As one of the shapeshifting vampire witches of the Caribbean, Soucouyant has been a nightmare for generations and a fear lurking in the gloomy.
In the nocturnal traditions of the Caribbean, there is a figure who is feared and whispered about in equal measure. This being, known as a soucouyant, is neither a spirit in the ordinary sense of the word nor a corpse rising from the grave. This is something much more disturbing. He is a living person who becomes a vampire at night, abandoning his human form and going on a secret hunt.
The legend is most deeply rooted in the folklore of Trinidad, Dominica, Saint Lucia and Haiti, where it appears in slightly different forms, but always carries the same basic horror. Soucouyant is a woman, often older, who moves through her community unnoticed during the day. At night he becomes someone completely different.
Abandoning the human form
He goes by many names. In Guyana, Belize and Jamaica they call her Ol' Higue. In Suriname, Asema and Hag in the Bahamas and Barbados. The belief in soucouyants is still preserved to some extent in Guyana, Suriname, and some Caribbean islands, including Saint Lucia, Dominica, Haïti, and Trinidad. The name Soucouyant comes from the French Creole words “sucer” meaning suck and “couir” meaning run or flow.
In everyday life she looks like an ordinary woman. Or an older woman on the fringes of society, or even a juvenile woman who leads men astray.
After gloomy, the vampire witch removes the skin. The discarded meat is carefully hidden, often in a mortar, a hollow tree or a gloomy corner of her house. At times, the repeated shedding of her skin left her human form extremely wrinkled. Described as a ball of fire or lithe, sometimes flickering like embers carried by the wind, it begins its hunt.
It slips through cracks in the walls, under doors, through keyholes and shutters. Entering houses when the inhabitants are sleeping, he approaches the chosen victim and drinks his blood. Often the focus is on the vulnerable. The diseased, the elderly, and especially children are common targets of stories. In some accounts, it leaves diminutive bruises that are effortless to miss. The victim simply weakens over time without understanding why. If it eats too much, the prey will die or become a Soucouyant.
Danger of discovery
The biggest weakness of the succulent is the skin it leaves behind. If she is found and destroyed or treated with certain substances, she will not be able to return to her human form. Folklore in the Caribbean talks about using salt, rice or warm peppers to prevent it from returning. Sprinkling salt on hidden skin is said to burn it upon re-entry and kill it at dawn.
The soucouyant's skin is considered valuable and is part of black magic rituals.
Rice has another function. It is believed that the succulent is forced to count the seeds if they are scattered in her path. This obsession delays her until sunrise, when she is caught outside the skin and destroyed by the lithe.
Regional variations of the vampire shapeshifting witch
This creature has many regional variations that are so similar, seem the same, or so different that it appears to be a completely different creature.
In Haiti it is known as lougawou and in the Dominican Republic as Lugarú, also known as Galipote or Zángano. Here is a mythical shapeshifter who can take the form of not only various animals, but also inanimate objects such as trees and stones. He has incredible strength and is resistant to bullets. Like other versions of the legend, Lugarú was also considered immortal and maintained this state by prowling at night and drinking the blood of children.
In Mauritian folklore, the Lougarou is a figure commonly used to scare children, appearing during the full moon. Following Cyclone Holland in 1994, a form of Lougarou, known as Touni Minwi, is believed to have visited women in their homes at night. This led to hysteria among the local population; many witnesses would confirm that they saw terrifying phenomena at night, including Lougarou's apparitions. The Touni Minwi phenomenon led to a enormous mobilization of people in the capital Port Louis and the village of Lallmatie.
Origin and meaning
The soucouyant is part of a broader family of nocturnal creatures found in West African and Caribbean traditions. Its closest relatives include the loogaroo and other shapeshifting vampire forms introduced by the transatlantic slave trade and transformed in the Caribbean environment. Sometimes the stories of Loogaroo and Soucouyant are so similar that they seem to be the same creature.
Soucouyants belong to a class of spirits called jumbies. Unlike ghost folklore, which depicts a slender mist, the jumbee is depicted as a gloomy, shadowy figure. Especially in the case of Firerass, or ole Higue, it is said to share the same compulsion to count sand, salt or rice.
It is likely that the origin of Soucouyant, as well as the Bahamian “witch”, has a robust connection with Aje, or the witch of the Yoruba people. Many Yoruba Bahamians called senior Congolese women witches who shed their skin at night and suck human blood.
Bible, Objects of folklore from the Negroes of the Bahamas, written by Clavel and published in 1904, describes the Bahamian version: “When a witch enters your house, she always sheds her skin. When you first see her, she looks like a candle flame floating in the air. She somehow puts you to sleep and revives her body (but without the skin), then she lays on top of you and sucks out every drop of blood that God put into you.”
There is also another creature from Ghana and Togo where an organ-eating vampire is said to live, called the Adze, which looks like a firefly but reverts to human form when captured. It's strenuous to say where one type of vampiric creature ends and another begins, but there are certainly threads from around the world that make up the horror of the Caribbean.
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Soucouyant – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Soucouyant | USC Digital Folklore Archives
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