Phung (Phûng) is among the most dreaded malevolent spirits of traditional Mizo belief, lexicalised by Lorrain as 'a spirit, a bogey, a spook, an ogress, a genie, a goblin'. She is imagined as a being of colossal size with wild hair and pitch-black skin who frequents roads, paths and lonely places, and the Mizo generally regard the Phung as female. Her characteristic harm is to seize humans and afflict them with epilepsy and insanity — the very disease being named phûngzawl, 'seized by the Phung' — and she was credited with sorcery and witchcraft. She belongs to the wider company of harmful wild-spirits, the ramhuai or huai ('demons who cause sickness') whom the pre-Christian Mizo strove to placate or avoid, but unlike the formless demon-class she is individuated as a named ogress of the folk imagination.