Jumbies and “duppy” humanoid encounters in the English Caribbean

Record summary

Jumbie and duppy traditions encompass spirits, dangerous dead people, and bush beings that may appear in human or humanoid form. Recent cultural studies, oral-history projects, local journalism, and social-media narratives preserve alleged encounters, but the terms are broad rather than names for one cryptid species. This lead is useful for comparing Caribbean supernatural testimony with Latin American wild-person reports and for examining African, Indigenous, and colonial transmission. The principal uncertainty is lexical: the same word can denote different beings in different islands and communities.