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Hi everyone and welcome back to Happy Hour, 欢迎你又回到酒馆.

I don't know if you have realized this, over the weekend we just had our own Ghost Festival中元.At Happy Hour we have this tradition every year around the Chinese Ghost Festival and western Halloween, we would do our dark and creepy episodes. If you got to know me through the past hundreds of episodes, you know how fascinated I am with all things dark, eerie, creepy and supernatural. One of my biggest hobbies is collecting laws and strange tales across different cultures; another would be sharing these stories with you.

Since recently we kept hearing all sorts of stories about girl power, let's focus on women. In English, there is an expression borrowed from French, which is Femme fatale, literally means fatal women, often referring to attractive yet extremely dangerous females. They are the ones that can lure you, harm you or even kill you.英文里从法语借来的这个词Femme fatale, fatal woman,相当于中文里说的蛇蝎美人或者致命女郎。

Mythical or not, the Femme fatales are extremely popular characters in stories, books, TV movies, and all art forms you can imagine. They are as intriguing as they are deadly.

So in today's special ghost month episode, let me take you on a tour around the world to meet some mythical Femme fatales in local folklore and mythology.所以这一次的酒馆鬼约特集里,就让璐璐带你去见见神秘世界里那些Femme fatale.

Let's start with a pretty well-known female creature in Greek mythology, Siren 塞壬.In Greek mythology, the Sirens were dangerous creatures who lured nearby sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck on the rocky coast of their island.在古希腊神话里塞壬是危险又魅惑的存在,她们可以用歌声诱惑水手让他们的船触礁沉没。

In the very beginning, Sirens were believed to look like a combination of women and birds. But later on, they became known as a creature that had the upper body of a woman, but instead of two legs, they had fish tails. By the middle ages, the figure of the Siren had transformed into the enduring mermaid figure.在童话滤镜下显得特别可爱的美人鱼,其实最初就是塞壬的模样。

In the classic epic Odyssey by Homer, 在荷马史诗奥德赛里, Odysseus ordered his sailors to tie him to the mast of the ship so that he wouldn't be tempted by Sirens. Even the famous mermaid in the Starbucks logo is actually a Siren.大家都熟悉的星巴克人鱼其实是塞壬.Perhaps in the hope that the brand will intrigue customers the way Sirens attracted passing sailors.

Maybe because of our fascination with the ocean, many cultures have their own versions of mermaid, 其实类似人鱼的传说自古就流传在很多文化里. The one I find rather creepy is the one in Slavic lores called Rusalki.我觉得尤为诡异的人鱼图景是斯拉夫民间传说里的Rusalki. Rusalkis are the spirits of women who have died while carrying an illegitimate child who died in or near a body of water or who committed suicide.据说他们最早是因为生下私生子而死去或者自杀的女性.They look like typical mermaids with fish tails. They live in lakes deep in the forests. But at night they emerge from the water to climb trees. They have very, very long and wet hair. They would cling to tree branches and comb their long wet hair. These girls aren't very friendly, they'll often seduce men or lure them into the water after which they would drown him.

According to some legends, just hearing their laughter can kill you. I don't know about you, but a long wet hair pouring down between the branches in the dark forest, that imagery is enough to haunt my nightmares.

Now if Sirens or Siren-like creatures are mostly known for their singing, the next spirit is more defined by her crying. This is Banshee, a Banshee is a female spirit in Irish folklore,是爱尔兰民间传说里的报丧女妖. They are able to foretell the death in a household usually by wailing, shrieking, crying right outside of their house. 如果他们夜晚出现在某户人家门口哭嚎，并唱起哀悼的歌谣, 这意味着这一家很快会有人死去。

A Banshee usually has long streaming hair and wears a gray cloak over a green dress, and her eyes are red from endless weeping. Because of their ability to predict death, they are often seen as bad omens. Yet Banshees are not the only ones that cry, travel to Latin America you will encounter La llorona, which means the weeping woman in Spanish.

说到哭泣, 在拉美传说里就有一位哭泣的女人, 西班牙语是La llorona. Instead of predicting death, La llorona is usually believed to be a ghost who roams waterfront areas mourning her child whom she drowned. Hers was a very sad story, she was originally a beautiful woman happily married with two lovely kids. But one day she saw her husband with another woman and in a fit of blind rage, she drowned both of her children and act she immediately regretted, unable to save them and consumed by her own guilt, she drowned herself as well.

