Origins: Migration, empire, and historical antecedents

The conditions that later nourished the oily man repertoire were laid in the nineteenth century, when Malaya and Singapore became imperial crossroads marked by mobility and migration. The consolidation of the Straits Settlements in 1826, the Pangkor Agreement of 1874 that brought Perak under British control, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 further intensified this role, making the region a hinge of empire. Labour and capital followed. Although travel and migration had long produced interchange among Malay, Minangkabau, Baweanese, Bugis, and Peranakan communities within the region, the 1830s inaugurated an unprecedented inflow of Chinese migrants from Fujian and Guangdong (including Chaoshan). These migrants were almost exclusively male: some arrived as merchants, but far more as indentured labourers bound for tin mines in Perak and Selangor or for gambier and pepper plantations in Singapore and Johor.Footnote ²⁰ The Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860) and the Taiping Movement (1850–1864) accelerated this exodus, so that by the close of the century the numbers of Chinese ran into the hundreds of thousands.Footnote ²¹

Empire and migration seeded early antecedents of the oily man, ‘connected by a “corridor”—a cultural space that transmits people, wealth and information in both directions’—linking Southeast Asia with Qing China (1644–1911).Footnote ²² Tales of theft, sorcery, and bodily transformation travelled as readily as goods and labour. The Scottish photographer John Thomson (1837–1921), passing through the Straits of Malacca, Siam, Cambodia, and Cochin China before reaching China, recorded such accounts in his Through China with a Camera (1898). He described a variety of techniques ascribed to ‘Chinese thieves’: housebreakers stripping naked and their ‘bod[ies] oiled all over’ so that they could evade capture; queues, then a distinctive Qing hairstyle, coiled with needles or swapped for detachable false ones to frustrate pursuers.Footnote ²³ Oil here was not supernatural but tactical, a bodily stratagem that made intrusion uncanny.

Panics: Scares and spectacles from the 1930s to the 1950s

The 1930s yielded the first documented oily man complaints in Singapore, crystallizing repertoires already in circulation. On 15 July 1932 a pseudonymous ‘father’ wrote to three English papers describing a prowler ‘heavily greased and nude’. Each paper reframed him differently: in the Straits Times he appeared as a thief ‘with the object of stealing’; the Singapore Free Press recast him as someone whose ‘main intention is not to steal but to spy on women and girls’; by the time the Malay Tribune reproduced the letter, his ‘primary motive’ was ‘to outrage the modesty of women, and young girls in particular’.Footnote ²⁴ It remains unclear whether these were three different letters or one reshaped by editors, but the effect was unmistakable: a housebreaker recast variously as thief, voyeur, and rapist. Rumours multiplied and for months the figure circulated in letters.Footnote ²⁵ The 1932 scare followed a familiar rhythm—flare, embellishment, subsidence—yet what endured was not certainty but circulation itself, the momentum that secured his staying power.

Oily man fears crystallized in 1932 because of a demographic shift. The Immigration Restriction Ordinance of 1930 limited male but not female arrivals, gradually transforming Malaya and Singapore from male-dominated labour societies into communities where women were more visible in public and domestic life.Footnote ²⁶ In this setting, the oily man was increasingly cast as a menace to women. As burglars who entered homes disproportionately encountered women, intrusion was recast as sexual threat. Responses were framed through protective roles: the ‘father’ cited earlier declared his intention to apply for a revolver licence, while a schoolgirl’s friend considered a pistol to defend herself from the oily man.Footnote ²⁷ Fieldwork conducted after the Second World War confirmed that Chinese and Malay homes were conventionally organized around segregated spaces—bedrooms and kitchens—where valuables were kept and where women spent much of their time, further heightening the sense that women were especially vulnerable to the oily man’s intrusion.Footnote ²⁸

