Orang Minyak

Also Known As: the oily man; also orang licin, the slippery man
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Malaysian Mythology, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A man coated head to foot in oil who cannot be held, cannot be cornered, and in some accounts leaves a house as a dog.
Role in Mythos: He is the intruder of the Malay night, entering village houses and army quarters to attack young women and slipping every hand that closes on him.
Relation to Humans: He is not a spirit of the forest or the graveyard but a thing that comes indoors, and the countermeasures against him were domestic ones: bells hung at every door, women moving in with relatives, whole villages sitting up between eleven at night and two in the morning. Belief in him was itself a kind of shelter for him, because a woman who thought she had seen a demon reported a demon.

In October 1957 the wives of Malay soldiers living in the married quarters at Clementi started packing up and moving in with relatives elsewhere in Singapore. Something had been getting into the quarters after dark. It was described as a man, or as something using the shape of a man, naked or close to it, and greased from scalp to heel so that nobody who got a grip on him could keep it. The Malay press carried the story of the exodus on 12 October. That report appears to be the first time the orang minyak turns up anywhere in print.

The name is exactly as plain as it sounds. *Orang* is the ordinary word for a person, *minyak* is oil, and in some districts he was called *orang licin* instead, the slippery man. What the name does not carry is any great age. Malay tradition is crowded with the unseen and has been recorded in detail for well over a century: the pontianak in her white shroud, the penanggalan trailing her stomach through the roof thatch, the toyol stealing from kitchens, the polong kept in a bottle. The oily man is not among them. He has no old story, no hikayat, no place in the collections. When Singapore’s studios began turning out monster pictures in the late 1950s, every other creature they filmed came out of that older stock. This one came out of the newspapers.

What the newspapers described was oddly consistent from state to state. He came between eleven at night and two in the morning. He went into houses. He did not take anything. Villagers at Kampung Gentong found rooms turned over and money and gold jewellery lying exactly where they had been left, which is the detail that unsettles most, because it removes the only motive anyone could have named out loud. At Rantau in Negeri Sembilan in May 1958 a woman woke before dawn to find a man in her bedroom wearing nothing but underwear, his body running with oil; he went out through the window, and she was taken to hospital. At Kampung Kelola and Pulau Tawar in Pahang in March 1959, women walking to the mosque were harassed for weeks. Once, the villagers actually got a ring around him. He went straight through it. There was nothing on him to hold.

The reports spread the way a rumour spreads and the way a real offender moves, and it is not always possible to tell which is which. Butterworth, Muar, Rungkup, Segamat, Kuala Pilah, Masjid Tanah. At Kampung Jawang in Kuala Kangsar in September 1960, householders hung a bell and a length of bamboo at every door to be struck the moment anyone saw him, so that for a season the sound of the village at night was the sound of people waiting to make noise. In December 1960 the member for Muar Utara raised the matter in the Dewan Rakyat. In December 1961 a woman at Pasir Panjang woke to find her blanket drawn off her and her underclothes cut with scissors. The stories run on in the Malay papers until at least 1971.

The powers grew as the reports accumulated. He could go up a wall. The headman of Pulau Tawar told reporters in 1959 that the orang minyak could clear a fence by striking his stick once on the ground. He could become a yellow dog, and in one village a dog was beaten to death on the suspicion that it was him. The head of Malay Studies at the University of Malaya in Singapore pointed out that old Malay romances had men turning into dogs long before this, and Singapore’s chief kadi allowed publicly that the powers were real. A bomoh from Tanjung Malim who styled himself the Bomoh Malaya offered to come down and clear Clementi. Other pawang were more deflating. Their account was that the orang minyak was an ordinary man who had just finished an apprenticeship in *ilmu* under a teacher living in retreat on a mountain about a hundred kilometres away, and that the oil was part of the discipline, not a supernatural hide.

The other origin, the famous one, was written for money in 1958. P. Ramlee’s *Sumpah Orang Minyak* gives the creature a curse and a bargain: Si Bongkok the hunchback is straightened by the devil on terms, and the terms require him to rape twenty-one virgins in seven days. That is where the twenty-one virgins come from. Not from any village, not from any old tale, but from a film released in April 1958, made in a hurry, in a race with a rival studio. L. Krishnan’s *Orang Minyak* had beaten it to cinemas in February with Nordin Ahmad under the grease and Roomai Noor as the police inspector hunting him, and a sequel followed the same year. A Singapore paper reported in January 1958 that Ramlee’s picture was drawn from a novel published in Sumatra. Ramlee himself admitted he had run late finishing it because he was afraid of what might come to his house.

The studios were not coy about the joke they were in on. A Cathay-Keris spokesman said in January 1958 that the first purpose of their film was to prove to the public that the orang minyak was an ordinary man and not a ghost. To make sure of it, they brought in a convicted orang minyak, released from prison, to tell them how he had actually done it. Both studios were making horror films about a crime that was still under police investigation.

That is the whole of his strength, and it is also the whole of his weakness. Oil is not a gift from anywhere. It was hair oil first, then coconut oil mixed with soot, then, in the films and eventually in the imagination, black crude, which is why the figure has been read as a monster of petromodernity, arriving in the exact decade when oil became the thing the region ran on. But grease dries, and cools, and comes off on a windowsill. Men were caught. One was seized at Butterworth in 1956 and banished from the district. Others were jailed. When a nurse was tied and assaulted at a Kuala Lumpur hospital hostel in 2005, the papers reached for the old name again, and in 2000 a run of attacks around Sri Petaling ended with an arrest. He was never proof against a locked shutter or a crowd that stayed awake. He was proof against being believed in as a man.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Orang Minyak?

The Orang Minyak, meaning “oily man” in Malay, is a figure of Malaysian and Singaporean folklore: a man covered head to foot in oil who breaks into houses at night and attacks young women, and who escapes because nobody can keep hold of his greased body. He is also known as the orang licin, the slippery man.

Is the Orang Minyak an ancient Malay legend?

No. Unlike the pontianak, penanggalan or toyol, the Orang Minyak has no older Malay tradition behind him. His first appearance in print is a Malay newspaper report of 12 October 1957 about families leaving the Clementi army quarters in Singapore, and the legend spread through newspapers and films over the following fifteen years.

What powers does the Orang Minyak have?

The reports credit him with a slipperiness that makes him impossible to seize, the ability to climb walls and clear fences, and in some accounts the ability to change into a yellow dog. In 1959 a village headman in Pahang told reporters the Orang Minyak could jump a fence by striking his stick on the ground once.

Where does the story of twenty-one virgins come from?

It comes from the 1958 Malay film *Sumpah Orang Minyak*, directed by and starring P. Ramlee, in which a hunchback accepts a bargain with the devil that requires him to rape twenty-one virgins in seven days. The detail is a screenwriter’s invention from that film rather than part of any older village belief.

Was the Orang Minyak a real criminal?

The police, the studios and some traditional healers all treated him as a real man. A Cathay-Keris spokesman said in January 1958 that their film existed partly to prove the Orang Minyak was an ordinary person rather than a ghost, and a convicted Orang Minyak was brought from prison to advise them; men were arrested at Butterworth in 1956 and in later decades in Kuala Lumpur.