The Angab: Leyte and Samar's Other Night Thing

Next topic is the angab. It's the chupacabra of the Philippines. Or more specifically, the Waray-waray region's. I clearly remember my older brother using it to scare me when we went out to the forest just to make fun of me.

Have you heard about it?

The angab does not get a lot of attention. I think that is partly because it does not fit neatly into the usual categories. It is not exactly an aswang. It is not a spirit or a multo. The oldest written record I could find on it comes from a 1931 folklore collection from Tanauan, Leyte, compiled for the National Library of the Philippines. That is a long paper trail for something most people outside of Eastern Visayas have never heard of.

According to Waray folklore, the angab appears in one of many forms. But two stand out.

The first is a goat with very long ears. The second is a massive cow or carabao. Some stories describe it as large as an elephant with red eyes. It moves fast, faster than a normal animal of its size should, and it is invisible most of the time.

It comes out at night. Sometimes even as early as late afternoon when it's already dark in fully shaded areas with lots of trees. It announces itself through a whistle before it shows up, which in the context of Philippine folklore is never a good sign. Whistling in the dark tends to belong to things you do not want near you.

You can also tell if an angab is nearby if you smell a pungent scent that you can't explain all of a sudden.

What it does, primarily, is frighten people. It seems to go out of its way to target women whose husbands or male relatives are not home. Or the favorite of almost all Filipino folklore creatures, children.

It is also very hard to kill. Stabbing does nothing. The traditional method for dealing with one is to cut it into four pieces. First in half lengthwise, then each half cut horizontally. Four pieces total. Each piece has to be buried separately at a crossroads, because if any two pieces are left near each other, they will fuse back together and the thing gets up again.

When I started asking around relatives, friends, and people from that part of the Visayas, and describing what I found in the records, a few of them knew what I was talking about right away. The descriptions they gave me matched the documented ones, with one extra detail that kept coming up: the ears.

Big, disproportionate ears.

In some tellings the ears flap and make a sound when the creature moves, a low drumming in the air. That detail was not in the 1931 document. But multiple people described it independently, and the sound seems to be part of how you know it is nearby before you see it.

The physical description, taken together, does not match any animal native to the Philippines. Large hind legs that make the creature look like it is crouched and peering between its own legs. Enormous ears. Nocturnal. Described as appearing to look at you from a strange angle, body positioned wrong.

It resembles, more than anything else I can find, the aye-aye.

If you are not familiar with it, the aye-aye is a nocturnal primate from Madagascar. Big ears. Large eyes. Long thin fingers. The proportions look off from most angles. When one locks onto something with those ears and turns its head, people who encounter them in the wild describe it as unsettling in a way that is hard to put into words. Some communities in Madagascar consider the aye-aye a death omen. On opposite ends of the world, two groups of people with no connection to each other looked at roughly the same kind of animal and arrived at similar conclusions.

The aye-aye does not exist in the Philippines. There is no fossil record, no known migration path, no scientific reason for one to be in Leyte.
So either what people encountered was a real unknown animal that resembled the aye-aye and has since disappeared from the region, or the description was built up over generations of genuine nighttime encounters with something nobody could properly identify.

Or people were scared and their minds filled in the blanks.

None of those explanations fully satisfies me. I have never seen one. The aye-aye comparison especially, because it is too specific to dismiss and too geographically impossible to accept.

The 1931 documentation lists the angab the same way it lists everything else. Here is what it looks like. Here is what it does. Here is how you deal with it.

Just the crossroads instruction, written twice, as if the person documenting it wanted to make sure you understood that part.

And the funny thing is that, when I was in college, I had a classmate who claimed angabs are real. They regularly hunt it in a forest near their home and they eat it.

At that time, I just thought they were describing a regular wild animal that they named angab. But looking back at the conversation, there's no mistaking that what he was describing was similar to the supposedly non-existent creature.

A goat-rat-like muscular animal with huge long ears, strong pungent smell, the fact that it's hard to kill, and the way it stood.

I never pressed further for details, maybe I should have.