Orang minyak (the oily man)

A figure of Malay belief, a man coated in black grease who carries off young women at night. It first appeared in Singapore's Berita Harian in October 1957, and the name has since been attached to a rape reported in 2005 and to rumours in Melaka in 2017.

Wikipedia calls the orang minyak, Malay for "oily man", a being of Malay ghost belief and traces its first mention to a Berita Harian report of 12 October 1957. Jacqueline Lee, writing in BiblioAsia in 2021, gives the same paper and year and says the figure appears to draw on Malay folklore. She describes it climbing walls and slipping out of reach because its skin is greasy.

In November 2005 Bernama reported the suspected rape of a nurse in her thirties at 3am at a nurses' hostel on hospital grounds. The attacker was a man carrying a knife, his face and body covered in oil. Bernama's headline called him an orang minyak rapist at HKL.

Benjamin Radford, writing for Live Science in 2012, reported villagers who distrusted the police and had formed citizen patrols armed with machetes to hunt the creature. He placed it among several similar figures in the region: the orang ekor, or tailed man; the orang gadang, or big man; and the orang bati, or flying man.

In August 2017 police in Melaka asked people to stop passing on rumours about an orang minyak that people said had been breaking into houses. The Malay Mail, carrying a Bernama report, said the story had spread on social media, mostly through WhatsApp.