Archive for Creatures

It’s the nature of time that the old ways must give way to the new. But what happens when the old ways are not superstitions? What happens when they’re immortal and very very real?

Szepassony is the “beautiful lady” of Hungarian folklore. She was a spirit of romance, fertility, birth, death, and also storms and rain. Midwives and expectant mothers would pray to her for a safe childbirth, and she was also prayed to in matters of love.

With the dawn of Christianity, Szepassony was reviled as a demon. A temptress who led men astray and caused the deaths of babies that nursed at her breast. If you were out in a rainstorm, caught cold, and died, you had incurred the wrath of the demon Szepassony.

“The pishtaco is a fantasy figure, a bogeyman….The pishtaco is nearly always a vampirelike white man, who roams the countryside and plunders the fat from Indian bodies…”

—Mary J. Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes

One of the strangest vampire species is the pishtaco of Peru, a species of vampire that was introduced by the Spanish missionaries and conquerors as the Spanish Empire started to expand its hold over the Caribbean and parts of North and South America. In Spain, this creature is known as a sacamantecas and its legend is older than that of the pishtaco. These monsters likely made the journey across the Atlantic, into the New World, where they continued their predatory ways in Peru and other South American locations. The pishtaco is so strange as, unlike other vampires, it does not seek blood but instead lives off of body fat.

Mythology: West African (from Akan Folklore)

As Europeans infringed upon native peoples and their lands in Africa, eldritch beings and pacts came to light and began to evolve with the times. Once such creature is the Asanbosam. Now thought of as a cross between an ogre and an iron-fanged, living vampire, their origin is much more horrifying. As humans violated the unspoken pact between the Akan peoples and their deities, a convocation of witches summoned the ancient Sasabonsam, who protected Asaseyaa’s forests on Thursdays (her day of rest). Europeans from the recently captured Fort tantamkweri were brought as sacrifices, and rather than drinking all of their blood, Sasabonsam mated with many.

They were returned as part of the negotiations between the Ashanti Empire and the British, and nine months later, they all gave birth to healthy, pink, red-haired, Caucasian babies. Well, some were healthier than others. These newborns would all grow into adulthood and, in their late twenties or early thirties, felt drawn to the forests around them. Those that could, seek out the jungles of Africa and rejoin their Asanbosam kin while they undergo their transformation into Asanbosams, changing into what is needed to protect the sacred lands of the indigenous peoples.