🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº6501 ACTIVE

Sigbin

The sigbin is a Visayan familiar spirit, and almost everything popularly said about it is younger than the name.

Where and when was Sigbin sighted?

Location: Visayas, Philippines
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: 10.316, 123.885
Last updated: 2026-09-10

LOCATION

What is Sigbin?

The oldest dated mention we have been able to trace is in the history the Jesuit Juan José Delgado began at Guiuan, on Samar, in 1751 and finished on 6 June 1754: there the sigbinan is a human sorcerer who carries demons shut up in a little box and lets them out in the shape of a crocodile, a snake or a dog. No goat, no shadows, no walking backwards. Encarnación's Cebuano dictionary of 1885 still defines sigbin only as the familiar demons that attach themselves to a person; the Samar and Leyte dictionary of 1914 is the earliest we have read that calls it an animal, and compares it to a small dog. The hornless goat with clapping ears and a whip for a tail, the Capiz address and the link to a cat-fox photographed in Borneo all arrive later — the last of them on a specific day, in an unsigned Wikipedia edit of 22 May 2006 that cited nothing and that Wikipedia itself deleted thirteen years afterwards. The dictionary of Panay, the island Capiz stands on, has no sigbin in it at all.

What is the history of Sigbin?

The sigbin is not a Capiz creature, and for the first two centuries it can be traced in writing it was not a creature at all. The oldest dated account we have been able to find is a manuscript the Jesuit Juan José Delgado began at Guiuan, on Samar, in 1751 and closed at Palapag on 6 June 1754. It waited until 1892 to be printed, in Manila, as the first volume of the Biblioteca Histórica Filipina. Delgado's own biography is the map of the word: the edition's prologue records that he lived many years in Cebu, served as minister at Palompon and Poro, as rector of Guiuan and of Carigara on Leyte, and preached at Inabanga and Talibon on Bohol. Listing the kinds of sorcerer he had heard of, he writes: "En Visayas hay otros que llaman sigbinan: éstos unas veces se transforman en caimanes, y matan mucha gente: otros en culebras ó perros, que muerden y matan á muchos. De otros he oído decir que llevan consigo estos animales encerrados ó mejor, demonios, en alguna cajuela, y sueltan ya el uno ya el otro." In the Visayas there are others they call sigbinan: these sometimes turn into crocodiles and kill many people; others into snakes or dogs, which bite and kill many. Of others I have heard it said that they carry these animals shut up, or rather demons, in a little box, and release now one and now the other. Two things in that passage are worth stopping on. The sigbinan is the person; the sigbin is what the person keeps. And nothing in it is a goat: the shapes are crocodile, snake and dog. Delgado also records, in his chapters on plants, a herb called panigbin, whose "nombre indica que es antídoto contra el hechicero sigbinan y su hechizo sigbin" - whose name marks it as the antidote against the sigbinan sorcerer and his sigbin spell - and which, he adds, "se da en todas partes aquí en Visayas". A plant named after the thing it repels is about as material a trace as a belief ever leaves. The dictionaries then track the drift, word by word. Juan Félix de la Encarnación's Cebuano Diccionario bisaya-español, third edition, Manila, 1885, still has no animal in it: "SIGBIN. Tener alguno familiares, demonios, que el vulgo cree que acompañan á alguna persona, que tienen trato con ella y la sirven constantemente, y los tales familiares." To have familiars - demons that common belief holds accompany a person, deal with them and serve them constantly - and those familiars themselves. In the Waray dictionary of Samar and Leyte compiled by the Franciscan Antonio Sánchez de la Rosa and reissued in 1914, the sigbin has finally acquired a body, and the entry is the first we have read that gives it one: "Sigbin. s. Animal quimérico", a chimerical animal that walks the forests and hills and looks like a small dog. Still a dog. Still not a goat. By the time the anthropologist Richard W. Lieban published Cebuano Sorcery in 1967, after fieldwork in Cebu City and its province, the sigbin had settled into the role it holds today. "An aswang may keep special animals, called sigbin, as pets," he writes. "Sigbin can also cause illness." Now Capiz. The province is genuine aswang country, and the slip is easy to make, but it does not appear to be sigbin country. Alonso de Méntrida's Diccionario de la lengua bisaya, hiligueina y haraya de la isla de Panay, Manila, 1841 - the dictionary of the very island Capiz stands on - has no sigbin in it. That is not because its compiler was squeamish: in the same 2.5 MB of digitised text, asuang occurs ten times and ungo twenty-seven, onglo twenty-eight, demonio fourteen, and the bare Spanish gloss Hechizero seventeen. The vocabulary of witchcraft is there in quantity. The word sigbin is not, in any spelling. Nor is it in Mateo Sánchez's Vocabulario de la lengua Bisaya, compiled on Samar around 1616 and printed at Manila in 1711, where the same test returns ungo sixteen times, demonio twenty-one and the hechi- root of witchcraft fifty-seven, and sigbin - including every long-s misreading of it - zero. Where the goat came from we cannot date from anything we have read. The hornless goat with ears it claps together and a tail used as a whip is generally credited to Máximo D. Ramos, The Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology, University of the Philippines Press, 1971, which we have not been able to consult: it is not in any full-text archive we can search, and we are not going to quote a book we have not opened.

