The first evidence I can find of my predilection for severed-head monsters was way back in 1984 when I wrote the first Dragon Warriors book. That was the death's-head, pictured here by definitive DW artist Jon Hodgson. The description runs:

These vile supernatural creatures have the appearance of a human head with a long horn sprouting from the forehead and black bat-like wings behind the ears. They flap swiftly about their opponents, presenting a very difficult target (hence the high DEFENCE) and attacking with stabs of their sharp horn.

However, during the hours of daylight, the wings and horn of a death's-head become invisible and intangible, rendering it unable to fly. The monster gets around this problem by acquiring a host body. It devours the head of a victim and binds itself magically to the severed neck, using its sorcery to animate the body as a zombie. The death's-head then uses the host body to move around by day, passing itself off as human. It will always be on the lookout for a new host, however, as the decomposition of the body becomes obvious after a few days. A death's-head's disguise is thus 90% perfect on the first day after taking a new host, then 80% on the next day, and so on.

If attacked before sunset, the death's-head is bound to its stolen body and is thus less dangerous. It will use its host body to fight, using any weapon to hand, but the host body will have only the fighting skill of a normal zombie instead of the death's-head's own abilities given below. The fight is resolved just as though it were a combat with a normal zombie, except that any successful blow struck against the monster has a 10% chance of hitting the head and inflicting a wound on the death's-head itself. Otherwise the blow strikes the zombie body and reduces its Health Points.

The moment the sun sinks below the horizon, the death's-head regains its wings and horn and takes to the air. It will then scour the forests and lonely hill roads seeking a new host. It has a special spell, Spellbind, to help it overcome a foe without damaging his/her body. This spell is usable once per night, and cast with a MAGICAL ATTACK of 13. It has a range of 10m and, if successful, will cause the victim to stand in place while the death's-head kills him. Although a Hold Off the Dead spell will keep the stolen body of a death's-head at bay, it will not affect the death's-head itself as these creatures are not undead.

ATTACK 16    with horn (d10, 4 points)
DEFENCE 18
Armour Factor 3
MAGICAL DEFENCE 7
EVASION 7 
Movement: 
zombie host – 6m 
flying  –  30m
Health Points 1d6 + 2
Rank-equivalent: 6th

I'm not sure that I've ever used death's-heads in a game, though the Dragon Warriors scenario "The Honey Trap", written many years later, features a village of eerie critters obviously inspired by the penanggalan or the nukekubi. The reasoning there was probably that the players would expect some kind of vampiric nastiness, given that the adventure was set in Emphidor, but I obviously didn't want it to be too obvious. Come to think of it, I should have thrown in a harmless albino peasant just to incite the PCs into doing something they'd be ashamed of later. The differences from the usual South-east Asian flying heads (the sleepwalking, the taste for honey, bouncing like balloons) would be so that the knowledgeable Orientalists among the players (such as Paul Mason, Tim Harford or Jamie) couldn't accuse me of anatopism.

As you go on, a soft low beating drifts across the barren moors. You listen to the sound and it seems to form words – slay, slay slay… 

You look up to see four dark shapes swooping down through the mist towards you. The creatures attacking you are chonchons. These disembodied heads fly using their large veined ears as wings and attack by biting with their chisel-like teeth. 

If the flying heads of the Orient belong to the province of Dream, being either nightmarish (penanggalan) or surreal (nukekubi), those of South America are the creatures of Delirium. What else are we of make of an entity that flies by flapping its ears, the only warning of its approach being the soft beat of “tue, tue, tue” on the hot evening breeze?

Chonchons made an appearance in The Castle of Lost Souls (illustrated by Leo Hartas) and I could have sworn I originally came across them in the West Indian horror stories of the Reverend Henry S Whitehead. I even had an explanation of their origins, in a story that an African slave might tell his children of seeing an elephant’s head peering over the treetops in the dusk. The snag is, I can’t find anything about chonchons in Whitehead’s work now, nor any evidence that they originated outside the New World. And it was such a beautiful theory, too.

