…that which is featured: Following the Wrong Footprints
an essay by Lance Marwood
“A woman in white. A forest road. One detail that tells you it’s not human. This essay follows the backward-footed monster across global folklore and asks what we’re really being warned about.”
You tell me if this story's too scary for a five-year-old.
It's past midnight and you're driving down a narrow forest road. The kind of road where the trees press in close on both sides and your headlights only reach so far into the darkness ahead. There's the occasional lamp post casting a welcome bit of light, but mostly it's just you, your car, and whatever's waiting in those black spaces between the trees.
Then you see her.
A young woman in a flowing white dress, maybe a hundred feet ahead, walking down the center of the road. She's moving directly toward your car with a strange, gliding gait. You slow down. Naturally; you don't want to hit someone, even if it's weird that anyone would be walking alone out here at this hour.
As she gets closer in your headlights, you can make out more details. Long dark hair, pale skin, the white fabric of her dress almost glowing in the artificial light. She's definitely walking toward you, looking right at you through your windshield with dark, hollow eyes.
But then your brain registers something that makes your blood run cold.
Her feet are pointing the wrong way.
Not like she's walking backward. You can clearly see she's moving toward, her body facing you, her eyes locked on yours. But her feet, somehow, impossibly, are pointing in the opposite direction from where she's walking. Toes where heels should be, heels where toes should be.
And according to the legend, that realization, that moment when you understand what you're looking at, is the last thing that goes through your mind before she kills you.
I was five when I first heard this story, and it's been living rent-free in my head ever since.
It's the story of the Churel (choo-RELL), and while I eventually used it as partial inspiration for my book "The Cherale" (turning it into something about generational curses and cosmic horror) when I first wrote the book, I had absolutely no idea how it was spelled. In fact, I wrote a whole afterword about why I kept the spelling wrong, but that's for a different story.
The Universal Nightmare
Now, you'd think the Churel would be some one-off piece of Indian folklore, right? Some local legend that got passed down through a few villages and that's it.
Wrong.
Turns out, this exact same monster design shows up literally everywhere. And I do mean everywhere.
Slovenia has wild mountain women called Krivopete (KREE-voh-peh-teh), which literally translates to "crooked feet", who roam around with their feet turned backward.
The Himalayas? Backward-footed demons.
The Philippines? Forest dwarfs whose feet point the wrong way.
West Africa? Trickster spirits with the same impossible anatomy.
Hop across the Atlantic and the Caribbean has legends like La Siguanaba (lah see-gwah-NAH-bah). The Dominican Republic has the Ciguapa (see-GWAH-pah), wild siren-women with flowing hair and, of course, feet that face the wrong direction. Drop down to the Amazon rainforest and you'll meet Curupira (koo-roo-PEE-rah), a fiery-haired forest demon whose calling card is his backward feet.
Hell, even Australia decided to get in on this. The Yowie (basically their version of Bigfoot) sometimes gets described with backward-facing feet specifically designed to mess with trackers.
We're talking about cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years. Cultures that had zero contact with each other until relatively recently. And somehow, somehow, they all independently looked at the concept of a supernatural predator and thought, "You know what would make this really terrifying? Feet that violate the fundamental laws of human anatomy."
What are the odds of that? How is this possible?
…of Verse & Vision
…that which is or may be learned or known
…these conversations we have about the process
Testament founder Eric Peterson joins MAKE // BREAK to talk Para Bellum, four decades of thrash, touring burnout, AI and creativity, and how horror movies, strange books, and stubborn personal taste still drive the riffs.
You're reading Lowkey Hellish — essays on folklore, horror, philosophy, and the strange places where ancient fears meet modern anxieties.
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