Sarasola

Sarasola is a learned investigator of witchcraft, demonology, and the evil attributed to unexplained infant deaths. When Amaia Salazar and Jonan Etxaide visit him after Doctor Berasategui’s death, he turns a photograph into a disturbing interpretation of the case: the scene, he argues, was prepared for the human sacrifice of Amaia’s son. His account joins present-day clues to older records of child deaths and to beliefs about Inguma, the night visitor said to steal a sleeper’s breath.

Introduction and Investigative Role

Sarasola receives Amaia and Jonan in his office, where he clears documents from a crowded desk before taking them to the chairs by the window. He already knows they have come because of Doctor Berasategui’s death, a sign of how quickly news travels to him in Pamplona. His manner is that of a practiced, informed interlocutor: he listens closely, studies the photograph, and offers an interpretation that connects the immediate investigation to a much older history.

Amaia asks what he sees in the image, and Sarasola answers by treating it not as an isolated oddity but as the scene of a sacrifice. The exchange places him in the role of an interpreter of evidence, bringing historical and folkloric knowledge to bear on what the investigators have found.

Historical Framework and Unresolved Crimes

Sarasola invokes the inquisitor Salazar y Frías, who investigated alleged witchcraft in Amaia’s valley and across the French border. As Sarasola recounts it, Salazar y Frías lived among the local people for more than a year and investigated their practices with the patient, verification-minded approach of a modern researcher. Sarasola describes those practices as deeply rooted in local culture and fused, in troubling ways, with Christianity.

He also distinguishes the historical record from the circumstances under which confessions were obtained. The Inquisition’s threat and torture, he says, could drive people to confess; he approves of Salazar y Frías’s effort to end the abuses, but stresses that rejecting coerced testimony wholesale left other crimes unresolved. Declarations described the deaths and later disappearance of children under two and adolescent girls. Once the practices of the Inquisition had been exposed, those accounts were dismissed as false in their entirety, leaving the alleged crimes without resolution.

The Photograph and the Arizkun Desecrations

Sarasola reads the photograph as showing preparations for a human sacrifice, with Amaia’s son as the intended victim. He identifies the act, in his account, as witchcraft and an offering to the Evil One. This is a grave escalation of the image’s meaning: the danger is not merely that human remains have been used, but that a living child was meant to be killed as an offering.

He links that interpretation to the desecrations at Arizkun in Baztán. The use of human remains, especially those of children, is presented as familiar within the practices he describes; killing a child for sacrifice, however, is the most extreme offering. His explanation thus separates evidence of desecration from the far more urgent implication that the ritual was directed toward a living victim.

Inguma and the Night Visitor

After a pause in which Amaia looks toward the dark sky over Pamplona and then returns to Sarasola with renewed determination, she asks whether he knows Inguma. Sarasola answers by treating Inguma not simply as a thing but as a being, and connects it to Lamashtu in Sumerian demonology. In the account he gives, Lamashtu steals nursing infants, consumes their flesh and blood, and causes babies to die suddenly in their cradles; only Pazuzu, whom the Sumerians identify with Lucifer, ranks above this demon in evil.

Sarasola describes similar explanations across cultures for sudden death during sleep: Turkey’s crushing demon, an African name meaning a demon riding on a person’s back, the Hmong torturing demon, and the old woman Batibat associated with bangungut in the Philippines. He also mentions the Japanese term pokkuri and Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare, in which a demon sits on a sleeping woman. Across these accounts, the recurring image is of a sleeper trapped beneath an unseen presence: unable to move or wake, pressed on the chest or throat, or robbed of breath. By assembling these traditions, Sarasola gives Amaia a comparative vocabulary for the case’s supernatural claims while keeping its central stakes sharply concrete: the threat described in the photograph is directed at her child.