Churel

A churel, also written as "churail" is a female ghost out of Hindu folklore.

Description

She appears either as a hideous creature with long, pendant breasts, sharp long teeth, unkempt hair, and a black tongue, or as a beautiful young woman who can charm any man. Often, her feet are backward, and she has an unnaturally long black tongue. The churel is said to be the ghost of a low-caste woman who died in childbirth or while menstruating.

Origin

The Churel is the revenant of a woman who dies when bearing a child or has somehow broke some religious taboos when dying.

Behavior

Due to the fact that young men are the cause of her death, the Churel always drinks from young men, beginning with the one she loved in life. She keeps them enthralled, draining them of their vitality, until they prematurely become grey-haired old men.

Strenghs/weaknesses

The ways to prevent or get rid of a churrel include:

• Piercing the thumb and fore-fingers of the corpse with nails.
• Binding the the toes of the corpse together with an iron ring.
• Breaking the legs of the corpse above the ankles.
• Burying the corpse the corpse face downwards.
• Burying the corpse in a special place such as one near the house which was always in shadow at high noon.
• Fixing an iron nail at each of the four corners of the burial site.
• Placing millet or mustard seeds, or thorns or iron nails, in the grave itself and/or on the ground above the grave.
• Placing millet or mustard seeds on the road between the grave and her former home.
• Placing millet or mustard seeds, or thorns or iron nails on the thresholds of her former home. The practices involving millet or mustard seeds had to do with notion that the revenant became pre-occupied with counting these. The same practices and belief here concerning seeds and such occurs in Eastern Europe and, at least to some degree, in many other parts of the world.
• Ritual offerings and rites of exorcism performed at the site of the grave
• Sometimes the corpse was cremated. But then a ball of thread is burned with it in belief that the woman's spirit will be so occupied with unwinding the ball that she will forget the gripe she has with her relatives.