[2] In Late Antiquity, the empousae have been described as a category of phantoms or spectres, equated with the lamiai and mormolykeia, thought to seduce and feed on young men.
The primary sources for the empousa in Antiquity are Aristophanes's plays (The Frogs and Ecclesiazusae) and Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana.
[7] A folk etymology construes the name to mean "one-footed" (from Greek *έμπούς, *empous: en-, one + pous, foot).
[3] According to the 1st-century Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the empousa is a phantom (phasma) that took on the appearance of an attractive woman and seduced a young philosophy student in order eventually to devour him.
[9] In a different passage of the same work, when Apollonius was journeying from Persia to India, he encountered an empousa, hurling insults at it, coaxing his fellow travellers to join him, whereby it ran and hid, uttering high-pitched screams.
[9] This empousa confessed it was fattening up the student she targeted to feed on him, and that she especially craved young men for the freshness and purity of their blood,[9] prompting an interpretation as blood-sucking vampire by Smith′s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1849).
In the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series, the Empousai first appear in The Battle of the Labyrinth as servants of Hecate who had, by that time, joined the Titan Army.
The song "Empusa, Queen of the Damned" by the English deathcore band Infant Annihilator is inspired by the themes of the Greek myth.