Episode 16: The Ciguapa

Episode

27 May

Danger in the Dominican Republic

An illustration of a jungle with exotic, colourful plants and flowers. A woman with golden skin and flowers in her hair peers out from behind a large leaf.

Originating from the Dominican Republic, the ciguapa has long captured the imagination of storytellers and scholars. But beyond her mythical allure, she serves as a profound symbol of Dominican identity and resilience in the face of oppression.

At first glance, the ciguapa may seem like just another fantastical being, with her backward-facing feet, golden or blue skin, and mesmerising black eyes. But a closer examination reveals layers of meaning deeply intertwined with the history of the Dominican Republic and its diverse people.

This episode of Paranormal Pajama Party traces the backwards footsteps of the ciguapa through the historical context of colonialism and nationalism that’s shaped her narrative.

Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as racism, slavery and suicide. Please be advised.
Tonight’s episode features a little bit about zombies, those badly dressed, shuffling monsters who only want one thing: BRAAAAINS.
This badly dressed shuffling monster also only wants one thing: RAAAAAA-tings – and reviews! If you’re enjoying Paranormal Pajama Party so far, please leave the show a five-star rating and a review on your favourite podcast platform. Thanks!
[Pause]
Steph: Michael couldn’t find the trail. He’d only stepped off for a moment, just for a quick toilet break. But when he zipped his fly back up and stepped out from behind the big tree, he had no idea which way he’d come from. The dense underbrush looked the same in every direction.
He cursed himself for hiking alone and setting out so late in the afternoon, and he cursed the bartender who’d talked him into this stupid hike. What kind of a name was “The Mosquito” for a bar, anyway? Asshole.
Michael smacked a large leaf away from his face and promptly tripped over a root he hadn’t seen in the growing darkness. There weren’t any predators in the Dominican Republic, right? Just birds and things?
[Bird call that sounds like laughter]
Steph: As if mocking him, a bird made a cawing sound like a harsh laugh from a tall tree somewhere in front of him.
He thought of Alison, back in their Airbnb. They’d decided against phones during their stay at the cacao farm. Wanted to get off the grid for a minute, find some peace. Right now, he missed the grid. He wanted the grid.
Ahead of him, there was a promising gap between the trees. Maybe he’d stumbled around enough to return to the trail after all. He rubbed some beads of sweat from his nose and cheeks and strode forward.
But instead of the path, Michael found himself at the edge of a hidden glade, bathed in the pale glow of the rising moon. And on the far edge of the clearing, he caught sight of a fleeting figure, quickly stepping back into the trees. That damn bird laughed again.
[The same bird call repeats]
Steph: “Hey, wait!” Michael said. “Un momento, por favor.” He didn’t know much Spanish. Hadn’t thought he’d need it. But maybe the woman he’d seen darting into the trees could help him find his way back. Or at least tell him where he could stay overnight.
He dashed after her. She wasn’t too far ahead of him, and he kept catching glimpses of her. She obviously knew the area because she dodged the trees and bushes gracefully, disappearing into the tangled foliage before he could catch up. Panting and shouting in English and Spanish, he crashed after her.
When he finally caught up to her, it was only because she’d been hemmed in by a running stream. She stood ankle-deep in the water, staring at him with glinting eyes. But the most remarkable thing about her was that she seemed to be completely naked. Not that he could see anything, because her black hair was so long and flowing that it covered her body like a dress.
And Michael was surprised to realise, despite his fear and exhaustion and anger, that he was disappointed. He kind of wanted to see something. He forgot all about Alison and the Airbnb and drank in the woman’s shining dark skin and beautiful features. He took a step forward.
So did she. And as she did, she opened her mouth as if to speak. But the only thing that came out was the same horrible, hoarse bird laugh he’d heard before.
[The same bird call repeats a final time]
Steph: It was the last thing he ever heard.
[Music]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
Hey, just before you come in, I want to give you a little heads up. Tonight’s guest is wearing her bunny slippers with the cute little cotton tail facing forward. Don’t say anything about it – she’s really proud of her feet. They’re just a little… different than ours. Seriously, don’t mention anything. She will 100% eat you if you do. Cool? OK, come on in!
I’d like you to meet tonight’s guest of honour, straight from the Dominican Republic – she’s the ciguapa! Love that your own hair acts as a full-length nightgown, girl – forget fast fashion, you are so environmentally conscious!