And because of her sins, she was unable to move on,一时冲动溺死自己的两个孩子, 随后自杀的女人, 死后也无法解脱。And ever since that day, she spent all her time roaming the earth to look for her kids.

There are many versions of her stories, but they all include white dresses crying at night and an association with water. If you are interested, there have been a number of TV series and movies about the horrifying yet often saddening story of La llorona.

Moving away from the crying woman by the waterside, meet the next lethal character who is quite literally a fireball, also in Latin America, now we go to the Caribbean, and meet a lesser known creature called Soucouyant. The Soucouyant is a shape shifting Caribbean folklore character, shape shifting, so she can change her shape and turned into other things. She appears as a reclusive old woman by day, by night she would strip off her wrinkled skin and turned into a fireball.加勒比民间传说里的 Soucouyant,每到深夜就会褪去老妇人的皮,变成一团会飞翔的火球.

She flies across the dark sky in search of a victim. And there is simply no hiding from her because the Soucouyant can enter the home of her victim through any sized hole like cracks, crevices and key holes. She attacks her victim by sucking their blood, pretty much like a vampire. And if she draws too much blood, her victim will either die and become a Soucouyant, or perish entirely, leaving the killer to assume the victims skin, 被他吸干血的猎物,要么自己会变成 Soucouyant,要么会变成他新的皮囊.

Talking about female spirits and creatures who turn monsters and haunt the night, let's come back to Asia, Southeast Asia to be more precise, to meet a particularly disturbing character. The Manananggal in the folklores of the Philippines.

The Manananggal is a scary character, she is able to sever her upper torso and sprout huge bat-like wings to fly into the night in search of victims. 菲律宾民间传说里提到的Manananggal,她的躯体可以上下分离,并且上部会在分离的时候长出蝙蝠一样的翅膀.

And the upper part will fly around in a night to search for victims. There are somewhat similar lores in China and Japan.听起来有点像中国和日本传说里那种也可以头身分离的妖怪叫做“飞头蛮”的存在.

But what sets Manananggal apart is one gory detail, when she severs her upper torso, all of her insides, including her guts, intestines will still be attached to the upper half trailing across the night sky. She likes to pray on sleeping and pregnant women using a very long tongue to suck the blood or the hearts of fetuses. She also haunts newlyweds and couples in love. Some versions of the story says Manananggal used to be a girl who got left at the altar, the men she was supposed to marry changed his mind. So that's perhaps why she chooses to attack the newlyweds or couples in love or even pregnant women, for she might be jealous of the life she once dreamed of.

Actually folklore of similar creatures can be found in many of the Southeast Asian countries. After these two monsters creatures in the night, the last story is about a woman who can kill with her looks. For this we come back to our neighbor Japan, and a Femme fatale here is Yuki-onna.

今天最后的故事我们来说说日本的雪女Yuki-onna, which means the snow woman in Japanese. She appears on snowy nights as an elegant, beautiful woman wearing a white kimono. Her inhumanly pale or even transparent skin makes her blend into the snow landscape. She floats across the snow leaving no footprints. Some say she might be the snow or the blizzard itself. She is, at the same time, beautiful and serene, yet ruthless in killing unsuspecting victims. In many stories, she appears to travelers trapped in snowstorms and uses her icy breath to freeze them to death. But like the snow and winter weather she represents, Yuki-onna has a softer side, in one popular story she sets a young man free and she makes him promise never to speak of her.

But later in life, this man tells the story to his wife, and it turns out the wife he married is Yuki-onna herself. She is furious because he broke the promise of never to tell anyone. But again, she spares his life out of concern for their children. She tells him to take care of their kids and disappears in the snow.

That ends our little tour of some eerie and horrifying female creatures and spirits in different cultures. Unlike typical stories about male monsters and spirits, the ones about these Femme fatales are, in most cases, with more human touch and a hint of sadness. They linger, wander and take revenge due to a special reason, often a loss of something or someone important. After all, when we're telling legends and folklores, we're really talking about all the emotions in real life，aren't we?

Hope you enjoyed today's special. See you next time.