42 MALAY POISONS AND CHABM CUBES 



Sir Hugh Clifford describes the femnggalan, a horrible, 

 partially disembowelled wraith from the lying-in room 

 who comes to torment little children. There are many 

 others. Skeat describes an evil thing called the polong, 

 who is always attended by a familiar in the shape of a 

 house-cricket. This familiar is described as the play- 

 thing of the folong and is called the pilSsit The 

 feUdt appears to be similar to the nigget of Esses. A 

 writer to The Times of September 3rd, 1915, gave an 

 account of a witch who died within forty miles of 

 London in 1915. Among other unnatural things, this 

 old woman kept niggeis or " creepy-crawly " things 

 that she fed wuth little bits of grass all chopped up. 

 She sat and played with her niggeis. The p^sit is very 

 well known in Kelantan and Kedah. It is acquired 

 by a special process in Black Art from the corpse of an 

 infant, the fii'st-born child of first-born parents. Tlie 

 creature becomes the owner's servant and obeys her in 

 all things ; its chief use, however, is to inflict sickness 

 and death upon persons who are disliked by its patron . 

 The owner of a fMdt is always a woman, who plays 

 with it and feeds it on her blood and is supposed to 

 keep it in a bottle. She can be recognised by her 

 faihu-e to meet the eye, by her refusal to take a bit of 

 pinang nut, still pinched in the scissors of the betel 

 chewer*s outfit, or by becoming momentarily deranged 

 (laiah) if a frog is popped under a coco-nut shell and put 

 behind her back. The pMidt can be exorcised by the 

 following formula : — 



Vampire, well do I know thy origin, 

 B(?gotten of the after-birth, 



Engendered of the discharge of unproductive blood, 



Khnang thy name I 



Gazing skyward thy vomit be blood, 



Bending earthward thy vomit be ordure. 



In the name of Allah and in the name of Hia Apostle 1 



With the bteaainga of Allah and the Prophet ! 



