The Dreaded Langsuir

Every culture, every part of the world has its own set of vampire myths and the Malaysian Langsuir is one of many of those myths.

Now the Langsuir isn’t your average kinda vamp, there’s no capes or a holy water phobia with them. No tragic star-crossed love story or quest for redemption, not even close. First off this vampire is always a woman, an incredibly beautiful woman… who can fly. She is made into a vampire by either dying during childbirth or due to the shock of hearing her newborn baby is stillborn (that stillborn baby also turns into a kind of vampire, called a Pontianak). Her death can come before or after childbirth and within forty days she becomes a Langsuir and you are looking at a lot of trouble.

To spot a Langsuir you will need to look for a woman with ridiculously long nails, green robes and hair so long it reaches her ankles, oh and she has a hole in the back of her neck. That hole is used for feeding. The Langsuir will fly up and hide in trees at night and come down to feed on the blood of other mother’s children. Or fish. She also craves fish, along with babies. I mean, who doesn’t want baby with a side of fish? Right?

The Malaysians did come up with a few ways to keep a woman from becoming a Langsuir. Those methods involve placing glass beads into the corpses mouth, putting hen’s eggs under her armpits or sticking needles into the palms of the corpses’ hands (I pity whoever’s job it was to do that to corpses). The needles prevent the woman from flying and also from letting out a awful wail called the ngilai.

Lets say you don’t take any of those precautions (tsk tsk) and you have a Langsuir on your hands, don’t worry, not all is lost. To get rid of her what you need to do it first cut off her nails (jeez what a girl) and then stuff all that floor length hair into the hole in the back of her neck. Once you do that then she is tamed and no longer evil. She can even marry and have children, living for a long while as a totally normal person…that is… until she dances. You get her in a dance and you are screwed, because once she starts to shake those hips and rock out to the beat she goes back to being a Langsuir.

- Moonlight