Old Hige
The old woman who counts until dawn
Scatter rice across a doorway, the old stories say, and she has to stop and count every grain.
In Jamaican folklore
Old Hige (also spelled Ol' Higue) is one of the best-known figures in Jamaican and wider Caribbean folklore: an old woman said to shed her wrinkled skin at night, hide it away, and go looking for sleeping households to visit — drawn especially, the old stories say, to babies. Two remedies are told again and again. Scatter rice or grains across a doorway, and she's compelled to stop and count every one, since she's said to lose count quickly — this can hold her in place until sunrise catches her outside her skin. And if anyone finds her hidden skin, rubbing it with salt is said to keep her from ever wearing it comfortably again. We've kept this gentle: the older tellings go into more detail about what she does to her victims, and we leave that out.
Sources
- Martha Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (1929)
- Frederic G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, Dictionary of Jamaican English, 2nd ed. (University of the West Indies Press, 1980)
- Olive Senior, Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (Twin Guinep, 2003)
