Berbalang

No indigenous origin myth or etymology is recorded in the supplied sources. The primary narrative available is an 1896 account by E. F. Skertchly describing a small village at the centre of Cagayan Sulu whose inhabitants are called 'Berbalangs' and who, according to that report, feed on corpses and sometimes on the living. Later popular and gaming references derive from that account rather than from independently documented origin stories in the local language.

According to the principal 1896 report, Berbalangs are presented as members of a village population whose eyes have pupils "not round, but just narrow slits like those of a cat," and whose eyes may give off "flashing lights... like dancing fire‑flies in the dark." The same account mixes physical descriptions (grave‑digging, eating entrails) with an out‑of‑body component.

The primary source (E. F. Skertchly, 1896) reports that Berbalangs dig up graves and eat the entrails of corpses, and that if corpses are scarce they "go away into the grasslands" to seek living prey. Skertchly describes a procudure by which practitioners allegedly "hold their breaths and fall into a trance," liberating an "astral body" that flies away to enter the body of another and feed on its entrails. These abilities and behaviors are reported in that single ethnographic account and are the basis for later retellings and modern adaptations.