I've heard of this legend, and I was hoping somebody would be able to write it up well.
I have never heard of this legend. It's uh, well. The addendum creeped me the hell out, so I guess I'm upvoting.
One wonders why that needed an incident to be added to the regulations, though.
It's called a penanggalan, a Malaysian vampire of sorts. I first encountered it in the AD&D Fiend Folio, where they called it a vargouille, and later looked up the origin to see how badly they'd mangled it (to their credit, they only missed the bit about the vinegar, and the fact that the penanggalan isn't undead as such).
The Fiend Folio printed in 1981 calls it a 'pĕnanggalan', and devotes a paragraph to the vinegar issue. It is a creepy monster, and not as widely known as others, but it is still a straightforward mythological creature. This entry follows the Wikipedia entry much more closely than the D&D version, being a living woman, a midwife, and having a diet of placental material. Downvoted for lack of a novel twist to the legend.
It was posted in the context of a contest http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-376556 in which entrants were supposed to be based on folklore. I chose to do a straightforward version of this particular folk tale.
Oh, I guess that is different. I will remove my downvote because it was written pretty well. I had a draft that got shot down for being a recognizable creature of myth (not a vampire or werewolf) so I was judging it on that and it being in a published D&D book.
This reminds me a little of SCP-742, but not a bunch. I've never heard of this legend, but frankly it's creepy as fuck.
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Man, I love this particular myth, so I was hoping to love this. But… it's only "alright". It's a pretty much completely straight port of the myth, well-written, but uninteresting. Good writing, but this really needs more. No vote for now, but I'll be checking back to see if it improves enough for an upvote.
I think he's talking about the embryo/fetus distinction. Wikipedia sez: "In humans, it is called an embryo until about eight weeks after fertilization (i.e. ten weeks Last Menstrual Period or LMP), and from then it is instead called a fetus."
I think this needs something more. I mean, it's got the weird image of the disembodied head flying around dangling organs, and then the thing about the pregnant women, but nothing else really. Like, it's unnerving a bit, but I think it's got some real creep potential here that isn't being tapped into.
My thinking was to keep it short and, er, sweet, and to let the creep from the actual legend speak for itself. As Moose correctly points out, it's a relatively straight translation of the legend into SCP form. I'd prefer to leave the rest of the details, including the retreival, to the imagination.
The one exception to this is that it's implicit that this woman apparently doesn't consciously know that there's anything unusual about her. And yet she trained as an obstetrics nurse…
Got Picture for this SCP
http://lagodaxnian.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/leak.jpg
I think its from an old movie or something. Some edit might be required
It's from an Indonesian movie from the early eighties called Mystics in Bali.
The version I've seen you link in… looks like three different places so far on the wiki was stolen from a Cracked.com article.
and like I said in the other place, the photo is poor quality—which reduces suspension of disbelief (since the thing is in containment and therefore available to be photographed), so I don't want to use it. I knew about this photo when I created the article as part of the Bright challenge.
oh gog how did I miss that we contained a frikkin' penanggalan
I live in the Southeast Asia region. Tonight, I happened to be taking a run on a path that strayed near a jungle. At one point during the run, a fucking twig or something fell from the tree right behind me. Immediately, this SCP flashed into my head and so I jumped like three feet and ran like, like something that runs goddam fast I don't know. Once I reached the relative safety of a bus stop, I collapsed onto a bench and resolved to upvote this SCP immediately when I got home, and also to hate you forever.