The Pontianak

The pontianak is the best known ghost of the Malay world, and her paper trail is shorter and stranger than the phrase "ancient folklore" suggests. The oldest printed description we have been able to date is from 1839: Lieutenant T. J. Newbold, writing at Malacca, called her the ghost of a woman who died in child-bed, seen as a huge bird with a discordant cry, haunting forests and burial grounds and dangerous above all to men. Fifteen years later the Dutch scholar P. J. Veth found the same being on the Kapuas in Borneo - naked, hair loose, waiting under a kapok tree - and recorded that the city of Pontianak took its name from her, not the other way round. What the early record does not contain is almost everything a film audience expects. Walter Skeat's informants in 1900 dressed her in green, made the pontianak the stillborn child rather than the grieving mother, and tamed her with her own cut hair and nails pushed into the hole in the back of her neck. The white dress, the floral perfume, the banana grove and the iron nail belong to a later and very datable layer: the Singapore studio cycle that began at midnight on 27 April 1957.

The pontianak arrives with a paper trail, and the trail is shorter, stranger and better documented than the phrase "ancient Malay folklore" suggests. Rebuilt from the printed record rather than from later retellings, the story is largely one of European officials writing down what Malay informants told them, of two different beings being slowly welded into one, and of a Singapore film studio fixing the image everybody now carries. The oldest printed description that could be dated for this article is from 1839. Lieutenant T. J. Newbold, of the Madras Light Infantry and stationed at Malacca, published his "Political and Statistical Account of the British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca" with John Murray in London that year. In volume II, page 191, under the running head "Superstition", he lists the spirits the Malays feared and begins with two of them, "the Plissit and the Pontianak". Of the second he writes that she "is supposed to be the ghost of a woman dying in child-bed, and is commonly seen in the form of a huge bird uttering a discordant cry". She haunts forests and burial grounds, appears to men at midnight "and is said to emasculate them", and afflicts children and pregnant women, causing miscarriages. Two details in that short paragraph are worth holding on to, because both are usually blamed on the twentieth century. In 1839 the pontianak is already the ghost of the mother, not of the child. And she is already dangerous to men in particular. Fifteen years later the Dutch scholar P. J. Veth assembled the Borneo dossier in "Borneo's Wester-Afdeeling" (Zaltbommel, 1854). On pages 13 and 14 of the first volume he writes that before the town of Pontianak existed, the swampy island on which it was built was, in the eyes of the superstitious inhabitants, the dwelling of a kind of spectre, "sometimes regarded as the souls of children who never saw the light because of the untimely death of the mother, more usually as the souls of the mothers themselves, who died in labour before delivery". They show themselves naked and with loosened hair, wailing in lonely places, and are so hostile to men that the thought of meeting one under a kapok tree, their favourite perch, freezes the blood of the boldest. Veth then states the order of naming without hedging: the name of these spectres, Pontianak, passed afterwards to the city founded there. The founding itself Veth reconstructed from Dutch residency papers he had read in manuscript, including C. L. Hartmann's unpublished 1823 report on the residency of Pontianak. Sharif Abdurrahman left Mempawah with fifteen vessels, sailed up the Kapuas and chose the point where it joins the Landak river; before landing he had his prahus ranged around the island and fired on it with live shot for two hours to drive off the pontianakken, then sprang ashore with his parang and began cutting. Veth's printed dates are 23 November 1771 for the departure and 7 January 1772 for the clearing of the ground. The bombardment story he attributes to W. L. Ritter, whose sketch "De oorsprong van Pontianak" was collected in "Indische herinneringen" (Amsterdam, 1843) after first appearing in a journal. Veth also records a flatly competing account, from G. Muller, in which there is no cannonade at all: Abdurrahman simply asked the Sultan of Sanggau for leave to build a house on "the islet Pontianak", which is to say that the place already carried the name. On the Malay Peninsula the record runs differently, and it runs through a different creature. In June 1881 W. E. Maxwell published "The Folklore of the Malays" in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. On page 28 he describes what happens to a woman who dies in childbirth, "either before delivery, or after the birth of a child and before the forty days of uncleanness have expired": she is popularly supposed to become a langsuyar, a flying demon. To prevent it, he reports from Perak, glass beads are put in the mouth of the corpse, a hen's egg under each armpit and needles in the palms of the hands, so that the dead woman can neither open her mouth to shriek, nor wave her arms as wings, nor open and close her hands to assist her flight. Maxwell's article never mentions the pontianak. Walter William Skeat's "Malay Magic" (1900) quotes Maxwell and then goes much further, and what he sets down is not what modern retellings say. In the Selangor material of his chapter on birth-spirits the langsuir is the mother and the pontianak is her stillborn child, an owl like her. The langsuir wears a robe of green, not white. Her famous ankle-length black hair is grown to conceal the hole in the back of her neck through which she drinks the blood of children. And the way to tame her is to catch her, cut short her own nails and tresses and stuff them into that hole, whereupon she becomes indistinguishable from an ordinary woman, marries and bears children, until someone lets her dance at a village merry-making. Skeat also notes that "Pontianak" appears to be the same word as "Mati-anak", perhaps a shortened "mati beranak", died in childbirth. By 1908 R. J. Wilkinson's abridged Malay-English dictionary offers a third definition again: "puntianak, an evil spirit attacking women at the time of childbirth" - a thing that assaults mothers, not the ghost of one. Three respectable sources, three incompatible creatures, inside twenty-seven years. None of the four names is in the two standard dictionaries that came before. In Marsden (1812) the headwords run punas, pungut, punok, punia with no puntianak among them, and langsuir, bajang and penanggalan are absent as well; Crawfurd (1852) has bajang only as a Javanese word for "dwarf". Whatever the age of the belief itself, its life in European print begins in the 1830s and its detailed description in the 1880s. The pontianak the world now recognises was assembled much later, and in a cinema. At midnight on 27 April 1957, Cathay-Keris premiered "Pontianak", directed by B. N. Rao, produced by Ho Ah Loke, scored by Zubir Said and starring Maria Menado as Chomel. It was a hit large enough to create a genre. Cathay-Keris followed with "Dendam Pontianak" the same year, "Sumpah Pontianak" in 1958 and "Pontianak Gua Musang" in 1964, while the rival Shaw Brothers studio answered with "Anak Pontianak" (1958), "Pontianak Kembali" (1963) and "Pusaka Pontianak" (1965). The nail belongs to this layer: the Asian Film Archive's synopsis of the surviving 1958 film has Chomel's powers crippled by a nail driven through her neck. Malaysian censors stopped approving local horror as the 1970s wore on, and the genre only came back with Shuhaimi Baba's "Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam" in 2004.

