Things Which I Do Not Know How to Speak Aloud

In all fairness, my favorite monsters should be gremlins, as they not only provided inspiration for the title of this blog, but lead me to seek out my current occupation as a bulldozer driver. If not gremlins, then vampires, as without them I would have a lot less to make fun of. And as much as I'd enjoy meeting a beholder in a fedora or being abducted by mind flayers, they aren't, you know, real. (Take that, eighth-grade English teacher.)

It's slightly embarrassing to admit that my favorite monster is one I know very little about. Several Google searches proved that I didn't even know how to spell its name properly, much less pronounce it. My initial investigation kept bringing me back to boots.

I first learned of the penanggalan (or penanggal) from a Ravenloft Monstrous Compendium, so my initial understanding of the creature was likely a bit sanitized. Commonly classified in America as a Malaysian vampire, a penanggalan is actually a normal woman placed under a curse. At night she separates her head from her body, flies through the treetops, and looks for newborns and placenta to eat. The penanggalan's entrails hang from its neck, and some accounts say that these may be used to grab victims or perform common tasks like programming VCRs. But the dangling viscera are also the monster's weakness. An expectant mother will leave sharp branches and thorns around her home to prevent penanggalan from sneaking in and sucking the fetus directly out of her womb.

Go ahead. Click on that and see what happens.

After doing a little non-role-playing research, it's no surprise penanggalan have always fascinated me. For one thing, they scream whenever children are born. Some of them have Hong Kong action hair. They're difficult to spell. And for a monster this horrible, they're ridiculously underexposed.

I'm sure That Guy Skipp could recommend several short stories about penanggalan, but that's not my point. For me, the coolest monsters are the most unfamiliar. It's hard to take C'thulhu and the horrible realizations of man's universal insignificance you can see in his eye seriously when that eye keeps falling off your 13" C'thulhu Santa. The penanggalan is a weird, rare, disturbing monster that even if it could be classified a vampire, is not one you'd want to have sex with.