Popobawa

Popobawa is a night attacker of Zanzibar belief, said to sexually assault people in their sleep. Reports go back to 1965 on Pemba, with scares peaking in 1995 and returning in 2000 and 2007.

Wikipedia, citing Parkin, says the first reports of Popobawa came from the island of Pemba in 1965, soon after its political revolution. Sightings that drew more notice came in 1970, the creature came back at intervals in the 1980s, and reports peaked in 1995. After five quiet years it showed up again for a short time in 2000, and once more in 2007.

Henriette Jansen's account in Tanzanian Affairs (1996) describes the scare from inside it. People spoke of a band of seven such beings who had kept the islands awake for weeks. A popobawa was said to roam at night nearly naked, carrying a jar of magic medicine and a cow's tail, with a foul smell announcing it. Rubbed with the medicine, the tail could open walls and doors without leaving a mark, and sleeping men and women were raped from behind. Jansen also records that a man killed during the scare had been named as Popobawa. It was then announced that he was a mental patient, a mainlander, who had travelled to Zanzibar to be treated.

Ally Saleh, reporting for BBC News in 2001, wrote that islanders had claimed Popobawa came only at election time, as in the disputed general elections of 1995 and 2000. In 2007 the BBC reported that men in parts of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's main city, were afraid of a sex attacker who struck at night.

Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Briefs in 1995, argued that the popobawa is a Zanzibar form of the waking dream, drawing on a 1992 Skeptical Inquirer article by Peter Huston. He described these as hypnopompic or hypnagogic hallucinations, felt when waking or falling asleep, which can bring a sense of being pinned down or paralysed, or of floating out of the body.