The ciguapa is a unique creature because she is actually, in some ways, a patriotic invention. She’s basically a national heroine.
Ciguapas live in the mountainous area of the Dominican Republic called El Cibao. They usually live in or near rivers, and they like to hide in caves and dark areas of the forest. They only come out at night, but if you’re very lucky – or maybe unlucky – you may spot them hopping from branch to branch through the treetops.
They usually have dark brown or even gold or blue skin, and they’re stunningly beautiful, with almond-shaped black eyes. Some of them are small – about three feet tall, and some of them are the size of the average woman, but with extremely long legs. Their shiny black hair grows so long that it’s all they wear as clothing.
But the truly standout feature of the ciguapa is her feet, and I don’t mean that in a creepy way. Where human feet typically face forward, the ciguapa’s feet are the other way around – their heels are in the front and their toes are in the back.
Based on their footprints alone, you can’t tell if a ciguapa is coming or going. So I guess you have to use other clues, like if all the raw meat and butter in your home goes missing overnight. Ciguapas love butter, which… same.
Another clue might be the chirping sound of a bird. Ciguapas can’t – or don’t – speak in a human tongue. They communicate with birdsong, hiccups and howls.
The strongest hint, however, is this: The men you’re travelling with through the mountains of the Dominican Republic hear a bird song, are irresistibly seduced by it, follow it into the woods hoping for sex, and are subsequently ripped to shreds and eaten. Then you know for sure that there’s a ciguapa nearby, and she’s just had a fine dining experience, although she would have preferred more butter.
If, for some reason, you want to avenge the death of your male friend, who – remember – was the sort of person that thought sex with a strange hiccuping woman in the forest was a good idea, you can track a ciguapa down and capture her, but it’s very, very hard to do.
As I said, being hard to track is kind of their whole thing. The only time you can catch a ciguapa is by following their backwards footprints on a night with a full moon, using a six-toed black-and-white dog, called a ciqueño. Once you trap her, she won’t live long – ciguapas can’t survive in captivity. Hope your sex-fiend friend was worth it.
Many Dominicans believe that the story of the ciguapa is an ancient one, originating from the indigenous Taino people who were living on the island of Hispaniola when Christopher Columbus rocked up. (Fun fact: I learned this week that the Taino chief who led the resistance against the Spaniards after Columbus started demanding tributes and cutting off people’s hands if they didn’t bring them was a woman. Her name was Anacaona and the tallest building in the Caribbean is named in her honour.)
There’s no evidence of Taino roots at all, and it seems more likely that the ciguapa was the 1866 creation of Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi, a white nationalist. Hmm. Let me rephrase that. He was a Dominican nationalist who happened to be white. Although, this story’s going to get racist as hell, so unfortunately, I may have been right the first time.
I need to preface the rest of the episode by saying that I am a middle-class white woman who has only been to the Caribbean once. My family went to the Bahamas on a cruise when I was 10. I got some kind of weird rash from either sunscreen or possibly the sun itself and had to spend most of the trip inside the hotel room watching Gilligan’s Island reruns. Yeah, I’m WHITE white.
What I’m trying to say is that I am completely unqualified to talk about the lived experience of people from the region and especially the experiences of people of colour.
Not to get all soap-boxy, here, but feminism isn’t feminism unless it’s intersectional and takes into account the voices of all women, from all backgrounds. That means centring people who have historically been sidelined. Once I get my podcast act together a bit more, I want to prioritise inviting guests from these backgrounds to talk about the ghosts, creatures and witches from their cultures because I think that’s the only way we can really understand these things.
So that’s the game plan. But at the moment, what I can do is: Ensure the sources I use to research these issues are created by people from these backgrounds, use the platform I have to share their knowledge, and point you towards the actual experts. For today’s episode, I’m leaning heavily on two sources in particular: A journal article titled “La ciguapa y el ciguapeo: Dominican Myth, Metaphor, and Method” by Dr Ginetta Candelario; and a chapter from the book Querellas de las mujeres: Pasado y presente called “Afro-Caribbean Post-Humanism – Sirens, Ciguapas”, by Macarena Martín Martínez.
