Country file · South America
Cryptids of Peru
What cryptids are in Peru? The best-known are Yacumama, La Llorona and Kharisiri.
Peru’s Amazon basin is a landscape of oxbow lagoons and flooded forest that has long inspired stories of giant serpents. Quechua-speaking and other Indigenous communities speak of the Yacumama, the “mother of water”, a colossal snake said to draw anything within a hundred paces into its jaws. Traditionally people blew a horn before bathing in a lagoon to make it reveal itself.
- 3 cryptids
- 3 recorded sightings
Cryptids reported in Peru
Yacumama
A vast Amazonian water serpent of Quechua tradition, ‘mother of water’, said to draw anything within a hundred paces into its jaws; a spirit of lagoons. Folklore
La Llorona
A weeping ghost in white who wanders rivers and canals at night crying for the children she lost – Mexico’s most famous and most widely told legend. FolkloreKharisiri
A fat-stealing bogeyman of the Andes, thought by many to be a real danger, that anthropologists read as a story of fear of outsiders and exploitation. Regional legendThe legends of Peru
These accounts are part of living Indigenous spiritual tradition as well as being popular with visitors to Iquitos and the Peruvian jungle. Naturalists suggest that the largest anacondas, giant caimans and the shifting river channels stand behind some of the descriptions.
Hotspots
- Loreto and the Peruvian Amazon
Lagoons and river mouths where Yacumama stories are told.
Sightings timeline
- 1969Peruvian ‘grease’ sale Kharisiri
Two men were reported to have sold bottles of human grease obtained by killing shepherd women.
- 1983Uchuraccay killings Kharisiri
Villagers killed eight journalists; the anthropologist Enrique Mayer suggests they may have taken them for pishtacos.
- 2009The ‘pishtacos affair’ Kharisiri
Police alleged a gang had killed up to 60 people for their fat; the case became known as the pishtacos affair.