By one account, chonchons are sorcerers who treat their neck with a magic ointment so as to be able to detach their heads. Alternatively, they could be a sort of Chilean vampire, arising from the graves of suicides and flitting off in search of blood. In classical myth, vampires frequently took the form of owls (striges) to screech out omens of death, and most versions of the chonchon have them feathered and/or taloned, so possibly there’s a connection there.

Anyway, as I’ve said before, the beauty of folklore is precisely that it is an incoherent jumble of sources. You want taxonomy, go to a zoo. Fantasy is far stranger than that.

The floating head goblin encountered throughout South-east Asia occurs in a much more Shinto-friendly sanitized form in Japanese folklore. No pus-dripping entrails here, no blood and childbirth, just an eerie flying head as described by Lafcadio Hearn in Kwaidan:

Gently unbarring the door, Kwairyo made his way to the garden, and proceeded with all possible caution to the grove beyond it. He heard voices talking in the grove; and he went in the direction of the voices, stealing from shadow to shadow, until he reached a good hiding-place. Then, from behind a trunk, he caught sight of the heads—all five of them—flitting about, and chatting as they flitted. They were eating worms and insects which they found on the ground or among the trees. 

Presently the head of the chieftain stopped eating and said, "Ah, that travelling priest who came tonight—how fat all his body is! When we shall have eaten him, our bellies will be well filled. I was foolish to talk to him as I did; it only set him to reciting the sutras on behalf of my soul. To go near him while he is reciting would be difficult, and we cannot touch him so long as he is praying. But as it is now nearly morning, perhaps he has gone to sleep. One of you go to the house and see what the fellow is doing."

Another head—the head of a young woman—immediately rose up and flitted to the house, lightly as a bat. After a few minutes it came back, and cried out huskily, in a tone of great alarm, "That travelling priest is not in the house. He is gone! But that is not the worst of the matter. He has taken the body of our chieftain; and I do not know where he has put it." 

At this announcement the head of the chieftain—distinctly visible in the moonlight—assumed a frightful aspect: its eyes opened monstrously; its hair stood up bristling; and its teeth gnashed. Then a cry burst from its lips; and, weeping tears of rage, it exclaimed, "Since my body has been moved, to rejoin it is not possible. Then I must die! And all through the work of that priest. Before I die I will get at that priest! I will tear him! I will devour him! And there he is behind that tree!—hiding behind that tree! See him—the fat coward!"

In the same moment the head of the chieftain, followed by the other four heads, sprang at Kwairyo. But the strong priest had already armed himself by plucking up a branch, and with that branch he struck the heads as they came, knocking them from him with tremendous blows. Four of them fled away. But the head of the chieftain, though battered again and again, desperately continued to bound at the priest, and at last caught him by the left sleeve of his robe. Kwairyo, however, as quickly gripped the head by its topknot, and repeatedly struck it. It did not release its hold; but it uttered a long moan, and thereafter ceased to struggle. It was dead. But its teeth still held the sleeve; and, for all his great strength, Kwairyo could not force open the jaws.

With the head still hanging to his sleeve he went back to the house, and there caught sight of the other four Rokuro-Kubi squatting together, with their bruised and bleeding heads reunited to their bodies. But when they perceived him at the back door all screamed, "The priest! the priest!" and fled through the other doorway out into the woods.


Notice that Hearn calls it a rokuro-kubi, rokuro being the Japanese word for a potter's wheel and kubi meaning neck. Technically (if folktales can ever be subject to technical analysis) the word rokuro-kubi ought to describe another Japanese goblin that sends out its head by night on the end of a long stretching neck, like Mister Fantastic, and the proper term for one of these things with a fully detachable head is nuke-kubi. I'm not sure that a Japanese storyteller would bother with the distinction, though. Hearn certainly didn't.

Less viscerally terrifying than the penanggalan this may certainly be, but I prefer it. Like a lot of Japanese folklore it's more dreamlike, less shlock-horrific and so far creepier. Hence it was the nuke-kubi that I used in Lords of the Rising Sun - as brilliantly illustrated here by Russ.

