Kharisiri

Legends of the kharisiri date back to the time of the conquistadors. Tales describe white faced men stalking the Peruvian Highlands and attacking people and murdering them. Many attacks refer to the draining of life from the victim, sometimes describing this as removing the fat from the bodies.
Jackson Elias theorizes superstitious fears of these creatures is being used by a death cult to cover up ritual sacrafices. His research obtained the most information from a yatiri (an Aymara wise woman) named Nayra.
Nayra's information: The locals tell a story of an ancient and evil god who dwells in the mountains. It crawled out of the earth of fell from the sky, no one knows for sure. It brought hunger with it, devouring all it touched. The evil god kept fed by luring good people into the mountains with empty promiese and false beliefs they could vanquish the immortal. The trickster hero Ekeko decided not to fight. Instead, he told the evil god where the most nutritious food could be found underground, showing it tubers and grubs. Ekeko convinced the god from the sky, tempted by the food, to crawl into an old armadillo burrow. He then placed stones over the burrow, trapping the god below. Ekeko told the people that this was now a sacred site and had them build a temple over it, binding it in place with “spells worked in gold.” The god from the sky still lives underneath the temple to this day, and those who know of it are wise enough to avoid its tomb. Consequently, few if any people from Puno go anywhere near the pyramid, and it has largely become a forgotten site.
The archetypal kharisiri, according to Nayra, is a tall white man wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He carries a long knife that he uses to butcher people and steal their body fat. Alternatively, he may drug people and extract their fat using magic or strange tools, leaving them to die slow, lingering deaths. The stories Nayra has heard first-hand tell of a kharisiri who sucks the fat out with his mouth, like some kind of human leech.

Civilization and Culture

History

Investigators fought off creatures on a floating island on Lake Titicaca that resembled these beings, though the bodies appeared to be normal humans when killed and examined.
The creatures were encountered a second time at the Peruvian Pyramid. Though when the repairs in the tunnels were completed these creatures all crumbled into dust.

See also machukuna and suq’a.

Scientific Name

The word kharisiri comes from the term for carving something up with a knife.

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