Pontianak: the ghost in the banana tree

A baby crying where there is no baby, and the smell of frangipani where nothing is in flower.

4 min read · Published 31 October 2026

First, the answer

A pontianak is a female ghost of Malay folklore, told across Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei: the spirit of a woman who died in pregnancy or childbirth and returns as a long-haired woman in white. She is said to wait in banana trees, announce herself with the scent of frangipani that turns to a stench of decay, and cry like a baby, softly when she is close and loudly when she is far. She preys mostly on men and on women in childbirth, and in the best-known remedy a nail driven into the hole at the nape of her neck turns her back into a docile, beautiful woman. Indonesia knows the same figure as the kuntilanak.

Who she is

The pontianak is a woman who died while pregnant or giving birth and could not rest. She appears beautiful at first: long black hair, pale skin, a white dress. Then the stories turn. Her face changes, her nails grow long and sharp, and the men she lures are found torn open. Her targets are men who wander alone at night and, as cruelly, women in labour and newborn babies.

Older Malay accounts, written down by British colonial collectors around 1900, separate two spirits that later tellings merge: the langsuir, the mother who died in childbirth, and the pontianak, her stillborn child. Today the pontianak has taken over the mother's story entirely. The Indonesian kuntilanak is the same figure under a related name, and the two traditions borrow from each other freely.

The signs, as Malaysians and Singaporeans tell them

Frangipani. The sweet smell of *bunga kemboja*, the frangipani planted in Malay Muslim graveyards, in a place with no flowers. When the sweetness turns to the stench of something rotting, she is close.
A baby crying. Her cry sounds like an infant's. A loud cry means she is far away; a soft one means she is near. It is the same trick the Filipino aswang plays with its *tik-tik* call.
Dogs. Dogs howling at night for no reason are said to see what people cannot.
Banana trees. She rests in banana trees, and many older Malaysians and Singaporeans will not sit under one after dark.

The nail in the nape

The pontianak can be beaten. In most Malay tellings she has a hole at the nape of her neck, hidden under her hair. Drive an iron nail into it and she becomes a quiet, beautiful woman, able to live as a wife, until someone pulls the nail out. Many stories end with exactly that: years of marriage, then a nail removed by accident or by someone who does not know, and the ghost returns.

Sharp iron in general keeps her away. Families with a woman about to give birth keep a nail, scissors, a knife or a needle near the mother and later near the baby. A bomoh, the Malay healer, may be called to protect a house or to deal with a haunting.

The nail story is about a man fixing a woman in place and calling it a happy ending, and I don't think the films have ever quite noticed.

The films that made her famous

The pontianak is the most filmed ghost in Malay cinema. *Pontianak* (1957), made in Singapore by the Cathay-Keris studio with Maria Menado in the title role, was a hit across Malaya and set off a run of sequels and imitations. No complete copy of it is known to survive.

Malaysian horror then went quiet for some three decades under strict censorship of the supernatural. Shuhaimi Baba's *Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam* (2004), with Maya Karin as the ghost, is widely credited with reviving the genre, and the pontianak has been back on cinema and streaming screens across the region ever since.

A city with her name

Pontianak is also the capital of West Kalimantan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo. Its founding story has the sultan driving pontianak spirits away with cannon fire before he built his palace there, and the city still fires bamboo and carbide cannons around Eid. The kuntilanak article tells that story in full.