“A grey, slimy thing that oozes through a crack in the wall to grin at the children who have been bad.”
On bad nights in old Malta, something grey went through the streets with its nose up. The Kaw Kaw — also Gawgaw — is a slimy, viscous creature that roamed the towns after dark and could smell out naughty boys. Walls did not stop it: using its formless body, it would squeeze into homes through cracks and open spaces, arriving at last at the bedside of the child whose misdeeds had summoned it.
What it did there was almost worse than violence: it grinned. The Kaw Kaw met its victims with a wide, toothless smile and proceeded to frighten and torment them — a punishment of pure dread, calibrated to a child's imagination. In some tellings it is instead a giant that crossed the island of Malta in two steps; in others it is a cursed man, condemned to the slime for the accident of his birthday.
The Legend
The standard account is sensory and simple: grey skin, slime, a body that pours itself through the gap under a door or the crack in a wall, and the toothless grin waiting at the end. It hunted by smell, and what it smelled was misbehaviour — the Kaw Kaw could scent out naughty children in their beds, which made every crack in a Maltese bedroom wall a keyhole for something patient and grey.
The creature keeps a season. Tradition ties the Gawgaw to the darkest stretch of the year: in one strand of the lore it is a human being unlucky enough to be born on the night of 24 December, cursed by God for sharing a birthday with so holy a time, and doomed to take monstrous form in the hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.
The Record
The Kaw Kaw is firmly lodged in the documented folklore of the islands. The standard survey describes a grey and slimy creature who roamed the streets at night and could smell out naughty boys, and in 2014 Stephan D. Mifsud's The Maltese Bestiary — an illustrated encyclopedia of Maltese monsters drawn from folktales — gave the creature a detailed entry among the mythical fauna of Malta.
The curse-lore is recorded in unusual detail. For the Gawgaw's curse to be lifted, the afflicted man must spend Christmas Eve night counting all the holes of a wheat sieve, and keep counting until the first Paternoster is sung on Christmas Day — an impossible piece of bookkeeping that renews the curse each year. Maltese cultural media still retell the figure's obscure origins and influences.
The Lore
The Kaw Kaw did not work alone. Its female counterpart, l-Imlejka, was placated with flowers left on the windowsill at New Year — a small domestic ritual buying peace from the season's monsters. And the older giant tradition, in which a colossal Kaw Kaw stepped across Malta in two strides, hints that the name once covered something larger and stranger before it shrank to fit through cracks.
Folklorists read the Kaw Kaw as a conduct-enforcer: one of the creatures of Maltese tradition whose role was to police the strict codes of the islands' pre-industrial society, punishing the children — and unsettling the parents — who broke them. Its Christmas association gives it a distinctive niche: where other cultures send a demon with a switch, Malta sent a grinning, boneless smell-hound in the season of goodwill.
Field Notes
- ✦ Said to hunt the guilty especially in the dark weeks between Christmas and early February.
- ✦ Its female counterpart, l-Imlejka, was placated with flowers on the windowsill at New Year.
- ✦ A classic 'scare the children' bogey of old Malta, sniffing out misbehaviour by smell.
- ✦ One tradition makes it a man cursed for being born on the night of 24 December.
- ✦ The curse lifts only by counting every hole of a wheat sieve before Christmas morning's first Paternoster.
Case File
- Classification
- Slime bogey
- Category
- Other
- Territory
- Across the Maltese islands
- First Sighted
- Traditional Maltese folklore
- Habitat
- Night streets, slipping into homes through cracks
- Reported Size
- Variable, snail-like or giant
- Also Known As
- Gawgaw · Il-Gawgaw