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Bestiary of Cryptids & Legendary CreaturesThe manananggal is a Philippine night-flyer whose upper body leaves its legs behind, gaining wings while becoming vulnerable to anyone who finds the abandoned half.
The sailors have been welcomed into a splendid house in Capiz. Dinner is served on fine dishes, the wine is excellent, and everyone is laughing. Then one guest notices his fork: it has the shape of a human hand. In Fletcher Gardner’s collected tale, the men decide to stay awake. [6]
Read the manuscriptThe manananggal’s flight begins with a separation. Its upper half leaves the lower body behind, taking to the night on wings. It belongs within the diverse Philippine category of aswang, discussed by scholar Bliss Cua Lim, rather than naming every being called aswang. Older collections sometimes describe this same waist-divided form under the spelling asuang. The name on a page and the action in a story both matter: some asuangs divide their bodies, while others in the same collection change into animals. [4][6]
Gardner’s The Four Asuangs of Capiz begins with a commandant arriving by boat, accompanied by a captain and six sailors. The commandant lodges separately; the boatmen stay in a grand house owned by a widow with three daughters. All are invited to dinner there. The hand-shaped fork interrupts an evening of generous food, wine and conversation. Its discoverer quietly alerts the others, and they finish eating as quickly as they can. Later the commandant returns to his lodging, the captain takes a room alone, and the six sailors share another. They agree to watch through the night. [6]
After midnight, when movement in the house has stopped, three sailors creep downstairs. Against a wall stand the lower bodies of three women, each complete below the waist and missing everything above it. The sailors smear the exposed surfaces with ashes and move the bodies out of place. Then they hurry away to tell the commandant and their companions what they have found. The returning women fly about, unable to rejoin themselves. They cry for help and insist that they have harmed nobody. Dawn is approaching, and they fear what it will bring if their bodies remain divided. [6]
The captain hears them and comes downstairs. Instead of treating their helplessness as a victory, he obtains water and a cloth, washes away the ashes and restores the bodies to their proper places. As daylight appears, the women become whole again. They promise their rescuer good fortune. Three sailors marry women of Capiz, and the commandant and captain remain there for a long time. The three who interfered with the bodies flee, but the asuangs pursue them, threatening death unless they make amends through marriage. Eventually the men agree. Gardner’s narrator closes by saying the marriages are good and the sailors never complain. The tidy ending follows a threat that the tale has made unmistakable. [6]
A second tale, The Woman Who Became an Asuang, gives bodily reunion a harsher history. A woman lives with her husband, mother and baby daughter. Her husband is often away, and she suspects another woman. Leaving the baby with its grandmother, she goes to look for him at a country house. He is absent, but meat hangs from the rafters. Hungry, she eats it; a piece of liver changes her into an asuang. Back home she attacks her child. The grandmother hears the crying and returns to find the mother fleeing and the infant fatally injured. After burying the child, she asks the village chiefs for protection.
