In the folklore of Kerala, pangolins — called Eenampechi in Malayalam — were thought by some to be the spirits of aborted human fetuses, most likely because of the way they curl up when threatened.

These scaly nocturnal mammals rest in burrows during daylight, but emerge at night to feed on ants and termites. They are sometimes encountered in paddy fields. They are now an endangered species — threatened by habitat loss, hunted for use in Chinese medicine, and killed by superstitious people who think they are evil spirits.

In folk stories, the Eenampechi is a sort of bogeyman who carries off children in the night.

The Eaka are a class of ghostly beings in the folklore of the Onge tribe of Little Andaman Island.

The Onge are a highly endangered tribe. In the 2011 census, their population numbered just 101 individuals. Their society, culture, and language have been devastated by colonization and settlement of the islands. As a result, anthropological understanding of their traditional mythology and folklore is limited. What follows is based primarily on interviews conducted by the anthropologist Pranab Kumar Ganguly between 1953 and 1957.

In Onge mythology, there are thirteen planes of existence, six that lie above our world and six that lie below. The six higher planes have no ocean, only endless land. Each of the six lower planes consists of an island about the same size as Little Andaman, surrounded by an ocean. Even lower, beneath them all, is Kwatannange, the primordial ocean, which is full of turtles.

This entry covers the beings who live in the six planes of existence that lie below Little Andaman Island. The residents of the higher planes are discussed in the separate entry on the Onkoboykwe.

The plane directly beneath Little Andaman is inhabited by the Eaka. Like the Onge, they are black-skinned, but have large distended bellies and bald heads. Food is plentiful in their world. They eat fruits, tubers, edible roots, and pork, in addition to meat caught from the sea that surrounds their island: fish, turtles, and dugongs.

The Eaka sometimes come to the human plane and kidnap Onge under cover of darkness. When they catch a person, they bring him down below and turn him into another Eaka.

The Eaka themselves are the ghosts of humans — at least, some of them are.