My friend Bill has a way of sending emails and texts completely out of nowhere. His most recent dispatch arrived with the subject line “Sasquatch of Sorts in Laos,” and it did not disappoint.
Bill has spent quite a bit of time doing fieldwork in Laos and apparently somewhere wedged in his notes from the late 1990s is this gem: a set of instructions from local Lao villagers on how to attract a Phi Kong Koi; a small, semi-ape forest creature said to roam the jungles of Laos and Thailand.
“To attract a PKK one should roast crabs in the campfire coals, then place the cooked crabs on the stones (very specific on this) around the fire. PKK will be attracted by the smell. You can know their presence by the fact that a very strong wind comes up, but the campfire smoke continues to rise straight up, unbent by the wind.”
I’m going to let that image sit with you for a second.
So what exactly is the Phi Kong Koi? Depending on which account you read, it’s described variously as about four feet tall with long reddish hair, childlike or apelike in appearance, with a bloated belly, glowing red eyes, and… ummm… feet that point backwards. The backward feet detail means that if you’re trying to track one through the jungle, the footprints lead you in the exact opposite direction from where it actually went.
Its name breaks down simply enough: “Phi” means ghost or spirit in Lao and Thai, and the creature is known across both Laos and northeast Thailand, lurking in the deep jungle where the canopy is so thick that daylight feels like night. Oh, and per some accounts it has one leg, hops to move, and announces its presence by calling out “Koi…koi…koi…” into the darkness. Our buddy PKK will then will feast on your blood while you sleep, sucking you dry through your toes until death. So essentially a vampire with a foot fetish. Yikes.
Now look, I’ve always had a soft spot for the idea of Bigfoot. I’ve been fascinated by cryptids my whole life. I want to believe there’s something large and mysterious out there in the forests of the Pacific Northwest or the hills of North Georgia. But the Phi Kong Koi is a different proposition entirely. I would very much like to not hear “koi…koi…koi…” drifting out of a pitch black Laotian jungle at 2 AM while I’m trying to sleep on the ground. Hard pass. Bigfoot, I’ll seek you out. Phi Kong Koi, I’ll be leaving the crabs off the rocks and keeping my feet crossed, thanks.
So, do you believe in the Phi Kong Koi, Bigfoot, or any other local cryptid lurking in the folklore of your neck of the woods? Drop it in the comments, I’d genuinely love to know what’s supposedly playing hide & seek in your backyard. And Bill, thank you as always for the field notes.