- The original vampiric creature of Australian mythology, the Yara-ma-yha-who stands out due to its unusual appearance and interesting feeding habits.
Small in stature, the red skinned monster's other notable feature is its giant mouth.
Though it may look silly, these beings give a whole new meaning to the word bloodsucker.
Meant to frighten children into good behavior, it also ties the members of indigenous communities to one another, to their environment, and to their shared past.
Oh, and by the way, they drink your blood through their fingertips and their toes.
I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is Monstrum.
One of mythology's truly unique creatures, the Australian Yara-ma-yha-who's unassuming, almost comical appearance hides it's threatening nature.
Standing only about four feet tall, the red skinned monster has a massive serpentine head on a disproportionately small body.
Its mouth, throat, and stomach are likewise freakishly large.
This strange being has no teeth, no weapons to speak of.
So why is it so scary?
Well, first of all, it swallows its food whole.
Its mouth widens like a snake, much wider than its body size.
The better to gobble up its prey.
And what is its prey?
Us.
Or more accurately, it is coming for your children.
The lore surrounding the Yara-ma-yha-who functioned primarily to frighten Aboriginal children into obedience so that they wouldn't wander away from the safety of their homes and into the bush.
The Australian Outback is a notoriously unforgiving landscape, and you can't blame a community for developing particularly gruesome and terrifying stories to keep their kids in line.
Although it won't turn down an unassuming adult either.
I mentioned that this monster doesn't appear to have any weapons, but appearances can be deceiving, especially when we're talking about this diminutive fellow.
In fact, the Yara-ma-yha-who has two grisly weapons to employ: sucker-cup-laden appendages and regurgitation?
According to one folk tale, a man tired from hunting fell asleep under a tree.
Before he could even utter a sound, a Yara-ma-yha-who leapt upon him and sucked his blood with its fingers and hooks.
The monster began to swallow him whole, creeping over his body with its mouth unnaturally wide.
The hunter's mother saw what was happening and grabbed her husband's spear, but she was too far away, and before she could come close to the monster, the Yara-ma-yha-who stood and ran off to a watering hole, his new victim in his stomach.
While telling the tale to little children in her community, the mother lamented, the Yara-ma-yha-who must have vomited him back up.
A smart man, she instructed, would have played dead until dark when the monster was asleep and it was safer to flee.
Her son, she believes, tried to escape, but the monster caught him, only to swallow him up again and again, until he became like the monster himself.
He had turned into a Yara-ma-yha-who.
Living among the thick leafy foliage of wild fig trees, Yara-ma-yha-who will pounce on its prey.
Men, women, and children alike as they walk below or are foolish enough to seek respite under the trees' branches.
Fear of this creature was so great that people would go out of their way to look for shelter in caves or rocky overhangs rather than sit under a tree.
The Yara-ma-yha-who's fingers and toes each end in a cup shaped sucker like those of an octopus, but these suckers drain their victim's blood.
And it gets worse.
Yara-ma-yha-who drains just enough blood from its victims to incapacitate them.
Then, like a cat with a mouse, the games begin.
Once the victim is unconscious, the Yara-ma-yha-who crawls toward it and swallows the body whole, head first.
This apparently takes considerable energy, requiring the monster to take a long drink of water and then curl up for a nap, the victim still alive in its belly.
Upon waking, the Yara-ma-yha-who vomits up its presumably terrified meal.
And it gets weirder.
Only once the creature falls asleep again, it clearly has a thing for naps, its victim can run away.
And if the Yara-ma-yha-who wakes, the victim may be safe since the monster cannot run very fast, its gait resembling that of a cockatoo.
But, you knew there was going to be a but didn't you?
It's not just the loss of blood that the human prey must fear.
If a person is caught by the Yara-ma-yha-who more than once, they will become shorter and shorter each time it regurgitates them until they become as small as the monster itself.
Slowly, their skin will turn smooth and red and they will lose all of the hair on their body.