To make sense of the ciguapa, I need to do a quick overview of the history of the island and the Caribbean.
OK, so: The island of Hispaniola, which is now the location of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic, has been occupied by several different Indigenous peoples during its history. As I mentioned, the Taino people were living there when the Nina, Pinta and the Santa Maria appeared on the horizon in 1492.
Once the Spanish decided it was theirs, it became the first permanent European settlement in the New World and their base of operations for all their other colonising activities. And by that, I mean exploitation and genocide.
The Spanish practically wiped out the Taino people to set up a sugar plantation-based economy on the island. The remaining Tainos organised a successful uprising and were granted a city to call their own, but the plantations needed workers and the white people sure weren’t going to do it, so instead they imported enslaved people from Africa. Cool.
But after the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs and the Incas and had all of South America to pillage, they started to neglect Hispaniola. Old immigrants left, new immigrants stopped coming, and the economy tanked. Nothing downgrades racial and class differences like poverty, and the remaining groups of people began to mingle, intermarry, and reproduce. These are the people who became Dominicans. Also, they were totally cool with pirates and contraband trade.
This was a problem for Spain, and in an effort to put a stop to contraband trade, the king ordered all residents to move to the southeast part of the island. Sensing an opportunity, the French quickly settled the vacated area on the west side of Hispaniola. (By the way, the Wikipedia article about this includes the sentence: “In order to entice the pirates, France supplied them with women who had been taken from prisons, accused of prostitution and thieving.” Yeah. Women as a pirate bargaining chip. Oh hey, history. You suck.)
I’m fast-forwarding through a lot of fighting and economic stuff, but basically: Spain eventually ceded 2/5 of the island to the French and kept ⅗ of it. Some policies changed back in Europe, and Santo Domingo’s economy revived. Unfortunately, so did the slave trade.
Again, really skipping over some things in the interest of time, but on the French side of the island, the man with the greatest name in all of history, Toussaint Louverture, successfully led a slave revolt, resulting in the establishment of the Black sovereign state of Haiti.
Then comes a long period of a lot of fighting and flip-flopping. Spain cedes Hispaniola to the French, the French lose it to the British, the British give it back to the Spanish, the Spanish kick the French out of the Caribbean so they all head north to New Orleans, and the Dominicans even briefly declare independence before being annexed by Haiti. On the island itself, more fighting – the Dominicans don’t like the Haitians, the Haitians don’t like the Dominicans, nobody likes the Europeans, who are scared of everyone who isn’t white. It’s a mess. The end result is a 12-year-long war for independence.
And some of the loudest proponents of the Dominican Republic becoming a separate nation were the children of white colonists, including journalist Francisco Javier Angulo Guridi, who also wrote poetry, novels, essays, and plays.
Guridi was born on the island to Spanish parents, although his family relocated to Cuba when he was young. After he returned permanently in 1861, he joined the War for Independence as a colonel. He held a few government roles and even served as a senator, but his main contribution was founding or writing for publications focused on self-determination, individualism, and nationalism.
According to Candelario, Guridi was “explicitly invested in narrating and influencing the course of history, society, culture, and politics in the Dominican Republic after its split from Haiti and in the context of a building sentiment in favour of sovereignty and abolition in the Hispanic Caribbean.”
One of the best ways to establish sovereignty is “indigenism”, which usually involves rejecting colonial and imperial influences and reclaiming indigenous narratives and symbols. It’s a way of establishing that your culture is distinct and tied directly to the history of your homeland. In this case, Guridi was using indigenism as a way to make it clear that Dominicans are not Spanish, not part of the US, which was also eyeballing the island, and not Haitian, which in this context means “Black.” Yeah, it’s problematic. I’m not on board.
I’m especially not on board with the next part. Because sometimes, for patriot reasons, you might go so far as to make your native culture up. All folklore had to start somewhere, I guess.
Guridi’s contribution to this effort was to write a novel, La Ciguapa. In the story, a traveller on the way to Santo Domingo to board a ship back to Spain is joined by a young man named Andres who wishes to accompany him back to Europe.

