Albasty

Albasty is a female demon in the beliefs of Turkic peoples. Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Siberian Tatar tradition blames it for harm to women in childbirth and to mothers of young babies.

Russian Wikipedia describes albasty as evil female spirits in the mythology of Turkic peoples and some of their neighbours. It is usually pictured as an ugly naked woman with long loose yellow hair, sometimes with a third eye and long claws. It can also take the shape of someone the victim knows, including relatives, and it comes in dreams and chokes people by pressing on the chest.

In a 2016 study of Kazakh birth customs, Yu. N. Naumova writes that albasty's chief harm is stealing an organ a woman needs to live, usually while she is giving birth. In the Kazakh telling, it takes the lungs, liver or heart of the woman in labour and hurries to water with them; once it drops them in, she dies. M. A. Korusenko, writing in 2010 on the Siberian Tatars, found that in present-day belief the Albastyg is an evil being that can hurt people and bring illness, appears as a woman or an old woman, and harms pregnant women and mothers with infants.

The Kyrgyz Wikipedia article on albarsty says the belief has long been widespread among the Kyrgyz. People connect it with a weak heartbeat, shortness of breath and bad dreams during sleep, and with the grave condition of a woman left weak by heavy bleeding in childbirth, which they put down to albarsty pressing on her. The article adds that such ideas are known to come from normal processes in the human body. Taken together, these accounts use the belief to explain real dangers of childbirth, such as heavy bleeding and a mother's death.

In 2017 the news site Zanoza.kg announced that a horror film called Albarsty, by the young director Bakyt Asylbek uulu, would open on 1 June. Zanoza.kg glossed albarsty as a mythical monster that comes at night to smother a person.