Woman

In Thai folklore, the Krasue is a malevolent spirit that appears as a woman's disembodied floating head trailing its own internal organs beneath it, hunting at night for blood, raw flesh, and carrion.

Stemming from Latin American folklore, La Llorona appears as a spectral woman in white, crying for her lost children.

In her monstrous form, Lamia is typically described as part-serpent, sometimes with a woman's head and torso set atop a serpentine lower body, an image that would later feed into related figures such as the empousa and the folkloric use of "lamia" for a snake-woman more broadly.

These mystical beings are often described as having the upper body of a beautiful woman, while their lower half resembles that of a fish or duck, drawing parallels to mermaids or sirens from other cultures.

In Mesopotamian myths, Lilitu is a female demon, resembling a seductive woman.

She is most commonly pictured as a mermaid, with a woman's upper body and a fish's tail, or in some tellings as a snake-charmer, often shown holding or entwined with large serpents; her long, flowing hair and light or fair complexion are recurrent details in visual depictions, particularly in the widely circulated chromolithograph imagery that spread across West Africa from the late 19th and early 20th centuries onward.

Archaic Greek art shows her with a broad grinning face, tusks, a lolling tongue, and a round staring visage meant to ward off evil, a type known as the Gorgoneion; later Classical and Hellenistic art, and especially Ovid, softens her into a beautiful woman with serpentine hair, emphasizing tragedy over grotesquerie.

In French and broader medieval European folklore, Melusine is a water spirit who is a woman above the waist and a serpent (or serpent-and-fish) below, bound to a marriage vow that forbids her husband from seeing her true form on a fixed day.

Her name is associated with clouds, and later interpreters connect her to a broader pattern in Greek myth of cloud-formed women, most famously the cloud-phantom created by Zeus in the story of Ixion, though sources do not always draw a direct line between that cloud-woman and Athamas's wife Nephele beyond the shared name and association with cloud and mist.

In Malay and Indonesian folklore, the Pontianak is the vengeful ghost of a woman who died in pregnancy or childbirth.

In Slavic folklore, the Rusalka is the restless spirit of a drowned woman who haunts rivers and lakes.

Salt Woman is a Pueblo deity identified with salt deposits, above all Zuni Salt Lake, whose migration narrative explains the site and the respect owed to it.

Sedna is most often described as a woman transformed into a being of the deep, her lower body merging into that of a great fish or sea mammal, and her long hair, which she cannot comb herself, drifting loose in the currents around her.

In Russian folklore, the Sirin is a bird-woman whose ravishingly beautiful song lures travelers into forgetting the world and following her to their death, the dark counterpart to the blissful Alkonost in the classic paired bird-maiden motif.

By day, the Soucouyant appears as an ordinary old woman, often living on the outskirts of a community.

She is typically described as a beautiful young woman with long, flowing hair, often blonde or wearing a white gown, who dwells in forests, mountains, clouds, or near lakes, springs, and rivers.

Walutahanga is a Solomon Islands serpent-woman with eight heads whose repeated survival of dismemberment culminates in a tidal punishment of those who wronged her, and a gift of water and coconuts to those spared.

In Yucatec Maya folklore, Xtabay is a seductive demon spirit who appears as a beautiful woman combing her long hair beneath a ceiba tree at night, luring men to their death.

In Japanese folklore, Yuki-onna, the "snow woman," is a spirit of winter storms who appears as a beautiful, unearthly pale woman and freezes travelers to death in the snow.