The 1932 scare shows how oily man reports could sustain contradictory registers. On 12 August the Malaya Tribune published an interview with a ‘Chinese gentleman’ who dismissed the panic as ‘imagination backed by Asiatic superstition … especially the Chinese who are very superstitious’, echoing elite critiques of popular practice during the Republican period (1911–1949) in China.Footnote ²⁹ Yet earlier in the same article the oily man appeared as burglar and sorcerer, said to rely on a ‘magic cockle-shell’ granting invisibility and to consult ‘wooden slips … kept in a bamboo tube’—motifs of Chinese divination that cast him as a practitioner of mantic arts.Footnote ³⁰ For most households, however, he was treated as a lived threat. Families responded within what Barend ter Haar characterized as a ‘demonological paradigm’ of Chinese religion and society, treating the oily man as a malign presence requiring prophylactic measures:Footnote ³¹ ‘quite a number of Chinese families have put up all forms of charms and amulets at the front and back doors to keep this “hobgoblin” away’, while it was ‘customary for anxious mothers [to] rush off to propitiate the gods’ at various temples ‘[d]uring this period of “Calamity”’.Footnote ³² A single scare could thus be narrated as rationalist dismissal, thief with magic, or ghostly assailant—registers that coexisted because they captured different ways of experiencing intrusion.

The same tension resurfaced in May 1954 at Zion Road, near the British Military Hospital, where the oily man was reported in both Anglophone and Chinese presses. Witnesses described him as being dressed in white, dancing in front of his pursuers, and throwing stones towards bystanders.Footnote ³³ Households responded in patterned ways: ‘women have been staying indoors and the men obliged to come home early’, while ‘jittery’ residents ‘stay(ed) indoors after dinner, and make sure doors and windows are bolted before retiring to bed’.Footnote ³⁴ Yet fear did not remain at the level of crime. Explanations quickly slid into the supernatural.

Several women linked the apparition to nearby construction, convinced that wartime burials had been disturbed—a persistent concern in a city still haunted by the mass executions of Chinese men during the Japanese Occupation (1942–1945).Footnote ³⁵ Others associated the intruder with a ‘dying and pale-looking Chinese youth’, with a Siamese priest identifying it as the ‘dying boy’s agent’.Footnote ³⁶ When an elderly woman died on 4 May, residents concluded that the spirit, echoing the Siamese priest’s hypothesis of the oily man as ‘an “agent of death”’, was appeased: ‘relieved housewives are now burning joss sticks on their doorsteps, windowsills, and family altars to appease the “spirit” and pray that it would never return’.Footnote ³⁷ The oily man’s dress carried its own resonance: its white clothing likely evoked the white-robed psychopomp of Chinese religion—the White Spirit of Impermanence (Bai Wuchang 白无常) who escorts souls to the afterlife—an association that almost certainly informed how housewives responded to its ominous appearance and abrupt departure.Footnote ³⁸ As in 1932, repertoires of crime and repertoires of ghostliness converged, so that prowling and stone-throwing were experienced not as nuisance but as spiritual assault demanding ritual closure.

If Zion Road evoked haunting, the Queen Street incident of May 1954 displayed a different register: spectacle rather than fear. For five nights thousands gathered outside St Joseph’s Church and the neighbouring St Anthony’s Convent Middle School, not in dread but in curiosity, eager to glimpse the figure. This was a scene of gaiety, disorder, and near-carnival anticipation rather than panic. Its origins were unusually well documented. On 22 May Mrs Fang Guiniang, the Chaoshanese wife of a church caretaker, reported seeing a ‘weird person’ with a body ‘covered in oil’ and dressed only in swimming trunks. She insisted it was ‘probably a madman’ rather than a ghost. After other residents confirmed similar sightings, she finally spoke out.Footnote ³⁹ Here the oily man was encountered less as supernatural menace than as collective mystery, unfolding in real time and drawing residents into the streets to take part in the spectacle.

