“There’s this monster called the Manananggal, it’s like a monster that feeds on pregnant women’s babies. So what happens is at night, the monster detaches the upper body from its legs you know to eat the babies. The only way to kill it is to put salt on the lower part of the body. So like when the monster is out eating, you put salt on it so it doesn’t have a lower body to come back to. Just some widely known superstition in the Philippines. Everyone just knows.. tells it.”

The Manananggal is a monster in Filipino folklore. It is similar to the Western vampire as, according to sources on the internet, it is afraid of daylight and garlic cloves. Furthermore, it feeds on the blood of humans, and it can spread its condition by forcing others to drink its own blood. It is interesting that the informant did not include these facts, perhaps knowing only the oicotype of his region. According to the wiki pages for Filipino folklore, the Manananggal is closely related or even synonymous to another monster, the Aswang, and it is said that the Aswang originally appeared as a result of a pandemic, dystonia parkinsonism, and the natives’ misunderstanding of this illness.