Albasti is the dreaded female demon of the birth-chamber, a being of the living Uyghur and wider Turkic folk world. Ugly and wild-haired, with pendulous breasts and long nails, she preys above all on women in and just after childbirth and on their infants, in the older Turkic accounts tearing out the mother's lungs or liver and fleeing to the nearest water. As a night-spirit she is also the incubus who presses upon sleepers, bringing the suffocating paralysis of nightmare, and she takes many shapes, most often that of a yellow woman, a goat, a fox or a dog. Against her the household sets iron, and the Uyghur peri-caller sets the peris.