Juan de Plasencia’s 1589 account places a figure called magtatangal in Catanduanes. In Blair and Robertson’s English edition, it appears at night without head or entrails and carries, or seems to carry, its head elsewhere. In the morning the head returns to the body. Plasencia calls the account a fable, although he reports that people claimed to have seen the being. On the same page he insists that a different creature’s attack should be believed. His missionary catalogue therefore records his judgments as well as the traditions he describes. The magtatangal occupies its own numbered place between other beings, without the waist and wings of Gardner’s later account. [2]
Gardner published Philippine (Tagalog) Superstitions in 1906. His introductory asuang description explicitly places the division at the waist and gives the flying half wings. He argues that the being is human, rather than a ghost or devil. That classification helps explain why his tales can end with marriage, a return to ordinary bodily form or departure from a village. Their transformed people retain relationships that continue after the alarming discovery. [6]
Isabelo de los Reyes’s El Folk-Lore Filipino, published in 1889, gives the Visayan asuang a striking set of physical details. It may be a man or a woman. Oil kept beneath an arm makes flight possible; long nails accompany a black tongue that can stretch and bend like silk. At midnight, the body divides at the waist. The waiting half is left in a corner of the house while the other goes out to feed. This is a figure that can be recognized by a strange part glimpsed in an ordinary place, as much as by a complete silhouette in the sky. [7]
The separation makes the flying being dependent on the part that cannot follow. De los Reyes describes salt preventing reunion; Gardner gives ashes that function in the same way. His Capiz captain’s cloth and water make the obstruction reversible. Power belongs briefly to someone who cannot fly but can reach the exposed body. The danger is therefore unequal in two directions: a visitor can come from the air, and a grounded person can decide whether it will ever become whole again. [7][6]
The USC Digital Folklore Archives preserves a family telling collected by Isabelle Perez in March 2021. Her mother, identified as JP, grew up in Bacolod and later moved to Los Angeles. The record gives Tagalog as her primary language and English and Ilonggo as the performance languages. Her fanged, winged female hunter targets pregnant people, newlyweds and abandoned grooms. Salt, garlic and holy water keep it away; interference with the lower body prevents reunion. She is less sure about its dislike of sunlight. Her hesitation survives beside the more firmly remembered details, giving the printed description something of a conversation’s changing confidence. [3]
De los Reyes places asuang dwellings beside rivers. The creature shares prey with a crocodilian companion, while the night bird tiktik warns of its approach and is therefore its enemy. A house under threat must be watched at several levels. His account of childbirth has relatives guarding the stairs and other openings, with a husband defending the roof or the space below the room. These positions make the building’s gaps and edges part of the story: danger need not enter through the same doorway as a guest. [7]
Gardner’s broader asuang collection includes a traveller who takes a crocodilian shape, a flying figure that changes from woman to cat, pig and turkey, and a man whose meals conceal stolen human flesh. Those episodes do not all describe bodily separation. The two waist-dividing tales have a more specific relationship with the manananggal portrait: their suspended return depends on the lower half. Even there, the response differs. One captain helps endangered hosts; another household’s exposure leads to departure. Shared anatomy does not settle the encounter’s outcome. [6]
De los Reyes also turns from the feared creature to the danger of being called one. He deplores attacks on innocent people accused of being asuang and describes suspicion attaching to unusual appearance. The accusation can extend to a family: neighbours reject marriage with the suspected person’s children and interpret an animal in the house as its owner transformed. His indignant account shows fear becoming a way of reading everything around someone. A face, a household pet and a child’s future can all be made to confirm a judgment already reached. [7]
Sabanpan-Yu reads manananggal representations through women’s bodily agency and the colonial marginalization of female religious authority. Marta’s scissors connect the intrusion with a neighbour’s injury, turning one woman’s defence into another’s exposure to collective suspicion. [5]
Lim follows the figure through oral telling, print, film and digital video. She examines bakla manananggal in the 1964 horror-comedy Mga Bata ng Lagim and Ricky Lee’s fiction. Bakla carries culturally specific combinations of feminine gender expression, same-sex desire and social position; it is not exactly interchangeable with the English word gay. Lim asks how a camp performance might challenge exclusion while also risking a fresh caricature. The changed character can gain visibility without escaping the audience’s prejudices. [4]
In Ivan Emil Labayne’s reading of Lee’s 2011 Si Amapola sa 65 na Kabanata, Amapola works at High Notes in Quezon City’s Morato district, where fictional addresses share a map with real streets. Her lower body, the Talukbang, eventually moves independently. A prophecy names her the country’s saviour, but her path leads toward collective action. Her foster mother, Nanay Angie, accepts her after learning that she is a manananggal. An adviser disputes the prophecy and urges solidarity; Amapola defeats Montero, her counterpart who regards humans as enemies. At the final joint march, Nanay Angie reads Amapola’s speech rejecting a solitary chosen saviour and calling for mutual help. Gunfire follows. Amapola dies, and the country remains unsaved. Labayne sees an unfinished struggle continuing beyond this ending. [1]
The old records disagree even when their images seem closely related. Plasencia doubts his headless traveller; Gardner insists that his asuang is a transformed human; de los Reyes describes both a monster and the ruinous consequences of accusing a neighbour. Their different purposes remain visible in the narration. In the Capiz story, the captain answers the divided women’s cries with a cloth and water. Before the dawn can decide their fate, a human guest decides to help. [2][6][7]
Plasencia is read in Blair and Robertson’s English edition; de los Reyes in the Spanish original. Gardner supplies the two complete body-separation tales. Perez preserves JP’s family performance. Sabanpan-Yu, Lim and Labayne examine literary and visual transformations. [2][7][6][3][5][4][1]
Ivan Emil A. Labayne · The Cordillera Review; University of the Philippines Baguio
Public HTML; opening paragraphs identifying High Notes and Amapola; The split(ting) Amapola and the splits in her social setting, lower-body passage; later political analysis
The novel’s events follow Labayne’s critical reading.