Timeline: the documented record of Sigbin

1616-1711 Mateo Sánchez's Vocabulario de la lengua Bisaya, compiled on Samar around 1616 and printed at Manila in 1711, records no sigbin in any spelling. Its witchcraft vocabulary is otherwise full: in the digitised text ungo appears sixteen times, demonio twenty-one and the hechi- root of witchcraft fifty-seven.
6 June 1754 The Jesuit Juan José Delgado finishes at Palapag the history he began at Guiuan in 1751. In it the sigbinan is a human sorcerer in the Visayas who carries demons shut up in a little box and releases them as crocodile, snake or dog; a plant called panigbin is the antidote against him. This is the oldest dated mention of the word we have been able to trace. The text is not printed until 1892.
1841 Alonso de Méntrida's dictionary of the language of Panay - the island Capiz stands on - is printed at Manila. It contains no sigbin. In the same file asuang occurs ten times, ungo twenty-seven and onglo twenty-eight. Capiz has the vocabulary of witchcraft; it does not have this word.
1885 The third edition of Juan Félix de la Encarnación's Cebuano Diccionario bisaya-español appears in Manila. Its entry defines sigbin as having familiar demons that accompany and serve a person, and as those familiars themselves. There is no animal in the definition at all.
1914 The Samar and Leyte dictionary of the Franciscan Antonio Sánchez de la Rosa is reissued. Its entry - Sigbin. s. Animal quimérico - is the first we have read in which the sigbin is a body rather than a spirit: a chimerical animal of forests and hills that looks like a small dog.
1967 Richard W. Lieban publishes Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines after fieldwork in Cebu. He records the arrangement that has since become the standard one: an aswang may keep special animals, called sigbin, as pets, and sigbin can also cause illness.
2003 In Invented Eden, Robin Hemley records a Mindanao informant showing him a tinggalung - the Malay civet, Viverra tangalunga - describing its habit of always defecating in the same spot, and calling it a sigbin, the pet of the devil. It is the clearest documented instance of a real animal carrying the name.
5 December 2005 WWF announces that a camera trap in Kayan Mentarang National Park, Indonesian Borneo, has twice photographed an unidentified mammal at night. Stephan Wulffraat says local people had never seen it and most consulted specialists thought it a new carnivore. The press names it the cat-fox.
22 May 2006 At 17:13 UTC an unsigned editor at 210.5.85.106 adds to the English Wikipedia article on the sigbin the paragraph tying it to the Borneo cat-fox, with the summary added paragraph on sightings claims and to cat-fox. The paragraph cites nothing and reverses the animal's leg proportions. It survives on Wikipedia until 2019 and on the cryptid wikis to this day.
2006 Erik Meijaard, Andrew C. Kitchener and Chris Smeenk publish in Mammal Review the conclusion that the Kayan Mentarang animal is most likely Thomas's flying squirrel, Aeromys thomasi, matching it on twelve of thirteen characters. The cat-fox was never a carnivore.
19 December 2019 The editor Dlthewave deletes the cat-fox paragraph from the English Wikipedia article with the note unsourced/not mentioned in source, thirteen years and seven months after it was inserted. The derivative cryptid wikis do not follow.

Is there a rational explanation for Sigbin?

