The albasty (Karakalpak albaslı) is the most widely feared of the malign spirit-beings of Karakalpak and neighbouring Khorezmian folk belief, part of the pre-Islamic demonological substratum that survived beneath Islam across the southern Aral region. Imagined as a female being, long-haired and heavy-breasted and often 'yellow', she is above all the demon of the birth-chamber: she attacks women in labour and their infants, and in the belief is said to seize the mother's liver or lung, so that a baqsı (shaman) must be summoned to drive her out. In her nocturnal aspect she presses upon the chests of sleepers, causing the suffocating dread of nightmare. She belongs to the working religion of the steppe and oasis rather than to the heroic epics, a reminder of the animist and shamanic layer that the Karakalpaks carried into the Islamic era.