Checked 2026-10-11
Juan de Plasencia · The Philippine Islands, volume VII; digital page at Wikisource · Account dated 1589; later English edition · Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, volume VII · English translation
Printed page 193, seventh category, magtatangal
The 1589 account is read through Blair and Robertson’s later English edition.
Artwork
Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.
Manuscript checked 2026-10-13. Artistic interpretations © Scott Schubr / Luminary Oddities.
Return to the Bestiary ↑The couple settle in another village, where their ceaseless comings and goings arouse suspicion. One neighbour enters while their upper bodies are away, swaps the lower halves and applies ashes. Returning, they cannot join themselves. They fly in and out, lamenting the approaching dawn, then leave once more. The neighbour reverses what he has done. When they return at daybreak, they become whole, but the discovery of their secret drives them away. Here the person who disables the bodies also restores them; the ending removes the couple from the village instead of narrating their destruction. [6]
The Witch of Tawas, retold by Hope Sabanpan-Yu from Damiana Eugenio’s collection, begins with Mang Tano waking to wings. He takes his bolo, a broad knife, but the half-woman, half-bird figure escapes. Villagers suspect an elderly woman seldom seen by day. On another evening Aling Marta hears wings while mending clothes. A threadlike thing hangs from the ceiling. She cuts it with her scissors; a cry and renewed wingbeats follow. Her husband gathers neighbours and goes to the suspected woman’s house. They find her bleeding from the mouth. [5]
Checked 2026-10-11
JP, informant, Isabelle Perez, collector · USC Digital Folklore Archives · Performance March 2021; posted 2021-05-18
Complete JP performance and context
Checked 2026-10-11
Bliss Cua Lim · Kritika Kultura; University of California eScholarship · 2015
Kritika Kultura 24; printed pages 178–188
Checked 2026-10-11
Hope Sabanpan-Yu · UNITAS; author-uploaded public text · 2017
Author-uploaded version, printed pages 81, 83–87 and 90–93; DOI 10.31944/2017901.HOSAYU03
The Tawas account follows Sabanpan-Yu’s retelling from Eugenio’s collection.
Checked 2026-10-11
Fletcher Gardner · Journal of American Folk-Lore; digitized historical scan · 1906
19(74), pp.191–204; complete II.The Asuang pp.193–195 and tales1–8 pp.195–200; principal tales6–7 pp.197–199
Gardner calls these beings asuang; the selected tales explicitly describe separation at the waist.
Checked 2026-10-13
Isabelo de los Reyes y Florentino · Manila: Tipo-Litografía de Chofré y Compañía; Project Gutenberg transcription · 1889 · Spanish; original paraphrase in English
Section II, printed pp.245–251; adopted asuang description and accusation consequences pp.248–251
The Spanish account is paraphrased here in English.
Checked 2026-10-13