More Haunting Tales of Old New Orleans from Alyne A. Pustanio

LE MARAIS TREMBLEMENT:TERRORS OF THE TREMBLING MARSHES

Copyright Alyne A. Pustanio © 2010

The Old Shell Beach Road meanders out of New Orleans toward Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne, the Rigolets, and beyond.  In long ago days, when New Orleans reigned as the crown jewel of the South, this road would take the traveler through a swampy wilderness expanse known as the “Marais Tremblement” or Trembling Marshes - so called because of the way in which the salty Gulf of Mexico winds billowed like waves over the tall marsh grasses.

For the most part the Marais were uninhabited, though here and there small encampments of Native Americans or freed people of color would crop up during the hunting seasons.  But at that time there also existed, hidden along the shores of Lake Borgne, a small fishing village of Filipinos called St. Malo, the earliest settlement of Asian people in the United States.  Established around 1763 by a group of Filipino slaves on the run from Spain’s Manila Galleon trade, St. Malo’s existence was kept secret for many years to avoid the vengeance of their brutal Spanish masters.  The swamps and marshlands concealed them well, and it wasn’t until 1883, when famed Louisiana journalist Lafcadio Hearn discovered and wrote about them, that their existence was revealed.  Until that time, the “Manilamen,” as they came to be called, were a people of rumor and legend, a part of the all-encompassing mystery of the Louisiana swamps.

The Manilamen, who called themselves “Tagalas,” lived in small, raised houses above the water very like the stilt houses they might have had in the Philippines.  The insides were bare and rudimentary with little for comfort.  Mattresses made of old sails and stuffed with Spanish moss, hung with mosquito-netting; old barrels and crates for makeshift furniture.  They made their living by fishing or “lugging” in the nearby oyster fields.  Women were rarely to be found in St. Malo or, indeed, in other areas of the Marais Tremblement because the living conditions were so primitive and harsh.  Because there were no Filipino women available to them, when a Manilaman married it was usually to a Spanish, Cajun, or Native American woman whom he would establish in a home in New Orleans or some other safe location.   

Folklore of the area confirms that the Manilamen held a rich supernatural tradition filled with weird and frightening denizens familiar to them from their Malaysian homelands.  Perhaps understandably, the creatures that came to prey upon these lonely men often appeared in the form of alluringly beautiful women.  So it was that in the evenings, when the palmetto rooftops and spindly masts of their little Oriental boats would cast stark shadows against the mango sunset skies, the Manilamen would gather together and light the fat stumps of tallow candles in empty oyster shells, peering into the all-encompassing darkness of the Louisiana night.  Out there, they knew, a race of exotic and strange creatures unique to their own culture lay in wait . . .

Chief among these, and surely the most feared, was the dreaded Penanggal.  This vampire-like creature, sometimes called a “water witch” for its habit of using marshy waterways to travel, was described as a beautiful female whose mastery of the black arts made her able to sever her head from her torso in order to fly through the night in search of victims.  The witch would drag its innards behind it, using them as an octopus might use its tentacles to move through the air, navigate obstacles, and to trap and constrict its prey.  A long, mosquito-like probe protruding from a mouth of fangs would pierce the skin of victims as the witch sucked her fill of blood. 

Pregnant women and infants were the favored victims of the Penanggal and this may be another reason why the Manilamen made homes for their women in far away from the wild marshlands.  But, deprived of women or children, the Penanggal made do with whatever, or whoever, she could ensnare.  Thorny bushes would be encouraged to grow around the meager huts of the Marais folk in the hope that the brambles would entangle the organs of the witch, trapping it until the morning sunlight could destroy it.  Shards of glass were spread along windowsills and wedged into roof eaves for the same purpose.  Manilamen also believed that garlic and onions would keep the witch away and placed these in copious amounts around their homes.    

Sometimes the Manilamen would overcome their fears and mount an offensive against a Penanggal preying on their community.  In one such case, the men of St. Malo traced the witch back to its hidden lair by following the slimy, snail-like path left by the creature’s entrails.  They found the Penanggal deep in the swamp, under the labyrinthine roots of an ancient cypress tree, asleep in its lair.  The witch was a beautiful woman, they discovered, and she was seated naked in a large vat of palm vinegar, a mixture that preserved her body while her head went in search of victims. The Filipino men entered the hiding place, shouting loudly and beating with sticks and hands against the sides of the tub. 

The witch was so completely startled that she lurched up, literally popping her head from her body; it flew, shrieking, into the roots of the tree, curling its entrails about it and snapping a mouth full of sharp, yellowed fangs.  While a few men kept the head at bay, the others dragged the creature’s body from the rancid vinegar, doused it with kerosene, and set torches to it.  As the body burned, the head flew off yammering into the swamp.  The men knew that without the preserved body to return to, the witch’s head would waste away or be destroyed by the light of the morning sun.