Andres, the son of Spanish farmers, wants to leave the Dominican Republic far behind him due to heartbreak. You see, he fell in love with Marcelina, the daughter of another Spanish family, and she fell right back. He took her to a beautiful riverbank to confess his feelings and they spent the next few hours imagining their future together – planning their home and their family.
But then dusk fell, and something near the river caught Marcelina’s eye. It was, quote, “a creature that is just three feet tall… Its muscles and extremities exist in perfect harmony with one another; it has a marvellously beautiful face and movements full of such agility, spontaneity, and grace that they captivate the attention of all who see it. It has the golden skin of the authentic Indian, black almond-shaped eyes, soft, lustrous, and abundant hair that on females falls down their gorgeous backs all the way to the knees… It has no language other than howling, and it runs like a hare through the mountains, or leaps like a bird among the trees’ branches as soon as it comes across a being from a different race.”
Yep, poor Marcelina spotted a ciguapa, and she was so unnerved by the encounter that she fell into a feverish state and died three days later. The ciguapa ruined any future happiness Andres could have hoped for, and therefore his life. At least it didn’t eat him?
This may have been an especially tragic ending for Guridi’s readers because the Dominican Republic, like many countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, has a history of policies supporting something called blanqueamiento – or “whitening.”
Blanqueamiento is a social, economic and political practice aimed at literally whitening the race. And I really hate it.
Sorry. I… I do know I’m speaking from a place of white privilege and definitely taking it for granted, because when you’re the advantaged group you never have to think of the ways in which you’re advantaged. I see where the mindset behind blanqueamiento comes from. But god, it makes me so fucking sad that our world is this way.
Basically, if you subscribe to this idea, the aim is to distance the past – usually seen as primitive and backward (and, this is key – Black and/or Indigenous) from the future, which will be booming economically and modern. To be modern, society should abandon those obsolete Black and Indigenous roots. And ideally, if you buy into blanqueamiento, everyone should be white. There are lots of different ways this attitude can be baked into economic and government policies, but at its most basic, practising blanqueamiento means encouraging couples with lighter skin to get together to make even lighter children.
It’s just another form of nationalism. And in the novel, written by Guridi the nationalist, the ciguapa has ruined a white couple’s chances of building a big, white family. Even if she doesn’t kill your girlfriend, she is a hunter and a woman of colour who seduces good, white men and leads them to their doom. Yeah, it’s icky.
After the novel came out, the story of the ciguapa gained popularity in the Dominican Republic, and as it was told, it changed.
As I said, folklore has to start somewhere, and the ciguapa gives us an interesting window into where stories come from, why we tell them, and how their meaning can change depending on the storyteller.
The ciguapa is not the only Caribbean monster. Ask any pirate – there are also mermaids in those warm waters. And the most successful monstrous export from the region by far also hails from Hispaniola – it’s the zombie.
In their earliest form, zombies were reanimated corpses, brought back to life to do the bidding of malicious sorcerers. They originated in stories told among enslaved African people who brought their spiritual beliefs with them when they were removed from their homelands.
In her article, Martín Martinez points out a pretty clear metaphor for enslavement – the zombie is dehumanised, loses the agency it once had as a living person, and is exploited to do the dirty work of those who control them. Zombie stories originated as a way to try to make sense of the senseless horror of slavery.
The mermaids of the Caribbean may also be connected to this dark history.
According to A. Missouri Sherman-Peter, Ambassador and Permanent Observer for the Caribbean Community to the United Nations, “…Twelve to 20 million Africans were enslaved in the western hemisphere after an Atlantic voyage of 6 to 10 weeks. This voyage, now known as the ‘Middle Passage’, consumed some 20 per cent of its ‘human cargo’. Disease and death were common outcomes in this human tragedy.”
Martín-Martínez argues that the sirens and mermaids that appear in Caribbean folklore probably have their origins in the people lost along this horrific journey, including people who jumped overboard into the water as a way of maintaining their agency before their lives were handed over to someone else to be used as a tool.
And just like the zombie and the mermaid, the ciguapa may also represent real people who were dehumanised by imperialism.
Remote and often inaccessible, the mountains and swampy areas of many Caribbean and Latin American countries became a haven for people fleeing colonialism. Usually, these were people of colour – Indigenous people and Africans – running from slavery, although indentured European servants or pirates escaped to these areas, too. There, they established autonomous, self-sufficient communities.
The Spanish called untamed cattle “cimarrónes”, and this term came to be applied to escaped slaves and people living outside colonial control, as well – another example of dehumanisation. Cimarrón eventually evolved into the word maroon. The maroon communities helped fugitives living outside the law preserve their cultural beliefs, languages and practices and enabled them to organise resistance efforts against colonial rule.
Sometimes they’d engage in guerilla warfare or raid plantations, disappearing back into the unfriendly wilds before they were caught, where they’d become extremely difficult to trace.
Sound like any backward-footed babes we know?
Even though the ciguapa was likely Guridi’s invention, her story has grown in its telling and retelling, as it’s been adopted by a culture that’s telling its own story. The original ciguapa didn’t have backward feet, but then she became untrackable and nearly impossible to catch. When she’s trapped, she’ll die – she can’t live in subjugation. Her skin became a darker brown. Her howling communication grew to include birdcalls and hiccups – it turns out she’s speaking a language, it’s just not one that her prey has bothered to learn.
The zombie’s story is a sad one. It changed, too – zombies lost their backstory, and when their popularity grew and they began to make appearances in white pop culture, they’re now dirty, mindless, flesh-eaters. (I didn’t realise this, but Martín Martínez says that zombies didn’t become people-eaters until George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968.)
It’s telling that the zombie – from Haiti, the world’s first Black freedom state – now has connotations of violence, contagion, invasion, chaos and otherness. It’s pretty disgusting once you make that connection, especially when you realise that in reality, Haitian zombies have never eaten or killed a single person, but that imperial exploitation of its people and resources sure as hell ate Haiti.
Mermaids had a similar treatment. Caribbean stories of mermaids are nowhere near as common as European mermaid stories, and the insane controversy that erupted after Halle Bailey was cast as the lead in the live-action version of The Little Mermaid showed us yet another example of racism being alive and well. Sometimes I don’t want to be part of this world.
But the ciguapa stands as the exception to this appropriation and further dehumanisation of already dehumanised groups. She’s been featured in a few movies and a children’s book, and I even found a romance novel in which the main character is secretly a ciguapa.
But she hasn’t made the same pop cultural leap that the zombie did. Although there are some ciguapa stories in Cuba, the other Caribbean country Guridi called home, she remains associated with the Dominican Republic.
These days, the ciguapa occasionally appears in contemporary literature and poetry written by Dominican women. Let’s not forget that colonialism conquers and exploits women’s bodies in the same way it conquers and exploits land and resources. So lately, when the ciguapa shows up in stories, she seduces white men in the forest… and then she ends the cycle of abuse.
[Music]
Steph: Aw, man. Unfortunately, our new friend the ciguapa has to run to work. Those men aren’t gonna hunt and eat themselves!
Once again, it’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party.
To learn more about the ciguapa, the dehumanisation of people and monsters, and to learn the name of that romance novel I mentioned, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
[Music fades out]

