Manananggal: the Filipino monster that splits in two
She leaves her legs standing in the dark and flies off on bat wings. The half she leaves behind is where she can be beaten.
4 min read · Published 30 October 2026
The answer
A manananggal is a creature of Filipino folklore, usually a woman, who at night severs her body at the waist, grows bat-like wings and flies off with her upper half, leaving her legs standing where she left them. She hunts pregnant women, letting a long, thread-thin tongue down through gaps in the roof to reach the unborn child. Her weakness is the half she leaves behind: salt, ash or crushed garlic on the cut stops her rejoining it, and sunrise finishes her. The name comes from tanggal, to remove or detach, and many folklorists count her as one kind of aswang.
A name that describes the act
Manananggal comes from the Tagalog root *tanggal*, to remove, detach or take off. The word names what she does: she takes herself apart. By day she is a woman of the village, often described as attractive and unremarkable. At night she goes somewhere hidden, a grove, a field, a corner of her own house, rubs herself with oil in some tellings, and separates at the waist. Wings like a giant bat's open from her back, and the upper half of her body rises into the dark.
The lower half stays standing, upright and still, until she comes back to it before dawn. That image, a pair of legs alone in a field at midnight, is the one most Filipinos picture first.
What she hunts
In almost every account the manananggal is after pregnant women. She lands on the roof of a house where an expectant mother sleeps and lets down a long, hollow tongue, thin as a thread, through a gap in the thatch or between the roof sheets. With it she feeds on the blood of the unborn child, or on its heart. Other tellings have her prey on the sick and the newly born, but pregnancy is the centre of her story.
That is why she belongs to the viscera-sucking kind in the folklorist Maximo Ramos's sorting of the aswang, and why so much of the protective care in those households is organised around the expectant mother's bed.
A monster that only hunts pregnant women says more about how frightening pregnancy was than about the monster, and I think the stories know it.
Her one weakness
The manananggal's power has a price: for most of the night she is in two pieces, and the piece on the ground cannot defend itself. Find the standing legs and sprinkle salt, ash or crushed garlic onto the open cut, and she cannot rejoin her body. When the sun rises she dies in the air. Some versions add that the lower half can be destroyed outright, or hidden, with the same result.
Households also defend the roof and the windows directly. Garlic, salt, holy water, a buntot pagi (stingray-tail whip) and a blade within reach turn up in the same lists as for every other aswang. A bottle of oil prepared by an albularyo, said to boil when a creature approaches, is the household alarm.
Cousins across Southeast Asia
The flying, self-severing woman is not unique to the Philippines. Neighbouring cultures tell stories of a creature that leaves part of her body behind at night and hunts with her organs exposed, and the resemblance is close enough that the creatures are often discussed together.
| Creature | Where | What flies |
|---|---|---|
| Manananggal | Philippines | The upper body, on bat-like wings |
| Penanggalan | Malaysia | The head, trailing its organs |
| Krasue | Thailand, Cambodia, Laos | The head with organs hanging beneath, often glowing |
| Leak (leyak) | Bali | In some accounts a flying head with entrails, the form of a sorcerer at night |
The Balinese leak is a sorcerer before it is a monster, which puts it closer to the Filipino witch than to the manananggal in most stories. The Malaysian penanggalan is the nearest relative: the same appetite for women in childbirth, the same vulnerability when the body is left alone.
The manananggal today
She is one of the most recognisable monsters in Filipino horror films, komiks and television, and the split body makes her easy to draw and hard to forget. In the provinces she is still part of the warnings given to expectant mothers: stay away from the window at night, keep garlic nearby, let someone sit up with you. Many of the women who hear those warnings do not believe a word of the story and follow the advice anyway, which is how a lot of folklore survives.
Three more questions
- What is a manananggal in English?
- There is no single English word for it. A manananggal is usually described as a vampire-like monster or self-segmenting witch: a woman who separates at the waist at night and flies with her upper body on bat-like wings to feed on unborn children.
- How do you kill a manananggal?
- In the folklore, by finding the lower half of her body while she is away and covering the cut with salt, ash or crushed garlic so she cannot rejoin it. She then dies when the sun rises.
- What is the difference between a manananggal and an aswang?
- Aswang is the broad Filipino term for shape-shifting monsters who live as ordinary people by day. The manananggal is one specific kind, the creature that splits in two and flies, and many folklorists count her among the aswang.
- Is the manananggal the same as the penanggalan?
- They are close relatives. The Malaysian penanggalan detaches only her head, which flies trailing its organs, while the Filipino manananggal takes her whole upper body. Both hunt women in pregnancy or childbirth.
Salimah Ibrahim