called its father, if a man, or its mother, if she happens to be a woman.[1]
The Polong is, I was assured, invariably preceded by its pet or plaything, the Pelesit,[2] which appears to be usually identified with a species of house-cricket, of which I was once shown a specimen by a Malay in a small glass bottle or phial. Whenever the Polong is commissioned by its adopted parents to attack a new victim, it sends the Pelesit on before it, and as soon as the latter, flying along in a headlong fashion, and usually tail foremost, enters its victim's body and begins to chirrup, the Polong follows.
The Pelesit appears to be occasionally kept either as a substitute for, or as actually identical with, the Polong, and I was told that it was, like the Polong, occasionally caught and kept in a bottle, and fed either with parched rice or with rice stained yellow with turmeric, or with blood drawn from the tip of the fourth finger, and that when its owner desired to get rid of it, it was buried in the ground. One of the most widely recognised ways of securing a Pelesit, which is regarded in some parts of the Peninsula as a valuable species of property, consists in exhuming the body of a child and carrying it at full moon to an ant-hill, where it is reanimated and presently lolls out its tongue; when this happens the tongue must be bitten off and buried in a place where three roads meet, when it will eventually develop into a Pelesit.[3]
The Polong is also sometimes identified or confused with a familiar spirit called Bajang in Kedah, which appears, however, to have originally been regarded as an entirely distinct conception, since its usual embodiment is stated to have been a polecat or rather civet-cat.
We have, then, in the list of Malay familiar spirits, the
