In Steiger's entry "Indochina's Vicious Swamp Demons," he retells Bodin's story of a Colonel Marchand supposedly sent in 1923 to a French military colony. It isn't clear which part of Indochina, but he brought his daughter Yvonne Marchand with him.
A native thief, faced between the choice of turning himself in to the authorities or crossing a haunted swamp, chose to surrender to the French.
Colonel Marchand, amused by the superstition, ordered the thief cast into the middle of the swamp. The thief begged for lenience and threw himself at the feet of Yvonne Marchand, but to no avail. He was marched into the swamp at bayonet point.
However, later that evening, he came back to the French camp and carried off the colonel's daughter to the swamp.
A search party was organized and they found the thief bleeding to death, covered in severe bites and scratches, his jugular torn open. With his dying breath, the thief claimed Yvonne did this horrible thing to him.
Pressing further into the swamp, the men found Yvonne, "naked except for a strip of cloth about her thighs. The searchlights caught the streaks of blood on her body, but her father was more horrified by the fiendish grin that parted her lips. Yvonne stood there before them, her teeth flashing as if she were some wild thing waiting for prey to fall within reach of her claws and fangs. To the astonishment of the entire search party, the girl rushed the nearest soldier, ready to gouge and bite."
They subdue her, but when Yvonne comes to her senses, she describes her capture. When they stopped in the swamp, hideous, fanged demonic faces bobbed all around the pair.
She described the strange sensations that came over her that drove her to kill the thief, remarking "I gloried in tearing away his flesh, in hearing him scream, in seeing him drop to the ground and crawl away. Then the faces summoned me on into the swamp. I tore off my clothes and began to bite myself. The faces laughed at me, and I laughed too."
Bodin's account is difficult to corroborate.
I haven't found any resources highlighting the service of a Colonel Marchand being stationed in Indochina around this time, but that does not wholly rule out the possibility. Proper, serious research of Southeast Asian metaphysics and the supernatural was not extensive among Europeans at the time, so we can only speculate what exactly they had encountered.
The floating fanged faces could have been any number of phi, including krasue, but there may be other possibilities. What do you think?
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