Aswang: the shape-shifter at the centre of Filipino folklore
A neighbour by day, a dog or a bird by night. Why one word covers so many Filipino monsters, and what households still do to keep them out.
7 min read · Published 30 October 2026
The answer
An aswang is a shape-shifting creature of Filipino folklore: a person who looks ordinary by day and at night takes the form of a dog, pig, cat or bird to feed on the sick, the dead and the unborn. The word works as an umbrella for several monsters, and the folklorist Maximo Ramos sorted them into five kinds: the blood-drinker, the viscera-sucker, the weredog, the witch and the corpse-eating ghoul. The stories run strongest in the Visayas, Capiz above all, and families still guard against aswang with garlic, salt, a stingray-tail whip and extra watchfulness when a woman in the house is pregnant.
One word, many monsters
Aswang is less a single creature than a category. Ask ten people from ten provinces what an aswang looks like and you will hear about a black dog that circles the house, a large bird on the roof, a pig that walks where no pig should be, and a woman whose upper body flies off at night. All of them are aswang. What they share is the shape of the story: someone who passes for an ordinary member of the community by day, and who becomes something else after dark to feed on people.
Some local names come from sound. Tiktik and wakwak imitate the noise the creature is said to make as it hunts, and in many places those words are used as plain synonyms for aswang. Many folklorists count the manananggal, the self-severing flyer, as one kind of aswang; some regional tellings give her a story of her own.
The figure is old enough to appear in the earliest Spanish records of the islands. Juan de Plasencia, a Franciscan friar who wrote an account of Tagalog customs in the late 1500s, listed an *osuang*, a sorcerer, among the figures he called priests of the devil: someone people claimed to have seen fly, who killed men and ate their flesh. He placed the osuang in the Visayas, not among the Tagalogs, which fits the region where aswang stories still run strongest.
The five kinds Maximo Ramos described
The folklorist Maximo Ramos spent much of his career gathering accounts of the lower creatures of Philippine myth, and his sorting of the aswang into five kinds is the one most writers still start from. The categories overlap in practice; a single story can have its aswang drink blood, change into a dog and raid a wake in the same night.
| Kind | What it does | How the stories show it |
|---|---|---|
| Blood-drinker | Feeds on the blood of the living | Often a beautiful woman who visits at night; victims weaken without knowing why |
| Viscera-sucker | Feeds on internal organs, especially of the unborn, and on the phlegm of the sick | A long, thin tongue let down through the roof; the manananggal belongs here |
| Weredog | Changes into an animal to hunt and eat people | A dog, pig or cat that does not behave like one |
| Witch | Causes illness through spells and the eye | Closer to the mangkukulam of the kulam stories |
| Ghoul | Steals and eats the dead | Raids wakes and swaps the corpse for a carved banana trunk |
The witch kind is where aswang stories run into kulam, and in many households the line between the two is not drawn at all. The ghoul's banana trunk is one of the most repeated details in the whole body of lore: mourners notice the body in the coffin has gone light, or stiff in the wrong way, and open it to find wood.
How the stories say you can tell
Because an aswang lives as a neighbour, a good part of the folklore is about spotting one. The signs repeat across provinces with small changes.
- The eyes. An aswang's eyes are said to be bloodshot from nights without sleep, and if you look into them your reflection appears upside down. Many stories have the aswang avoid meeting your gaze for exactly that reason.
- The sound. The *tik-tik* call is said to grow louder as the creature moves away and fainter as it comes closer, so a soft sound is the one to fear. It is a trick meant to make people relax at the worst moment.
- The company it keeps. Aswang are drawn to houses with a pregnant woman, someone very ill, or a body laid out for a wake. That is why those households keep watch through the night.
- The animal that is wrong. A dog that will not leave the edge of a yard, a pig too large for the village, a bird too heavy for the roof it lands on.
What households do to keep one out
Protection is the part of aswang belief people still practise. Garlic hung at windows or rubbed on the body is the best known. Salt is scattered at doors and sometimes under the house. A buntot pagi, the dried tail of a stingray, is kept as a whip, and in many tellings it is the weapon an aswang fears most. A bolo or blade by the bed, holy water, a rosary and a blessed palm frond from Palm Sunday all appear in the same households.
Some families keep a small bottle of oil prepared by an albularyo, the folk healer, which is said to bubble or boil when an aswang comes near. An agimat carried on the body serves the same purpose for many. The pregnant woman is the centre of most of this care: she is kept away from windows at night, and relatives take turns staying awake beside her.
Why Capiz carries the name
Capiz, a province in Western Visayas, has been tagged as aswang country for as long as anyone can remember, and people from Capiz hear the joke more often than they would like. Nobody can point to an event that started it. The reputation is the kind that feeds itself: a place becomes known for aswang stories, visitors come expecting them, and the stories get told again for the visitors.
Folklorists who study aswang accusations note a pattern familiar from witchcraft beliefs elsewhere. The person suspected is often a newcomer, a widow, someone who keeps to herself, or a family that has done unusually well. In places far from a hospital, the aswang also gave a name to things that had no other explanation: a miscarriage, an infant who did not survive, a long illness.
The Capiz joke has outlived whatever reason it once had, and I'd be glad to see it retired.
Aswang on screen and in comics
The aswang has been a fixture of Filipino horror cinema for decades and remains the go-to monster for a scare. Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo's comic *Trese*, later an animated series, fills Manila with aswang, tikbalang and other creatures living just out of sight in the modern city. Alyx Ayn Arumpac's 2019 documentary *Aswang* borrows the word for the killings of the Philippine drug war, a sign of how ready the name is as a metaphor for a predator who walks among neighbours.
Salimah Ibrahim