Toyol (tuyul)

An undead infant of Malay and Indonesian belief, known as the toyol or tuyul, that shamans call up through black magic, often for financial gain. A 2009 scam used the belief to rob an elderly woman.

Wikipedia describes the toyol, or tuyul, as an undead infant from Indonesian and Malay folklore that also turns up elsewhere in Southeast Asia's mythologies. Shamans, called dukun, pawang or bomoh, summon it through black magic. A common use, Wikipedia says, is financial gain, with the toyol stealing people's riches. Wikipedia compares it with the babi ngepet, an Indonesian boar demon, and the hantu raya, a Malay familiar spirit.

Historia reports that Clifford Geertz, doing fieldwork from 1952 to 1954 in Mojokuto, his pseudonym for Pare in East Java, heard from a young carpenter that spirits came in three main kinds: memedi, lelembut and tuyul. Tirto describes how Ong set the supernatural aside and asked why people in Java believed in the tuyul. He argued that in Java's farming communities the tuyul pictured the social and economic gap opened by traders, indigenous and minority alike, who built up capital and wealth. In short, he read the myth as coming from envy of the rich and hostility toward them.

The Star reported in 2009 that scammers persuaded an elderly woman that a toyol wanted her jewellery, and had her gather up and hide her valuables. She did as told and later found everything gone. The Star put her loss at RM700,000.

BiblioAsia (2017) notes a film retelling: Mat Sentol's horror comedy Mat Toyol (1969), in which a Malay shaman keeps the toyol, a spirit the size of a child, as a servant.