Once in motion, the Queen Street story detached from its source and sparked interest across Singapore. From 26–27 May hundreds of boys surrounded the church and school shouting ‘hantu’ when lights flickered, while police scoured the compound with flashlights.Footnote ⁴⁰ In subsequent nights the crowd swelled to more than 2,000, blocking traffic, breaking police cordons, and pelting officers with stones and fruit. One officer conceded it was ‘nearly a riot’, while hawkers peddled their wares to the crowd.Footnote ⁴¹ What unfolded was less a scare than a carnivalesque experience, a classical instance of ‘actants amassing’ as residents, hawkers, journalists, police, and the oily man himself converged without orchestration until curiosity swelled into spectacle.Footnote ⁴² The site intensified this dynamic. Alleged eyewitnesses variously placed the oily man in the belfry, within the church itself, or on upper floors invisible from the street.Footnote ⁴³ The very opacity of the church likely fuelled speculation, much as Christian churches in Qing China had sparked rumours of organ harvesting or human sacrifice.Footnote ⁴⁴ On Queen Street, architecture and rumour together produced conditions in which the oily man was experienced not in terror but in rowdiness.

The Queen Street panic also revealed how oily man scares could be tamed and disciplined within familiar vocabularies. On 13 August 1954, a Sin Chew Jit Poh journalist explained the figure not as a ghost but as the ‘oil chicken fellow’ (youjizai 油鸡仔), a practitioner of oily chicken sorcery. According to his account, the latter was conflated with ‘oily ghost fellow’, and in turn rendered as ‘oily man’. He traced the confusion back to Chaoshan, citing a scare ‘more than two decades ago’. The slippage he described, almost certainly sustained by Chaoshanese homophony between ‘chicken’ (gai) and ‘ghost’ (guei), is telling: Mrs Fang, whose sighting sparked the rumour, was herself Chaoshanese. In this lore, practitioners of oily chicken magic (characterized as a form of Mao Shan 茅山 sorcery) stripped naked, concealed their clothes within cockle shells—recalling tropes from 1932—and turned invisible to commit mischief. Practitioners included itinerant Buddhist monks, who stole food or defecated in rice pots.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such motifs of wandering monks trafficking in illicit magic were long established in late imperial Chinese literature and history, and they also resonated with common perceptions about the malignant potency of Mao Shan sorcery.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the process, the writer folded new figures into older cultural frames, naturalizing the uncanny within Chaoshanese language and familiar Chinese stock tropes. The oily man was thus rendered recognizable through wordplay—on Queen Street experienced as neighbourhood carnival, at once strange and familiar.

While the 1930s and 1954 scares were narrated largely through Anglophone and Chinese vocabularies, a turning point came in October 1957 when the repertoire was reframed through Malay idioms of gender and honour. The Straits Times reported that Corporal Yacob bin Abdullah of Clementi Estate claimed his wife had been molested by the ‘oily man’. The couple awoke ‘with a feeling of having been in a magic spell or trance’; his wife found oil stains on her neck, with ‘oil trails’ leading from the bedroom through the kitchen to the back door. The response was immediate: within days Clementi ‘resembled a curfew area’, with 1,000 police and soldiers patrolling nightly under shoot-on-sight orders.Footnote ⁴⁷ What earlier reports had framed as burglary or nuisance was now lived as crisis—an affront to Malay masculinity and the honour of soldiers unable to protect their own women.

Yet these responses did not mark a wholly new or uniquely Malay phenomenon. They continued familiar repertoires of prowlers and oily thieves, only now recast in Malay idioms. What was distinctive was not simply the scale of the response, but its specifically Malay inflection. In the Malay press, the Clementi scare centred on Malay households, especially the wives and families of Malay soldiers: women temporarily left their homes or slept together in nearby houses, while increasingly angry Malay men formed patrol units to guard the area, with some assistance from police and soldiers.Footnote ⁴⁸ The chief kadhi of Singapore did not dismiss the reports outright but advised residents to recite verses from the Quran before sleep as protection.Footnote ⁴⁹ A Kelantan-born bomoh, Encik Noordin bin Junid—the ‘Bomoh Malaya’—separately offered to help drive away the oily man.Footnote ⁵⁰ At the same time, Berita Harian carried a revealing disjunction in Acting Police Secretary F. G. Minns’s remarks. While he acknowledged that the police were ‘not taking this matter very seriously’ and that only ‘two or three’ officers might be on watch that night, he also observed that ‘Malay soldiers in the area are angry with the intruder’ and had ‘formed a patrol unit’.Footnote ⁵¹ Read together, these reports suggest not a uniform official overreaction, but a strongly Malay communal response that exceeded the more limited police posture. The oily man remained an intruder refracted through Malay anxieties of gendered honour and Islamic protection, not an invention of Malay folklore.

