Pontianak

The pontianak (in Indonesia, the kuntilanak) is the most famous ghost of the Malay world. In the classic telling she is the spirit of a woman who died in pregnancy or childbirth, or of her stillborn child, who returns at night as a beautiful woman with very long black hair and a white gown. She is said to rest by day in banana or other large trees, to signal her presence with the sound of a crying baby or a woman’s laughter, and to carry a sweet scent of frangipani (plumeria) that turns into the smell of decay. Her targets in the stories are men who wrong women, travellers out alone at night, and newborns and their mothers.

She belongs to an old family of childbirth spirits. Writing in 1900, the British colonial ethnographer Walter William Skeat listed the pontianak – also called mati-anak, which he linked to the word for “stillborn” – among four spirits feared at childbirth in the Malay Peninsula, along with the langsuir, the bajang and the penanggalan. In the version he recorded, the original langsuir was a woman of great beauty who died of shock on learning her child was stillborn, and the pontianak was that child. Midwives and healers used charms, plants and protective rites to keep such spirits away from mothers and babies. The legend reflects the real dangers of childbirth in the past, and it remains part of the living folk beliefs of many families, alongside – and sometimes in tension with – Islam.

The ghost even gave her name to a city. According to the traditional founding story of Pontianak, capital of West Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo, the river mouth where Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie established his settlement on 23 October 1771 was haunted by pontianak until he drove them away with cannon fire and built a mosque and palace on the spot. Local celebrations still fire bamboo cannons in memory of the tale.

In the 20th century the pontianak became a film star. Cathay-Keris’s Pontianak (1957), directed by B. N. Rao with Maria Menado in the title role, opened in Singapore on 27 April 1957, ran for months and launched a whole genre in Malaya and Singapore; the film itself is now believed lost. Film scholar Rosalind Galt’s Alluring Monsters (2021) argues that the pontianak has since become a way for Southeast Asian cinema to talk about gender, colonialism, religion and the loss of the forests she was said to live in.

Traditional signs of a pontianak include a baby crying where no baby is, a woman’s laughter or humming, dogs whining or howling at night, the scent of frangipani followed by a foul smell, and a pale woman in white glimpsed among trees or by the roadside. In some regions she takes the form of a night bird. People in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia still tell first-hand stories of such encounters, especially near banana trees, old kampung houses and dark roads.

Not one place: the pontianak is reported across peninsular Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Indonesia, particularly in Kalimantan and Sumatra. Her traditional haunts are banana and other large trees, forest edges, graveyards and lonely roads at night.

The pontianak has starred in dozens of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian films, from Pontianak (1957) and Sumpah Pontianak (1958) to Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (2004) and Revenge of the Pontianak (2019), and in the Indonesian Kuntilanak films. She also appears in games such as DreadOut and in Zen Cho’s fiction.