This is a story, not an address. There is no pontianak site to visit, and any tour that offers one is selling atmosphere. The one place on earth named after her is a real city. Pontianak, capital of West Kalimantan in Indonesia, stands where the Landak river meets the Kapuas Kecil, almost exactly on the equator - the standard gazetteer coordinate for the city centre is 0.0206 degrees south, 109.3414 degrees east. The Kadriah palace and the great mosque of Sultan Syarif Abdurrahman, both raised by the man whose followers are said to have shelled the island in 1771-72, still stand in the Dalam Bugis quarter of Pontianak Timur, and the equator monument is the city's standard photograph. Supadio airport handles domestic flights and small ferries cross the river to the old quarter. The films are more accessible than the folklore, but only just. The first two, "Pontianak" (1957) and "Dendam Pontianak" (1957), are regarded as lost; no print has surfaced. The third, "Sumpah Pontianak" (1958), 83 minutes, survives in the Asian Film Archive's Cathay-Keris Malay Classics collection in Singapore and is screened publicly from time to time. It is the earliest pontianak film that anyone can actually watch. The most rewarding visit, though, costs nothing and needs no aeroplane. Everything quoted above is free online and out of copyright. Skeat's "Malay Magic" (1900) is at Project Gutenberg. Newbold's two volumes of 1839, Veth's "Borneo's Wester-Afdeeling" (1854), Marsden's dictionary of 1812 and the 1881 volume of the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society are all scanned at the Internet Archive. Reading the page Newbold actually wrote takes ten minutes and is stranger than any night walk. One practical warning. Banana groves, kapok trees and graveyards are ordinary places where people live and are buried. In Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, wandering into a cemetery after dark is at best rude and frequently illegal, and nothing in the record above requires a field trip to check.