Colo Colo

The colo colo is a shapeshifting creature from Chilean and Mapuche folklore, traditionally described as hatching from the smallest egg laid by an old rooster, an event considered deeply unnatural and ominous. The belief was already well established in rural Chile by 1915, when it appeared among the oral accounts folklorist Julio Vicuña Cifuentes gathered for his survey of Chilean myth and superstition. Once hatched, the creature is said to take the form of a small, snake-like or lizard-like animal covered in feathers or fine hair, and to sneak into homes at night where it slips into the mouths of sleeping people to feed on their saliva or breath, leaving victims wasting away with an unexplained, lingering illness. Some versions describe it burrowing beneath the house instead, sucking life force through cracks in the floor. Rural communities in central and southern Chile traditionally recommended killing any egg suspected of harboring a colo colo, or burning the animal alive as the only certain way to end its curse and cure the afflicted person. The legend is closely related to other Chilean myths about witches and their familiars, and likely arose as an explanation for wasting diseases, chronic fatigue or unexplained deaths in an era before germ theory.