Aswang

Aswang is a Filipino umbrella name for a range of flesh-eating night beings. The oldest record here, from 1589, places the belief in the Visayas and says it was absent among the Tagalogs.

Juan de Plasencia, writing on the customs of the Tagalogs in 1589, listed the osuang eighth among the figures he described and glossed the word as sorcerer. People told him they had watched it fly, and that it killed men and ate them. He placed it in the Visayas Islands and said it had no place among the Tagalos.

Later writers use the word for a whole family of beings. Wikipedia, citing Maximo Ramos, treats aswang as a collective name for many creatures, which Ramos sorted into five groups matching Western types: ghoul, witch, weredog, vampire and a self-segmenting viscera sucker.

Kentaro Azuma studied aswang talk as gossip and rumour in a 2012 paper for the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia. He argued that rumour joined to aswang lore can give quiet approval to singling out and shutting out particular people.

Wel Mendoza, in a 2015 Rappler essay on rare diseases in Capiz, wrote that X-linked dystonia parkinsonism has been tied to aswang because of its symptoms, its high rate in the province and the province's reputation for mysticism. He said some families hid sick relatives out of shame, so they got poor medical care or none. A 2010 medical review of the disease by Raymond Rosales lists stigma and the withdrawal it brings among the burdens patients face; it makes no mention of aswang.