What is a ghoul?
In this version, a ghoul is a flesh-eating demon that attacks travellers or feeds on corpses.
Source status
This profile treats a public-domain literary retelling as evidence for its own portrayal, not for all Arabic folklore. “Demon” follows the selected English wording; no original-language terminology or earliest attestation is established here.
- record type
- creature
- tradition
- Arabian Nights — Andrew Lang’s English literary retelling
- source scope
- The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, edited by Andrew Lang (1898), “The Story of Sidi-Nouman,” especially p. 335.
Source account
Sidi-Nouman becomes suspicious because his wife Amina eats only a few grains of rice and crumbs of bread at their meals. One moonlit night he follows her to a nearby cemetery and hides beside its wall. There he sees her with a female ghoul. The two uncover a person buried that day, sit at the grave to eat, and return the remains to the earth when they finish.
They converse calmly over the meal, but Sidi-Nouman is too far away to hear their words. The scene therefore establishes that the ghoul speaks with Amina, without revealing what they discuss or how their association began. Neither notices the hidden observer. He leaves without confronting them and pretends to be asleep when his wife returns.
The encounter explains Amina’s apparent lack of appetite at home and leads to the next conflict. At dinner, Sidi-Nouman hints that he knows she has eaten human remains. Amina responds by turning him into a dog. The ghoul’s role in this sequence is as her companion at the grave; the subsequent spell belongs to Amina.
Description and limitations
Sidi-Nouman describes the ghoul as female and hideous, but gives no precise account of her size, limbs, face or clothing. The passage does not explain her origin, name her, or describe a way to defeat her. Amina’s transformation of her husband into a dog is her own magic; sharing a meal with the ghoul does not establish that the ghoul has the same ability.
Source realm
Sidi-Nouman’s explanation distinguishes two forms of feeding: ghouls ambush living travellers and eat corpses when no living prey comes their way. He places their lairs in deserted buildings and their search for the dead in cemeteries. The cemetery meal is the behaviour he actually witnesses; the attacks on travellers belong to his general description. These locations are settings within the tale, not an independently mapped supernatural realm.