Soucouyants: The Fireball Witches of the Islands

In these jewel lands spread across the sea, the history lends to strange tales.

If your neighborhood is located in one of the Caribbean islands, you may well know of the ghost I speak of. If not, you may hear it from your children — about a haunted house in your neighborhood that may exist. Do not doubt their little voices or suspicions, for there is literally more in the mortar than the pestle.

Within the depths of evil there rages a burning fire, and within that fire rage the souls of women burnt for their evil ways long ago — in the days of the masa, and even times long before.

The old woman in the old house

It is believed that these witches, called soucouyants, live within the oldest houses in some neighborhoods. Sometimes their houses are perched deep within the hills and mountains along the outskirts of small clustered villages.

You may see strange birds hovering over her house during the evening hours, and bats in a frenzy around dusk. Everything always appears very still; you will rarely see any form of activity around her small run-down house — except at night, when she awakens to do her bidding in her wrinkled skin.

She hides away carefully, crouches into a curled position, wincing as she turns and turns, forming herself into a flame of fire, and spins into a ball. This skinny old woman — now a ball of flames — rages around until she reaches the heat of her desire, then leaves her house in search of a victim, to suck the blood from his body: much like a vampire, but hot as all fire.

Before morning she returns to her miserable house to retrieve the hidden mortar which holds her skin. She slips back into it once her body has cooled to a warm enough temperature to fit with ease.

The five brave children of Siparia

It was told that five brave kids, living in Siparia, South Trinidad — now old men and women, two having passed away — found a mortar. And the mortar they found held a parched, leathery, dryish, frail substance: what seemed to them to be the skin of a soucouyant.

In their state of confusion and fear they scattered, screamed — and then finally came to their senses, and did what every island child is told to do should they ever find themselves where these five stood. With cringed faces, they put a major heaping of salt into the mortar.

Holding it with the bare tips of their young fingers, they shook it, so the salt would spread through the skin. Then they placed the mortar carefully back where they found it, ran a safe distance, and waited — hurdled together under a broken fence that shaded them from view of the old broken-down house they so often ran past on their way home from school.

The still of the night seemed endless. What took hours seemed to have taken days. Their eyelids were heavy as their hearts.

They aren't quite sure how it happened, to this day — but they tell of being awakened by repetitious screams:

"Ohh-key-yahhhh! Fall in meh, fall in meh nah! Why ya change? Ya change!! Why deh mess wid meee? Is mine!! No! No! Nooo! Why meee… oh Gahhhhhh…!"

To this day, we wonder.

From my Island Child folklore collection, gathered in Trinidad and retold for a new generation of island children.