The long battle for independence

The history of the Dominican Republic is marked by a long and arduous battle for independence from colonial powers. From the Spanish conquest to the Haitian occupation, and later, the struggle against European imperialism, Dominicans have faced numerous challenges in asserting their sovereignty and self-determination.

The ciguapa’s elusive nature and resistance to captivity mirror the story of the island’s maroon communities, which were mainly made up of people escaping slavery and fighting colonial oppression.

Mythical beings and oppression

She’s not the only mythical creature with relevance to this discussion, either. Zombies, originating from Haitian folklore, and mermaids, prevalent in Caribbean mythology, also hold significance in understanding the experiences of oppressed peoples in the region.

Zombies, originally depicted as reanimated corpses controlled by sorcerers, emerged from an effort by enslaved people to understand their horrific situation – what the UN has called “the greatest crime against humanity committed in… the modern era”. The zombie’s lack of agency symbolises the dehumanisation and exploitation of enslaved Africans during the colonial era.

Mermaids, too, are associated with the tragic stories of enslaved individuals who attempted to escape captivity by jumping overboard during the long voyage across the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.

All three of these beings – the ciguapa, the zombie, and the mermaid – serve as reminders of the profound impact of colonialism and slavery on Caribbean societies.

Nationalist tool?

The ciguapa also reveals how folklore can both serve nationalist narratives and ideologies and also – in the right hands – thwart those same ideas.

The ciguapa originally represented a cautionary tale within colonial and nationalist discourses about the disruption of white lineage, posing a direct challenge to the preservation of whiteness and the perpetuation of white power structures by seducing and leading white men to their demise.

But the fascinating thing about the ciguapa is that her story has undergone reinterpretation and adaptation, particularly in contemporary literature and storytelling. These days, she’s portrayed as a defiant, unconfined figure who challenges historical narratives of subjugation… by tearing them to pieces.