Langsuyar

Accounts converge on the langsuyar as the spirit of a woman who died while pregnant, in childbirth, or after learning of a stillborn child; one recorded narrative (Walter William Skeat's informants, quoted in secondary summaries) recounts a woman who, upon hearing that her child was stillborn, died of shock and 'flew...to a tree, upon which she perched.' Traditions vary in detail, but the common causal nexus is maternal or peri‑natal death leading to a revenant condition; Skeat's story is one documented version among multiple traditional variants.

Descriptions vary across sources. Commonly the langsuyar appears as a beautiful woman wearing green robes, with extremely long jet‑black hair reaching to her ankles, very long (tapering) nails and hands that may extend low on the body. In other accounts she is described in more grotesque terms as a floating woman's head from which entrails and a spinal column trail (a visual likeness to the penanggalan). Skeat's account also mentions a hole in the back of the neck used to suck blood from children; the corpus of descriptions presents both seductive and monstrous aspects depending on the report.

The langsuyar is presented as vampiric: she preys on humans and is said to suck the blood of children, with traditional notes that newborn male infants are especially targeted though females may be taken as well. She is associated with flight and night‑bird behavior—taking or resembling a nighthawk/owl while perching on roofs or trees during attacks—and with haunting houses, roofs, and particular trees (including those bearing the parasitic 'sakat' fern or poisonous Rengas trees). Skeat's recorded variant includes a capacity to be physically captured and rendered harmless by cutting her nails and hair and stuffing them into the neck‑hole; other traditions emphasize repulsion or exorcism rather than transformation.