Camphruch (カンフュール Kanfuuyūru) is a chimeric yōkai.
Appearance[]
Camphruch is an ungulate with a orange, dog-like head, no ears, eyes with gray sclera, a light-gray snouth and forehead, a single long horn on its head, a gray body, black hooves on the front, bird-like, yellow feet on the back, and a horse-like tail.
History[]
Video Games[]
- Camphruch appears in GeGeGe no Kitarō: Yōkai Yokochō as a D-Rank yōkai.
Legend[]
Illustration of Camphruch
Camphruch, or Camphur for short, is a chimeric creature that lives either in the Maluku Islands in in Indonesia, as French surgeon Ambroise Paré described, or in Aethiopia (Ancient Greek term referring to the southern reaches of Africa to east of the Indian Ocean), as Italian naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi described. Paré, who copied the creature's account of French explorer André Thévet, called it by its shortened name, while later bestiaries that descried the creature misnamed it as Camphurcii.
In all accounts, Camphruch is described as a creature as large as a doe, with a gray mane covering its neck, a single, three-and-a-half-long horn that can be as thick as a human hand and moves like a junglefowl's crown, and deer-like front legs, and goose-like back legs. Camphruch are amphibious, living in both saltwater and freshwater, and are piscivores. Thévet considered Camphruch to be a type of Unicorn, and said that its horn has similar medicinal properties.
Most of Thévet's accounts were second or third hand, so most modern naturalists consider the chimeric nature of the Camphruch to be from a mishmash of multiple different animal accounts. When Shigeru Mizuki included the Camphruch in his books, he mistakenly said the creature lived in Ethiopia, rather than the similar sounding Aethiopia.