The Popobawa: The Bat-Winged Terror That Feeds on Disbelief
This chronicle has watched legends be born — the chupacabra under television lights , Madam Koi Koi in the boarding-school dark — but the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania, gave the world a monster with a stranger property than any of them: a terror that comes in waves , sweeping the islands in documented panics — 1965, the 1970s, and above all 1995, when whole villages of Pemba stopped sleeping indoors and camped in their yards by lamplight for weeks — and that possesses, alone among the world's night-things, a demand : it wants to be believed in , and punishes the skeptic worst of all. The popobawa — the name is Swahili, popo "bat" and bawa "wing," the "bat-wing" — is described, when it is described, as a shadow with membranous wings and a single Cyclops eye, sometimes a smell of sulfur, more often no shape at all: an arriving pressure in the dark room, a weight on the sleeper, the door that was bolted, at dawn, standing q...