There is one modern, checkable episode in the sigbin's file, and it does not end the way it is usually told. On 5 December 2005 WWF announced that a camera trap in Kayan Mentarang National Park, in Indonesian Borneo, had twice photographed an unidentified mammal at night: slightly larger than a house cat, dark red, long bushy tail, small ears, large hind legs. Stephan Wulffraat, the biologist coordinating the survey, said that "we showed the photos of the animal to locals who know the wildlife of the area, but nobody had ever seen this creature before", and that most of the Bornean specialists consulted "were convinced it was a new species of carnivore". The press called it the cat-fox. It would have been the first new carnivore found on Borneo since 1895. It was not a carnivore. In 2006 Erik Meijaard, Andrew C. Kitchener and Chris Smeenk published "New Bornean carnivore is most likely a little known flying squirrel" in Mammal Review, matching the photographed animal to Thomas's flying squirrel, Aeromys thomasi, on twelve of thirteen characters; foliage in the frame had hidden the rodent snout, and nobody was expecting a flying squirrel on the ground. Guillaume Chapron and colleagues had already argued in Oryx that it was Hose's civet, Diplogale hosei. Neither reading leaves a new animal standing, and that is the half of the story the sigbin pages almost never carry. The link between that photograph and the sigbin never had a source at all, and it can be dated to the minute. It entered the English Wikipedia on 22 May 2006 at 17:13 UTC, added by an unsigned editor at the address 210.5.85.106 with the summary "added paragraph on sightings claims and to cat-fox". The paragraph opened "There are speculation that..." and got the anatomy backwards on the way, describing hind legs "lower than their front legs" where WWF had said larger. Wikipedia deleted it on 19 December 2019, the editor Dlthewave noting simply "unsourced/not mentioned in source": thirteen years and seven months of shelf life. The cryptid wikis that copied it in the meantime still carry it, which is why it is still the first thing most searches return. For the sightings themselves an ordinary mechanism is available, and it comes from a witness rather than from us. In Invented Eden (2003), Robin Hemley records a Mindanao informant showing him a tinggalung - the Malay civet, Viverra tangalunga, a real, shy, locally uncommon animal - and calling it a sigbin, the pet of the devil. Civets are nocturnal, they are secretive, they smell strongly, and they return to a single latrine site, a habit Hemley's informant remarked on. Sánchez de la Rosa's 1914 gloss, a chimerical animal that looks like a small dog, fits a civet considerably better than it fits a goat. As for the household complaints the creature is blamed for - waking tired, waking bruised - those are things bodies do, and having a name for them is not evidence for the thing named. And the oldest layer explains the newest. Delgado in 1754 was not describing an animal; he was describing an accusation, and it functions the way the aswang accusations documented on Panay function: it identifies a neighbour. Being called sigbinan has never required a sigbin to exist.

Can you visit Sigbin?

The sigbin has left nothing standing anywhere in the Visayas that this entry has been able to trace, and the belief is spoken inside houses and is not marked on the ground. The one Philippine festival built on a comparable figure was the Aswang Festival of Roxas City, in Capiz, launched by Dugo Capiznon Inc. in 2004 and ended in October 2006 after opposition from the church and from public officials. The record is online and free: Delgado's history, the earliest text on this page, is at the Internet Archive as volume I of the Biblioteca Histórica Filipina of 1892 [1]. So are Encarnación's Cebuano dictionary of 1885 [3]; Sánchez de la Rosa's dictionary of Samar and Leyte of 1914 [4]; Méntrida's Panay dictionary of 1841 [2]; Mateo Sánchez's Vocabulario of 1711 [6]. Lieban's Cebuano Sorcery is lendable there as well [5]. Every check made on this page can be repeated in an afternoon from a browser. The living tradition sits in the Cebuano-, Boholano- and Waray-speaking provinces — Cebu, Bohol, Samar, Leyte and Negros Oriental — and in rural Mindanao. Capiz stands outside it, and Méntrida's Panay dictionary of 1841 carries no sigbin in any spelling [2]. In Cebu City, Museo Sugbo occupies the former Cárcel de Cebú on MJ Cuenco Avenue in Barangay Tejero: the provincial jail designed in 1869 by Domingo de Escondrillas, emptied in December 2004 when the provincial detention centre moved out, opened as a museum with its first four galleries on 5 August 2008 and marked with a National Historical Marker on 13 August 2009 (article consulted 10 September 2026). It is a provincial history museum, and this entry has traced no sigbin exhibit there or anywhere else in the Philippines. No opening hours or admission are printed here: the figures on third-party listings disagree with each other and none of them comes from the museum. Sigbinan names a person: in Delgado's manuscript of 1754 it is the human sorcerer who keeps the demons shut in a box [1], and in Lieban's Cebuano fieldwork the sigbin is the pet an aswang keeps [5]. An aswang is a neighbour somebody has named, so asking to be shown a sigbin, or asking which household keeps one, asks a stranger to name a neighbour.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Sigbin

Where and when was Sigbin sighted?

What is Sigbin?

What is the history of Sigbin?

Timeline: the documented record of Sigbin

Is there a rational explanation for Sigbin?

Can you visit Sigbin?

Sources consulted

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Sigbin

Where and when was Sigbin sighted?

What is Sigbin?

What is the history of Sigbin?

Timeline: the documented record of Sigbin

Is there a rational explanation for Sigbin?

Can you visit Sigbin?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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