Toyol

The money goes in small amounts. A few notes from the tin behind the rice sacks, never the whole tin. A wallet lighter on Thursday than it was on Wednesday, though the door was bolted all night and nobody called. In houses across Malaysia and Java this is not treated as a mystery so much as a diagnosis, and the suspect is knee-high, bald, and belongs to somebody down the road.

A toyol is a dead child put to work. A bomoh, a dukun or a pawang takes a stillborn infant or an unburied foetus, says the words over it, and what stands up afterwards is not the child and never was. It answers to whoever paid for the ritual. It lives in a jar or a bottle, stoppered and pushed into the dark under the floorboards or buried at the edge of the yard, and it comes out when it is wanted.

What it looks like coming out depends on where the story is told. The common description is plain enough: a naked or near-naked toddler, unsteady on its feet, with a head too large for its body and hands too small for what they carry. The eyes are clouded. Malay tellings add sharp teeth and a red glare in the dark. The green skin and the pointed ears belong to the Indonesian tuyul and, more accurately, to Indonesian and Malaysian horror cinema, which has been rendering the creature as a grey-green goblin for decades. That version is recent and it is worth saying so, because it has almost entirely replaced the older image of an ordinary small child in a dirty singlet.

Accounts of where a toyol comes from split in two. In most, it is manufactured: the foetus or the newborn corpse, the incantations, the vessel. In others it is found rather than made, a lost child of a pontianak or a kuntilanak, one of the women who died in childbirth and came back angry. Beyond that the trail goes cold quickly. There is remarkably little historical research on the toyol, and one of the claims most often repeated about it, that the practice of keeping one goes back to pre-Islamic Arabia, circulates attached to the name of the Malaysian folklorist Mohd Taib Osman without anyone producing the passage where he says it. An entity that every household in the region can describe turns out to be an entity almost nobody can date.

The firmest ground is Java. Clifford Geertz, working in an east Javanese town in the 1950s, sorted the local spirits into five classes and gave the tuyul a class of its own: familiar spirits, distinct from the frightening kind and the possessing kind. His neighbours told him tuyul look just like three-year-old children. They discussed keeping one in a register closer to envy than to horror, and that is the genuinely odd thing about this creature. The scandal is not that the toyol exists. The scandal is that your neighbour has one.

Work begins after dark. It goes up the wall and over the roof tiles, small enough to use a gap no adult could, and drops onto cool concrete on bare feet that leave prints the size of a teacup. It takes what it can carry, and here the folklore is unusually precise about restraint: a toyol takes half. Half the cash in the drawer, half the gold in the box, never the lot. A house cleaned out entirely has been robbed by a person.

Keeping one is expensive in ways that have nothing to do with money. It wants sweets, toys, small clothes, the things a living child would want, and it wants blood, a few drops pricked from the owner’s finger or toe and given regularly. Javanese accounts of pesugihan, the wealth magic named from *sugih*, rich, make the price steeper: a woman of the household nurses it, and what it draws is not milk. Nor does the arrangement lapse when the owner dies. The thing is inherited along with the house, and the children inherit the obligation whether they wanted the wealth or not.

The belief is old. The fraud built on it is not. In December 2009 a 77-year-old woman in Bukit Bandaraya, Kuala Lumpur, took an anonymous phone call warning her that a toyol had marked her valuables, followed the caller’s careful instructions about where to move them, and lost seven hundred thousand ringgit. Ten years later, in the Mengwi subdistrict of Bali, a resident reported 1.4 million rupiah gone and small child-sized footprints across the bonnet of his car. Police noted, drily, that a human being might have an interest in being mistaken for something else.

Accusation is the toyol’s real occupation. It attaches to the shophouse that expanded too fast, to the official whose salary does not explain his house, to anyone whose fortune arrived without visible cause. Saying that a man keeps a toyol is a way of making unexplained inequality bearable, and a way of saying something about a powerful neighbour that would be unwise to say plainly. The word has kept pace with the economy too. Grab and Gojek drivers across Southeast Asia call their grey-market booster apps *tuyul*, because they fetch money by means best left undescribed.

Its powers are all consequences of what it is. Being small, dead and obedient, it passes unseen through the houses it robs, climbs what it needs to climb, and takes without leaving a mark on a lock. It grows stronger the longer it is kept, so an old toyol in a well-run household is a serious proposition. Its limits are consequences of the same fact. It is a toddler, and a toddler can be bought off. Marbles scattered on the floor, green beans, garlic strung up near the money box: any of these will hold its attention until it forgets what it came for, and shops in Malaysia have been known to keep a jar of marbles by the till on exactly that principle. Needles set under banknotes deter it, since it fears being hurt. A mirror frightens it, because it does not like the thing looking back. It can never take more than half. And it must be fed, or it turns on the household that owns it, which is why a bomoh is sometimes paid to cut one loose. A released toyol does not dissolve. It drifts into the forest, or into houses where it has no orders, and stands in the dark of somebody’s kitchen at three in the morning, watching, taking nothing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a toyol?

A toyol is an undead infant in Malay and Indonesian folklore, raised from a stillborn baby or an unburied foetus by a shaman and bound to a living owner as a thieving familiar. It is kept in a stoppered jar or bottle, hidden under the floor or buried in the yard, and sent out at night to steal. In Indonesian it is called a tuyul.

What does a toyol steal, and how much?

A toyol steals cash, jewellery and small valuables from houses other than its owner’s. Folklore is specific that it takes only half of what it finds, never the whole amount, so a drawer emptied completely is taken as evidence of an ordinary human thief. It enters through gaps too small for an adult and climbs walls and roofs to reach them.

How do you protect your money from a toyol?

The standard countermeasures exploit the fact that a toyol behaves like a small child. Marbles, green beans or strings of garlic left near the money will distract it until it forgets its errand, and some Malaysian shops keep marbles by the till for this reason. Needles placed under banknotes are said to deter it because it fears being hurt, and mirrors frighten it with its own reflection.

What does it cost to keep a toyol?

The owner must feed and entertain the toyol with sweets, toys and small clothes, and give it blood, usually a few drops from a finger or a toe. Javanese accounts of pesugihan, the magic of getting rich, describe a woman of the household nursing it while it takes blood rather than milk. The obligation is inherited: when the owner dies the toyol passes to the family, and a neglected one turns on the household that keeps it.

Are toyol and tuyul the same creature?

Yes. Toyol is the Malay form and tuyul the Indonesian, with thuyul in Javanese and kecit in Sundanese, and the beliefs attached to them are close to identical. Related child-spirits appear across the region under other names, including the Philippine tiyanak and the Thai kuman thong, though these differ in character and in how they are handled.

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