by a Chinese, and inserted it with the story belonging to it in a publication called the Anglo-Chinese Gleaner. And I said, “Sir, listen to the account of the penanggalan. It was originally a woman. She used the magic arts of a devil in whom she believed, and she devoted herself to his service night and day until the period of her agreement with her teacher had expired and she was able to fly. Her head and neck were then loosened from the body, the intestines being attached to them, and hanging down in strings. The body remained where it was. Wherever the person whom it wished to injure happened to live, thither flew the head and bowels to suck his blood, and the person whose blood was sucked was sure to die. If the blood and water which dripped from the intestines touched any person, serious illness followed and his body broke out in open sores. The penanggalan likes to suck the blood of women in child-birth. For this reason it is customary at all houses where a birth occurs to hang up jeruju [a kind of thistle] leaves at the doors and windows, or to place thorns wherever there is any blood, lest the penanggalan should come and suck it, for the penanggalan has, it seems, a dread of thorns in which her intestines may happen to get caught. It is said that a penanggalan once came to a man’s house in the middle of the night to suck his blood, and her intestines were caught in some thorns near the hedge, and she had to remain there until daylight, when the people saw and killed her.
“The person who has the power of becoming a penanggalan always keeps at her house a quantity of vinegar in a jar or vessel of some kind. The use of this is to soak the intestines in, for when they issue forth from the body they immediately swell up and cannot be put back, but after being soaked in vinegar they shrink to their former size and enter the body again. There are many people who have seen the penanggalan flying along with its entrails dangling down and shining at night like fire-flies.
“Such is the story of the penanggalan as I have heard it from my forefathers but I do not believe it in the least. God forbid that I should.” (Hikayat Abdullah, p. 143.)
It may be remembered that the Greeks thought that branches of buckthorn (rhamnus) fastened to doors and windows kept out witches, as Discorides tells us, De Materia