Eventually they become a Yara-ma-yha-who.
That's the creature, hauntingly creepy, and yet surprisingly practical from a community organization standpoint, right?
But I mentioned earlier that this monster story is deeper than just a warning to kids about the dangers of the wilderness that surrounded them.
Like many of the monsters I explore, Yara-ma-yha-who's story is intrinsically tied both to the cultural identity and to the history of the people who mythologized it.
The pervasive mythology of the indigenous peoples of Australia reflects their deep ties to the land and the environment, as well as the far reaching effects of colonialism on these cultures.
Aboriginal communities recognized three important categories outside of humans and animals in their mythos, ancestral creators, ghosts or human spirits, and spirit beings.
The ancestral creators occupied the land during what the aboriginals called dreamtime, the beginning of time.
They shaped the entire world from sky to sea and everything in between.
They dictated the traditions and customs of social and religious practice.
For aboriginals, humans exist because of these ancestor beings.
Ghosts or human spirits are understood to be the spiritual remains of the living.
Finally, there are the spirit beings.
Unlike the ancestral creators who are beings from a time long ago, spirit beings exist in the here and now, living on the land alongside humans.
Aboriginal sacred beliefs see these creatures, including the Yara-ma-yha-who, as co-residents of a shared landscape.
The spirit beings are part of the physical environment and that they contribute in ways that may directly influence the lives of people.
Among these spirit beings is a whole category of little men or spirit men, a group to which the Yara-ma-yha-who belong.
Anthropologist Phillip A. Clarke explored this classification deeply.
According to him, these small beings with human-like characteristics, unusually colored skin, most commonly red, and a mischievous nature are often connected to a particular environment or locale.
These spirit men are predominant in myths among Southeastern Australian aboriginals.
That being said, there is striking differentiation and variation in their appearance and habits across communities and even within a single community.
Moreover, there are other little men who appear throughout Australian lore.
In Western Australia, the Yara-ma-yha-who's counterpart looks more like an orangutan or a monkey and has a hairy, but still red, body.
In fact, one thing almost all the stories have in common is the unusual coloring of the little men.
They could be yellow, green, gray, white, or red, like our friend, the Yara-ma-yha-who.
The broader group of these little men generally live on high ground, whether it be on the tops of cliffs, hills or sand dunes.
Most active at dawn and dusk, they are spotted either in pairs or alone.
Hunters would leave out offerings from their kills to appease these beings.
Of course, there are ways in which Yara-ma-yha-who tales differ from those of these other spirit men.
They are not reported in pairs, and they do most of their hunting during the day.
They are truly unique however, in that they alone threatened to make you one of their kind.
Before the British forcibly settled on the continent, over 500 indigenous groups occupied the land.
Many of their myths and stories were misinterpreted by the Europeans, and creatures from Aboriginal mythology were regarded as real foreign species by European colonizers, beings that they had yet to see in the wild, but were certain existed like the bunyip, and even to a degree, the Yara-ma-yha-who.
Early 20th century anthropologist and archeologist Norman B. Tindale believed that accounts of the spirit men or little folk were actually the diluted oral history of a race of pygmy people believed to have arrived in Australia more than 30,000 years ago.
The increasing exchange of cultural practices and folklore in post-colonial Australia meant that indigenous myths were forever altered, including the mythology describing its monsters.
This helps explain for example, why the Yara-ma-yha-who is more often classified as a vampire species in modern times, rather than as the spirit being it originally was understood to be.
It also helps us understand why we see such variations in the monster's traits across cultures and throughout modern history.
Still, reported sightings of various diminutive humanoid beings in Australia continued well into the 1980s, and folklore of the spirit men continues to be shared among members of indigenous communities today.
The continuation of the oral traditions of spirit beings by the Aboriginal people serves as a connection to their regional communities and as part of a larger cultural identity in post-colonial Australia.
The Yara-ma-yha-who might be a strange body, but it is nonetheless a body of knowledge.
