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Legends of The Evil Woman/Tigress

Some years ago there was a Hollywood film called The Ghost and the Darkness, featuring African beliefs about shape-shifting lions, evil predators either in human or animal form. Curiously enough, there are many Thai legends (and possibly others from neighboring countries in the region) concerning were-tigeresses preying for the most part on human males.

Typically, in one of these legends, a man is obliged to spend the night in a lonely and dense forest. He's woken in the small hours by an overpoweringly-strong odour of foulness, and the sound of a woman's hurried footsteps and cries for help. In the dying light of his fire he sees the woman - outstandingly beautiful and in flight from some danger that somehow doesn't make itself evident. He comforts, calms the woman, and gratefully, eagerly, she turns to him, embraces him...Well, you get the picture. But when morning dawns, and his friends come searching for him, they find only bones, scraps of clothing beside the place where he spent the night. That and the pug-marks of a gigantic tigress.

Such a legend isn't surprising in a country where tigers of great ferocity abounded right down to recent times. A day's ox-cart journey out of Chiang Mai, travellers would stop for the night with every possible precaution - fires, circled ox-carts, armed watchmen. But so numerous were the tigers, and so avid for what the caravan offered, that despite these measures, it was not infrequently that a caravan passing a particularly dangerous piece of forest would continue in the morning with one less of the dogs, calves, children and even draught animals than they'd had the day before. And a man alone in the forest at night faced the same great danger.

Under these circumstances, a little supernatural embroidery is to be expected - tigresses that by first tasting human flesh and then developing a taste for it, acquired the power to take human forms themselves.