The Manananggal is one of the most horrifying and iconic monsters of Philippine folklore: a vampiric creature, usually appearing as a beautiful woman, who by night severs her own body in half at the waist, sprouts great bat-like wings from her back, and flies off into the darkness — her upper torso hunting for prey while her lower half stands abandoned, the secret of her undoing. Her name means “the one who separates herself.”
The One Who Severs Herself
The manananggal (from tanggal, “to remove or separate”) is a self-segmenting vampire-creature, related to the broader [aswang] family. By day she appears as a normal woman, often strikingly beautiful. But at night, she anoints herself with a special oil and her body splits in two at the waist: the upper half — head, arms, and torso, with the entrails sometimes dangling beneath — sprouts enormous leathery, bat-like wings and flies off into the night to hunt, leaving the lower half (the legs and lower torso) standing upright and motionless wherever she removed it, hidden away.
The Hunter of the Night
The flying upper-half of the manananggal preys, like the aswang, upon the vulnerable — above all upon pregnant women and their unborn children. Perching upon the roof of a house, she extends an immensely long, thin, hollow, thread-like proboscis-tongue down through the thatch or the window, and with it pierces the womb of a sleeping pregnant woman to suck out the blood of the mother or to devour the heart and entrails of the foetus. She also feeds on the sick, the sleeping, and newlyweds, draining blood and flesh through her terrible tongue.
The Secret of the Lower Half
The manananggal’s great vulnerability is her abandoned lower half. While she flies and hunts, her legs stand defenseless wherever she left them — and if they can be found, the creature can be destroyed: sprinkling salt, garlic, ash, or crushed spices upon the exposed flesh of the standing lower half prevents the two halves from rejoining at dawn, and so when daylight comes and she cannot reunite her body, the manananggal dies. Salt, garlic, and the sting-ray tail are her dread, as with all the aswang-kind. In the Manananggal, Filipino folklore gave form to one of its most unforgettable horrors — the beautiful woman who severs her own body and flies on bat-wings to feed on the unborn through her terrible tongue, the self-dividing vampire whose abandoned lower half is the secret of both her hunting and her doom.