Taotao Mo'na

Scholarly summaries note Taotao Mo'na as ancestral 'people before' who predate current inhabitants; academic accounts cited in the sources indicate the concept became prominent in the colonial era (Spanish occupation, 17th–18th centuries) as Chamorros reworked ancestor-memory and identity after social disruption. Rather than a single mythic origin, Taotao Mo'na represent a post-contact reassertion of preceding peoples tied to particular landscapes, serving social functions of enforcing respectful use of wild places and channeling recourse to local healers.

Descriptions vary across sources and local accounts. The tradition presents multiple characterizations ranging from gentler helper-spirits that assist suruhanas/suruhanus to frightening figures reported in some modern accounts as headless when angered. Taotao Mo'na are also said in some sources to dwell in banyan trees. There is no single canonical physical form in the available material; portrayals are heterogeneous and some popular-media depictions (e.g., television) have misrepresented them as 'zombie-like.'

Within Chamorro accounts Taotao Mo'na are said to protect mountains and secluded natural areas and to influence people who enter or harvest from those places without permission. Reported behaviors attributed to them in local belief include causing bad influences or misfortune in locations or toward persons, pinching or bruising, imitating voices, temporarily abducting children, and becoming attached to individuals (sometimes causing illness). They may also interact cooperatively with traditional healers (suruhanas/suruhanus). These descriptions are presented in the sources as folk beliefs and local accounts rather than verifiable empirical facts.