Pontianak, One Legend, Two Names Across the Strait

Malay and Indonesian ghost lore share a great deal of common ground, nowhere clearer than in the figure told as pontianak on one side of the Strait of Malacca and kuntilanak on the other. Strip away the name and the two accounts describe the same woman: she died in pregnancy, childbirth, or by violence; she returns beautiful, dressed in pale or white cloth, her long black hair loose; she is first known by a sweet floral scent, often compared to frangipani, that curdles foul just before she attacks a man traveling alone at night. She favors banana trees as a resting place, a detail so consistent that a lone banana grove near a village could become a place people avoided after dark. Where the traditions differ is in remedy: widespread folk practice held that driving an iron nail into the back of her neck or skull would calm her into ordinary, docile behavior, while removing the nail returned her instantly to her violent state, a piece of practical magic reported by Skeat's Malay informants and echoed in Indonesian tellings under the kuntilanak name. The pontianak is worth distinguishing from a different Malay figure she is sometimes loosely associated with, the penanggalan, a detached woman's head that flies by night trailing its entrails in search of blood; the two share a family resemblance as vampiric ghosts but are not the same creature, and folklorists keep them apart even where popular fiction does not. Because pontianak and kuntilanak name one legend, and because the city of Pontianak in Indonesian Borneo is popularly said to take its name from this same ghost, this atlas records a single entry under the more internationally recognized name and carries kuntilanak as its Indonesian alias rather than mint a duplicate entity for a difference of regional vocabulary.