Baigona is the serpent-spirit of the cult of the same name, which swept the Northern District of Papua, Orokaiva country among it, from about 1912. Its adherents, the baigona men, held that the spirits of the dead dwelt in snakes, above all the python of the mountains, and that through the baigona they could divine hidden fault, cure the sick, and send illness. E. W. P. Chinnery and A. C. Haddon documented the movement in 1917, and F. E. Williams treated it beside the later taro cult as an expression of Orokaiva dealings with the ancestral dead. Sources differ on whether baigona names a single presiding serpent or the class of snake-borne ancestral spirits at large.