Interesting lady...I am just saying one thing...I am not growing old in the Carribbeans! I don't want to risk my life at 80! (Cf article: http://www.delphis.dm/indpub/archive/970702b.htm)

Hope that helps! So, it sounded French...but it was Creole! :)

The Soucouyant ( Sukuya ), also called Old Hag, is a supernatural being who has made a pact with the devil to be able to change herself into all kinds of different forms. At night she sheds her human skin and changes into a ball of fire or any kind of animal and casts spells on people to turn them into animals also, but she has to slip back into that skin before dawn breaks and the cock crows, otherwise she will not be able to get back into it.
So it may happen, that, when people suspect that an old woman neighbour of theirs is, in fact, a soucouyant, they may trick her by going to her house at night and destroying the skin she left behind by putting salt on it so that it will shrink and she will not be able to get back into it and thus die.
In Trinidad, if somebody walks around with a "hicky" on his neck, he may get remarks from his friends like :" Eh, Eh, Soucoyant suck yuh or wha ? "



( also known in Jamaica as Ol' Higue ) Trinidad, Tobago


This is our vampire. She is generally an old woman who travels by night in a ball of fire, leaving her skin behind her, to suck the blood of her sleeping victims. You can tell you've been bitten by a soucouyant if you see two little bite marks side by side, anywhere on your body in the morning. Of course it could just have been two mosquitoes biting you in tandem. And doing so again the next night. Believe what you wish. I am not sure how one becomes a soucouyant, but I do remember tales of a midnight ritual around a silk cotton tree that scared the living daylights out of me when I was little.