Authority: Gender, policing, and the management of rumour

By the late 1950s oily man scares were still narrated through the authority of family men and the vulnerability of women, continuing the pattern first set by the pseudonymous ‘father’ in 1932. On 15 July 1958 the Straits Times reported from Klang that Inche Johari bin Haji Yusof, 45, father of three children ‘including two grown-up daughters’, had sighted a naked oily man whose body was ‘very bright and shining’. Another witness, Inche Ismail bin Haji Hassan, 32, was likewise noted to have a ‘beautiful daughter’.Footnote ⁵² Such details were not incidental. By privileging the testimony of married men, hajis, and fathers, journalists invoked their moral authority as guardians of women, distinguishing them from idle bachelors or gossipmongers. If, as Aihwa Ong argues, Malaysian factory women invoked ‘spirits of resistance’ to negotiate the strictures of predominantly male overseers at work, sightings of the oily man signified the opposite: a prowler whose menace curtailed women’s freedoms and placed their experiences within claims to male guardianship.Footnote ⁵³

This pattern, in which assaults were framed through women’s vulnerability and male mediation, persisted. On 17 November 1959 the Straits Times reported from Changi Road, Frankel Estate, that a girl had been assaulted in a playground at 8 pm by a young man ‘wearing only swimming trunks’. Women stayed indoors while armed police searched for an attacker whose ‘oil-smeared hands’ were said to have clasped the victim’s mouth.Footnote ⁵⁴ Here the oily man repertoire fused directly with the imagery of a sex crime, with oil functioning less as trace than as label marking the assault as uncanny. In January 1967 similar fears spread at Kampong Pengkalan Rinting, Johor, where young women screamed as the oily man peered through windows.Footnote ⁵⁵ No physical harm was recorded, yet in each case danger was conceptualized through women’s exposure and fear, and through the mobilization of men as guardians.

Yet an earlier example had already surfaced in a homosocial female environment. These gendered dynamics were most visible in such settings, where collective living intensified fear. In June 1954, at the Singapore General Hospital Nurses Hostel, ‘300 living in the hostel had shut their windows for fear of a “visit”’; as one nurse explained: ‘we closed our windows because people said the oily man could even slip in small openings’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similar panics erupted at the Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) in Shah Alam in August 1975, when the Berita Harian reported students abandoning campus after rumours of an oily man sighting. The director, Haji Lokman Musa, attempted to calm them, insisting that ‘there is no reason for them to be afraid’. Yet in 1994 the fears resurfaced, as female students in ITM dormitories were once again said to have been disturbed by oily men.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Aihwa Ong has observed, in post-independence and industrializing Malaysia, women’s living and working quarters often became charged sites where spirits articulated both vulnerability and agency. In the case of the oily man, the experience drew less on male corporate disciplinarians than on the intimate dynamics of dormitory life, where rumours, jokes, and anxieties spread quickly, blurring the line between menace and mischief.Footnote ⁵⁸

The oily man’s instability already shaped lived response: uncertainty over what the figure was helped generate patrols, religious intervention, and demands for official action. While oily man scares spread like other rumours, they did not fit the functionalist model of rumour as ‘weapons of the weak’, forms of grassroots resistance against the powers-that-be.Footnote ⁵⁹ Elsewhere in the region rumour often bore a subversive charge: Loh Kah Seng demonstrated how kampong clearance in Singapore generated whispers of government arson, while in Borneo and Indonesia stories of headhunting expressed hostility towards state agents and foreign intruders.Footnote ⁶⁰ Oily man rumours, in contrast, rarely projected anxiety onto officials or colonial outsiders. Europeans were not primarily framed as culprits, nor were state agents accused of donning oil to terrorize villages. Instead, these scares unfolded on another terrain—through women’s silence, men’s mediation, and the state’s role as epistemological arbiter of whether the oily man was fact or fiction.

