{
  "id": "aswang",
  "title": "Aswang",
  "type": "belief",
  "summary": "The umbrella of shapeshifting night-monsters in Philippine folk belief — witch, ghoul and self-severing viscera-sucker in one dreaded word.",
  "body": "Aswang is a catch-all term in Philippine folklore, strongest in the Visayan islands, for a family of malevolent shapeshifting creatures that pass as ordinary people by day and hunt by night. Under the one name sit several types: the blood-drinker, the ghoul that feeds on the dead, the were-beast, the witch — the exact taxonomy shifting from province to province and teller to teller.\n\nThe most infamous is the manananggal: a woman who by night sprouts bat-like wings and severs her own body at the waist, leaving the lower half standing while the winged torso flies off to prey on sleepers, favouring the blood of the unborn, drawn out with a long thread-like tongue. Folk defences are correspondingly specific — salt, garlic, the sting of a stingray's tail, and finding the abandoned lower half to spoil it with salt or ash before dawn.\n\nBelief in the aswang has long done real social work: explaining sudden illness and death, enforcing caution after dark, and — at its worst — marking outsiders and unpopular neighbours as suspect. It remains one of the most vivid and various bodies of folklore in Southeast Asia, alive in countless local tellings.",
  "culture": "Filipino (Visayan)",
  "region": "The Philippines",
  "language": "ceb",
  "transmission": "oral",
  "tags": [
    "monster",
    "shapeshifter",
    "night",
    "philippines",
    "belief"
  ],
  "sources": [],
  "confidence": "documented",
  "contributor": "seed",
  "added": "2026-07-12",
  "updated": "2026-07-12",
  "url": "https://crowdh.com/knowledge/aswang.html"
}