The Penanggal witch was not the only fearful creature haunting the wilderness of the Marais Tremblement.  The Manilamen and other Marais folk also greatly feared the “Tik-Tik” – a ghoulish, shape-shifting zombie that rose from the grave at night to prey upon the flesh of infants and small children and steal the corpses of the dead.  Filipinos called the creature “Tik-Tik” because of the sound it made grinding its teeth as it went about its awful work.

According to elderly Filipinos, the Tik-Tik could shape-shift into the form of an animal or even an insect; a favorite habit of the creature was to conceal itself in the swamp water, hiding among the tree roots and undergrowth, where it would lay in wait to snatch unwary fishermen from their lugger-boats.  The Tik-Tik could reanimate the corpses of the dead and use them to prey upon the living; Manilamen knew that seeing your reflection inverted in a man’s eyes meant that he had been possessed by a Tik-Tik.

Many tales of the Tik-Tik indicate that it commonly traveled with a familiar, or companion creature that it sometimes used as a decoy.  The Manilamen called this second creature the Sigbin.  When the Tik-Tik was hunting, sometimes the Sigbin would engage a victim long enough to distract it from the approaching Tik-Tik.  The Sigbin is described by eyewitnesses as a foul-smelling, goat-like creature, with matted hair and a mouth full of sharp fangs.

Folklore from this area suggests a similarity between the Filipino Sigbin and the legendary “Grunch,” a Chupacabra-like beast often sighted in sections of Eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish.

The Anak was a female creature that not only kept its head but maintained its beautiful appearance while busy about its ghoulish work.  Like the Tik-Tik, it was a shapeshifter, and often appeared in the form of an abandoned baby or child crying in the woods.  The unsuspecting would believe they were approaching a child, but as they drew near, the Anak would change into its true form and attack.  To lure men, she often took on the form of a beautiful woman with long, flowing black hair, revealing herself to be a demonic hag once her trap has been sprung.

Filipino lore portrays the Anak as a form of vampire.  The lore of the Louisiana Manilamen agrees with this and there are tales from the Marais that include frightening, descriptions of hearing the chilling, banshee-like wail of the creature from deep in the swamps; even more disturbing are accounts from survivors of a spectral woman with talon-like claws and a bird’s beak that it uses to suck blood from the genitals or intestines.  If she attacks a pregnant woman, she will eat through the abdomen until she devours the fetus; young girls who have been bitten by the Anak and infants who survive an attack are doomed to become one.  Always attracted to a place where blood is plentiful, Anaks are said to plague farms and slaughterhouses.  For this reason, Manilamen historically avoided the slaughterhouses along the St. Bernard and Orleans Parish line were the Anaks were said to “clean up” what the French werewolves left.

According to legend, the Anak is impossible to kill but iron, either in the form of a stake or a long, rusty nail, was said to be the only material that could return the creature to human form, making it vulnerable to physical death.  As a rule, Anaks avoided blacksmiths and carpenters, and would give wide berth to any garden where thorn bushes thrived.  The Anak was said to shelter by day in the trunk of a large tree, in Louisiana this might be an ancient oak or cypress tree.  If the tree could be found the Anak could be dispatched by hammering an iron stake into the opening and burning the tree down.  As a result of this tradition, one of the oldest oaks in colonial Louisiana was destroyed.

When an Anak was suspected of preying upon the men of St. Malo and other local settlements, a group of Manilamen, under the guidance of a their village elder, tracked the creature to its home in the hollow of a tree at the port of English Lookout.  The tree was a huge, old oak, ancient before Iberville even stepped ashore; because of its proximity to the territories of Mississippi, it was called the “Last Oak of Louisiana.”  Unfortunately, the horrible Anak had chosen this old tree as its home and when the Manilamen came upon it, they showed it no mercy.

For many years, all that remained of the ancient oak was a burned stump avoided by local wildlife and where, amid the chirping of insects and the droning of the swamp frogs, a horrible, keening wail could be heard trailing off into the ink-black Louisiana night.

St. Malo is gone now, destroyed in the hurricane of 1915, and the Manilamen, either through assimilation or marriage, became part of the large immigrant population of New Orleans.  As the years passed, and the old city grew, much of the wilderness area that was the Trembling Marshes was settled, becoming a thriving suburb of the growing metropolis.  Chef Menteur, the highway of the “lying chief,” cuts through the old Marais and along its route, not far from a place called Powers Junction, the 50’s actress Jayne Mansfield was killed, joining the ghosts of the Trembling Marshes.  Another hurricane, named Katrina, did much to change the landscape of the marshes and the lives of the large Vietnamese and Chinese community that still thrives there.

But the memory of the Manilamen lives on, and though the creatures that plagued them during their years in the marshes may go by other names today, they – and the terror they spread – endures.   

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