Ahool

The Ahool is a legendary giant bat-like creature said to haunt the mountainous rainforests of western Java, most famously the slopes of Mount Salak, with a wingspan sometimes claimed to reach three or four meters, a flat monkey-like face and grayish fur. Its name is said to derive from the eerie "ahool" call attributed to it, echoing through the jungle at night, a sound local villagers have long associated with an unseen predator of fish and small animals near rivers. The creature entered wider Western awareness in 1925, when naturalist Ivan Sanderson claimed to have observed one up close on the slopes of Mount Salak during an expedition, and it has since become a staple of Indonesian cryptid lists alongside other giant-bat legends found across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Rational explanations point to misidentified large fruit bats or flying foxes, unfamiliar nocturnal bird calls such as owls, or exaggerated folk memory of genuinely oversized but ordinary bat species; no specimen or verified photograph has ever substantiated a bat of the size described.