Mòkìlà/Mòkèlàkèlà

The Mòkìlà is a strange creature that comes from the Baka people of Cameroon. They are a sort of therianthropic creature being a person capable of turning into an elephant. When in their animal form, they are indistinguishable from normal elephants to the untrained eye. Their face and body odor however is often still distinctly human. They could also be recognized by the fact they have shallower footprints than regular elephants, and that they aren’t with other elephants. Killing a Mòkìlà elephant is considered murder since they are people. Some think when a Mòkìlà dies, it leaves behind a single human corpse. Some however believed that when a Mòkìlà dies it leaves two corpses, one human and one elephant. With this interpretation, the human corpse simply flies out of the elephant corpse, and sometimes runs to tell others where it died and where to find its body. People killed by Mòkìlà have wounds similar to knife wounds, and they only kill hunters who had wrongly killed Mòkìlà before. Women and children would sometimes be taken from villages and taught the secrets of Mòkìlà shapeshifting and would then remain willingly.

Citations:

Natural Enemies: People-Wildlife Conflicts in Anthropological Perspective. N.p., Taylor & Francis, 2013.