at all.

The turkey was never an arbitrary choice. In the old accounts it is a bird of fire and rain and thunder, and when the third sun was destroyed by burning rain the people who lived under it were turned into turkeys. The transformation ritual repeats that myth in miniature: fire converts a human being into a bird. The detached legs carry their own weight of meaning, since the missing foot is the mark of Tezcatlipoca and of divine disgrace, and among neighbouring peoples the loss of a leg reads plainly as castration and as a man turning into a woman before he can fly. In Tlaxcala the suspicion attached to something more domestic. The woman most likely to be named as a tlahuelpuchi was the one who ran her husband.

Her powers followed from what she was. She could darken a room, make herself unseen, pour sleep into a household, shrink to fit a keyhole, and hear anything said about her anywhere. She could not be detected except in the act. She could not harm her own kin, including in-laws, unless one of them tried to expose her, and any relative responsible for her death inherited the hunger, which is why families said nothing and went on saying nothing for generations.

Against her, people used what they had. Scissors laid crosswise in the doorway, a knife or a bundle of pins under the crib, safety pins fastened in a cross to a child’s clothes, a mirror, a bowl of water with a piece of obsidian in it set behind the door so that she would meet her own reflection and flee. Metal frightened her by nature. Garlic and onion wrapped in a tortilla and tucked into the blankets were the only things reckoned certain, and almost nobody bothered until a death had already happened. To kill her outright required inversion: strip your clothes off in front of her and put them back on inside out, upend a hat and drive a knife through the crown, walk out naked, recite the Magnificat backwards. A man threw a rebozo over her. A woman threw a hat.

The funerals were silent. No music, no priest at the graveside, no flowers afterwards, no eighth-day visit to the cross, and the child was never set among the dead who are welcomed home in November. The clothes were burned. The name went unspoken.

Hugo Nutini was working in the valley when the seven babies died in one night in December 1960, and over the following years he examined forty-seven of these deaths himself or brought a doctor to do it. The babies had not lost blood. They had lost air. Mothers nursed lying on their right side under heavy blankets in unheated rooms on the coldest nights of the year, and sometimes they did not wake up in time. Infant mortality in rural Tlaxcala ran near forty-five percent of children under five in 1960 and had fallen to roughly twenty percent by 1985. When Nutini went back in the mid-eighties, the people who had once described the tlahuelpuchi to him in exact detail could barely remember her, and had started using the ordinary Spanish word instead. Bruja. Witch. Nothing more particular than that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the tlahuelpuchi?

The tlahuelpuchi is a bloodsucking shapeshifter from the folklore of rural Tlaxcala in central Mexico, drawn from Nahua tradition. She lives as an ordinary member of a village family but must drink human blood at least once a month or die. To hunt, she separates her upper body from her legs over a fire and flies out as a bird, usually a turkey.

How does someone become a tlahuelpuchi?

Nobody becomes one. A tlahuelpuchi is born that way to otherwise ordinary parents, and the condition cannot be passed on by biting, mating or teaching. It stays hidden until puberty, revealing itself in girls at first menstruation and in boys after a three-day episode of soul loss called espanto. The one exception is that a family member who causes a tlahuelpuchi’s death inherits the affliction.

What does the tlahuelpuchi turn into?

A turkey most often, and also a buzzard, a donkey, an insect small enough to pass through a keyhole, or a moving light in the dark. The turkey form is old and deliberate, since that bird was linked in Nahua tradition to fire, rain and thunder, and to the destruction of the third sun. Whatever shape she takes, she carries a faint glow and a smell of blood that give her away.

How do you protect a child from the tlahuelpuchi?

Households used metal and mirrors: scissors crossed in the doorway, a knife or pins beneath the crib, safety pins fastened in a cross to clothing, or a bowl of water with obsidian in it behind the door. Garlic and onion wrapped in a tortilla and tucked among the blankets were considered the only certain defence. To kill her, people turned things inside out, reversing clothes, upending a hat with a knife through it, or reciting the Magnificat backwards.

Is the tlahuelpuchi an ancient Aztec belief?

Partly. Sixteenth-century Nahuatl sources describe a tlahuipuchtli who removed his legs, glowed, and terrified people in the mountains at night, but none of them mention drinking blood. The bloodsucking element appears to arrive with Spanish colonists, who brought the European strix, a woman who becomes a night bird and preys on infants, and the two figures merged into the creature Tlaxcalans later described.

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