Tiyanak

The tiyanak is a Philippine creature that takes the form of a baby and cries in the forest to lure travellers. Its oldest recorded form, from 1589, was the lament of a woman who died in childbirth.

Juan de Plasencia wrote in 1589 that the Tagalogs believed a woman who died in childbirth was punished along with her child, and that her crying could be heard at night. They called this patianac. He thanked God that preaching had wiped the belief out, saying couples marrying in his day had never heard of it.

The friar Tomas Ortiz, writing around 1731, recorded that people blamed the deaths of children on the patianac and also on the usang. In his account a bird, the tictic, flies ahead of the usang and marks the houses where babies are due; the usang then sits on a nearby roof and kills the infant with a thread-thin tongue. Fletcher Gardner in 1906 described the tianak or patianak as the soul of an unbaptized child reborn in the forest, which feeds on the blood of sleeping women or of women who nurse it out of pity. He noted that Ortiz used the Spanish word duende for it.

The sources link it to the aswang in different ways. Ortiz blames it together with the usang, and Gardner calls it cognate to the asuang, yet Gardner also called the whole subject confused and thought local tradition had piled up over a simpler core. Wikipedia describes it as a vampiric creature in its own right.

In Wikipedia's modern account the tiyanak usually looks like a newborn, cries in the jungle, and attacks whoever picks it up, returning to its true form. It is also said to lead travellers astray and to take children. Nestor Castro, an anthropologist at UP, told GMA News in 2020 that the stories grew out of the misfortunes that often come with childbirth.