Accounts of the polong's appearance vary, agreeing only on the point that the creature is strange to behold. It is often described as a very tiny, deformed female imp several inches in height, a description which closely matches that of the western homunculus.
The Victorian explorer P. G. Begbie gives us a very strange description, based on a rough sketch he received from a Malay healer:
"..the head being formed very much like the handle of a kris, the eyes being situated at either end of the crossguard ; The upper part of the blade represents the neck, from the extremities of which branch two spinous leg- like processes, running nearly parallel with the spiral filliform body, widening out at the insertion, and gradually approximating at the extremities.."
The Polong is completely invisible to all but healers. Even the creature's mistress is said to locate it solely by its sound, said to resemble that of a chirping bird or cricket. As you can see, Begbie's description also suggests a passing physical resemblance to a cricket or locust.
Penanggalan - One of the most disturbing mythological creatures of all time, the penanggalan, another figure from Malaysia's rich supernatural lore, is a female monster who lives during daylight hours as a normal human, but, after dark, can detach her head and vital organs from the remainder of her body and fly out in the night in search of human prey. After a night of feeding on bodily fluids, she soaks her full stomach in vinegar to reduce its swelling and slips back into her body before dawn. She faces final death if she does not manage to reconstitute herself before morning.
The penanggalan is universally feared as a bearer of disease and a murderer of children and expectant mothers. She is vulnerable to a certain variety of thorny briar, which is said to spring up wherever her blood or bile has been spilled (almost everywhere her monstrous form travels.) If her hair or organs become entangled, she becomes trapped, and is left at the mercy of the morning sun. A ring of briars around passages, windows or doors may prevent her approach.
The following story, an amazing piece of morbid humour, is quoted from the aforementioned P.G. Begbie:
The Malays state that a man had two wives, the one black and the other white, who were both Penanggalans.(nice luck- ed.) He was informed of the circumstance, but scarcely credited it. In order to ascertain the fact, he feigned a journey of some days, and the women, believing him to have left the house, departed on a Penanggalan trip, leaving their bodies behind. These the husband changed, putting the body of the black one in the place of the white one and vice versa. On the return of the women, with their entrails amazingly swollen from their foul banquet, each entered a jar of vinegar in order to diminish their size, and re-animated the bodies, but unknown to themselves, effected an exchange, the black one entering the white body and the white one entering the black body, and the black one the other, as they had not remarked the substitution.
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