Most gruesome of the disembodied heads of folklore is the spirit known variously throughout South-east Asia as the penanggalan (Malaysia), the leyak (Bali), the krasue (Thailand), the kasu (Laos) and the ap (Cambodia) - at least, in the unlikely eventuality that Wiki is to be believed. John D Gimlette, in Malay Poisons and Charm Cures, characterizes it as a disease-inducing spirit - "a horrible, partially disembowelled wraith from the lying-in room who comes to torment little children" - apparently taking his cue from Sir Hugh Clifford's description in his book In Court and Kampong:

"I had told them of the Pĕnangal, that horrible wraith of a woman who has died in child-birth, and who comes to torment small children, in the guise of a fearful face and bust, with yards of bloody trailing entrails flying in her wake; of that weird little white animal the Mati-ânak, that makes beast noises round the graves of children; and of the familiar spirits that men raise up from the corpses of babes who have never seen the light, the tips of whose tongues they bite off and swallow, after the child has been brought back to life by magic agencies."

The creature seems to be a sort of Oriental vampire, which during the day presents itself as a midwife but by night detaches its head from its body and flies around with its entrails dangling below it. In other (probably earlier) variants it makes no claim to humanity, but instead is a kind of harpy that, attracted by the sounds of a woman in labour, perches on the roof and makes a cacophonous screeching. The liquid that seems from its entrails can cause the newborn child to sicken and die. Or maybe it drinks the baby's or mother's blood. That's the wonderful thing about folklore; it's not a Monster Manual.

My HeroQuest book The Screaming Spectre was supposed to be titled The Singing Skull, except a suit at Hasbro thought that singing wasn't scary enough and skulls were too scary. Stolen heads still featured in the story, though, and as I chose South-east Asian folklore as inspiration for the gamebook section of the book, the penangga-lan inevitably made an appearance:

While going over a lot of my old books in preparation for next year's gamebook initiative, I've been noticing what a lot of creepy disembodied heads I've used as monsters over the years. Funny, I never thought of it as a particular obsession of mine, but apparently it's been there as a hangnail in my subconscious all this time. This one is from Necklace of Skulls and is based on a real (and magnificently nightmarish) creature of Mesoamerican folklore, as described in this excerpt from Tobacco Use by Native North Americans: Sacred Smoke and Silent Killer, by Joseph C Winter:

'Tobacco acts to seal off the demon's transformation from its human form. For example, the Charcoal Cruncher might possess a woman who then detaches her head so that it can roam the forest at night, eating charcoal. The demon is supposedly trapped by putting tobacco, garlic, and salt (all "civilized" creations of mankind) on her severed head. Another local demon, the Split-faced Man, can be killed only when he is thoroughly saturated three times with tobacco, salt, and other ingredients.'

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say this monster has the stamp of a debased deity about it, and therefore probably arose after the conquest of Mexico by the Spanish. If so, it wasn't a creature that a young warrior of the classic Maya period would fear to meet at night. But who knows? Here's how the thing is introduced in Necklace of Skulls:

'Nightcrawlers are disembodied heads that live in calabash trees and descend to glide through the air in the dead of night,' the fenman tells you. 'They find their way into houses through the roof, and can sometimes be heard crunching the charcoal beside the hearth. I myself once woke after a night of disturbing dreams to find my stock of firewood had mysteriously vanished.'

'These nightcrawlers are mischievous creatures, then,' you reply. 

He gives a snort of grim laughter. 'I prefer to think of them as steeped in evil, in view of the fact that they also smother babies.'

'I shall be sure to keep a weather eye out for flying heads,' you assure him. 

'Oh, they are more cunning than that! A night-crawler will sometimes latch onto a human neck, sinking tendrils into the host in the manner of a strangler fig taking root in another tree. In that guise, they may use trickery and guile to entice you off the road into the swamps.'

'Presumably the presence of two heads on a body is a sure giveaway, though?'

He shrugs as though this had never occurred to him. 'Salt is the only remedy,' he maintains. 'Night-crawlers are repelled by salt. Farewell to you, then.' He strolls off towards his house and you are left to mull over his advice as you continue your journey on foot.