Yara-ma-yha-who — Cryptid Encyclopedia

Do not rest under the fig tree. Aboriginal Australian parents have passed this warning to their children for thousands of years, and the reason crouches in the canopy above — small, red, and waiting with infinite patience.

The Yara-ma-yha-who stands about three to four feet tall, with bright red skin, an enormous head dominated by a wide toothless mouth, and the most distinctive feature of any cryptid in the Southern Hemisphere: octopus-like suckers on the tips of its fingers and toes. It lives in the tops of fig trees, motionless as a branch, watching the ground below with oversized eyes.

When an unsuspecting person rests beneath the tree — a traveler seeking shade, a child playing in the bush — the Yara-ma-yha-who drops. It latches onto its victim with those suckered fingers and toes and drains blood through them, like a terrestrial octopus feeding on a slow heartbeat. The victim weakens but does not die. Not yet.

What happens next is unlike any other vampiric creature in world mythology. The Yara-ma-yha-who opens its enormous, toothless mouth impossibly wide and swallows the victim whole. Then it takes a nap. When it wakes, it drinks water from a nearby stream, dances around the sleeping body in its belly, and regurgitates the victim — alive, but slightly shorter and slightly redder than before.

This cycle can repeat. Each time the Yara-ma-yha-who swallows and regurgitates its victim, the person becomes shorter, redder, and less human. Eventually, after enough cycles, the victim transforms completely into a Yara-ma-yha-who — another small, red creature waiting in the fig trees for the next person to rest below.

The red skin, the sucker-fingers, and the enormous gaping mouth make the Yara-ma-yha-who one of the most visually distinctive creatures in all of world folklore.

"Do not sleep under the fig tree. The red one waits above." — Aboriginal Australian warning.