I’m the biggest scaredy cat I know—and that includes my 10-year-old niece. I don’t watch horror movies. I don’t tell ghost stories. And I’m definitely not into creepy podcasts. That’s because by the age of 10, I watched The Amityville Horror, Cujo, Buried Alive, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre at big sleepovers hosted by my older cousins. But even more haunting than a killer dog or chainsaw-wielding psycho were the stories they’d tell about supernatural creatures from “back home.”

Most terrifying was the churail, a witch-like creature that at first glance was seemingly benign: an elderly, hunched over woman often with no real marker of danger other than her backward feet. The churail’s footprints on a lonely, dusty road is exactly what would lead you to her, not away from her.

Like most Pakistani folklore, stories about churails were passed down via oral tradition, but as someone who spent the majority of her life in Canada, I only heard about half-baked encounters—my aunt telling me a childhood tale about a woman with backward feet who suddenly appeared laughing maniacally in an empty field, or the third-hand story about a distant uncle who swore he saw a witch swoop down from a tree and sit beside him as he used an open-air squatting toilet, leaving him running bare-ass while trying to pull up his pajamas.

The current Western obsession with witches, covens, and black cats inspired me to get over my childhood fear and explore the provenance of brown witches. I discovered the lore behind who became a churail was not only fascinating, it is also pretty feminist.

It turns out that churails are described as women who died during pregnancy or childbirth or at the hands of mistreatment by their husbands or in-laws. They haunt those who abused them, or target young men at random, luring them high into mountains or deep into the forest, seducing them while entrapping their youth and sending them back down as old, weakened men.

The discovery of churails made me feel less alienated from a country I don’t live in, but feel deeply a part of

This discovery shook me: not only were churails badass af, the target of their ire was typically men. Most interestingly, these origin stories seemed to serve the function of protecting women. And while there’s no doubt a vitriolic strain of misogyny that exists in South Asia, my discovery of this folklore was part of a growing body of evidence of an ancient, homegrown feminism, one that made me feel less alienated from a country I don’t live in, but feel deeply a part of.