Women’s silence decisively shaped how oily man scares were narrated and judged. Because many did not or could not report assaults, police statements became the main yardstick of whether rumours were groundless. Women consistently figured as victims, yet their voices remained largely absent from the record. In Penang in October 1957, 12 young women—described by the Sin Chew Jit Poh as ‘those sacrificed’, a phrase that connoted victimhood and communal shame—were allegedly molested, though their parents insisted on anonymity when interviewed.Footnote ⁶¹ Three years later, in Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur, it was noted that several women had been assaulted but ‘police were not told’.Footnote ⁶² Honour and the protection of reputations meant experiences went unreported even as fear was invoked to justify male authority. The same dynamic persisted decades later. In Batu Arang near Kuala Lumpur in June 1997, a gang of oily men had carried out more than 20 housebreakings and frightened women, yet residents avoided lodging reports so as not to invite trouble.Footnote ⁶³ Silence curtailed women’s agency even as it prolonged the rumour’s life, keeping the oily man suspended in hearsay rather than resolved as verifiable crime.

In this epistemological vacuum, state authority increasingly became the decisive arbiter, with policing at its forefront. Oily man scares were experienced not only as encounters with prowlers or ghosts but as tests of the state’s authority to define truth. Already in 1932 letter-writers to the Malaya Tribune asked why he had not been arrested and fingerprinted, one jeering that Scotland Yard should be called in. The editor’s condescending reply—that ‘the police know their business well enough to attach great importance to fingerprints’—asserted expertise while tacitly admitting doubt.Footnote ⁶⁴ Similar logics resurfaced after independence. In December 1960 the figure had even entered Parliament, where the Member for Muar (North) urged the government to act against oily men said to climb into houses at night, enter bedrooms, and disturb sleeping women.Footnote ⁶⁵ In 1965 Acting Police Secretary Tuan Ratna Singam dismissed rumours in Geylang Serai because no reports of such incidents had been lodged.Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1984 Taiping police opened an investigation into an oily man sighting, lending rumours provisional recognition.Footnote ⁶⁷ Even in 2011, after reports near a Kedah secondary school, Acting District Police Chief Mansor urged residents not to believe rumours of an oily man who had allegedly raped a 16-year-old student, even as he told them to report suspicious individuals.Footnote ⁶⁸ Across these episodes the state appeared both as arbiter—pronouncing what was true or false—and as participant, caught in the same interpretive loop that sustained the rumours themselves.

To be sure, such ambivalence was already visible in the mid-century cases. Far from standing above the communities they were expected to police, state officials were drawn into them, compelled to report, debate, and even ritualize the oily man as though he were part of their beat. At Queen Street in June 1954 a police representative bemoaned that colleagues returning from patrol were themselves pressed to report on ‘ghostly figures’ until they too became ‘talking ghosts’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Weeks earlier at Zion Road, police secretary Peter Clague had declared, ‘We do not believe the “oily man” is a human being. There is no evidence to suggest it’, while another policeman said that if the figure were real, ‘he could not have escaped the police dragnet’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In press coverage, official responses were often ambivalent: even when police and other authorities sought to dismiss oily man rumours, they still engaged them as matters requiring explanation, investigation, or preventive action. Four decades later, in January 1993, policemen summoned to a robbery scene in Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, found a tower of stones believed to be a ‘curse’ left by the oily men. Instead of dismantling it, they allowed a ritual specialist to neutralize the danger—an acknowledgement of its resemblance to sorcery, and of the fact that oily men were experienced as threats demanding ritual as well as legal remedy.Footnote ⁷¹

Alongside police intervention, oily man scares were also lived as calls to collective self-defence. In March 1960 Berita Harian reported that villagers in Kampong Parit Tengah, Rungkup, near Bagan Datoh, formed nightly patrols. By September youths from Kampong Jawang, Perak, prepared clappers or rattles to alert neighbours, while residents of Kampong Chegar Galah on the banks of Sungai Perak likewise organized watches.Footnote ⁷² In Singapore the Sar Kong Vigilante Corps (established in 1962), attached to the Mun San Fook Tuck Chee temple at Sims Drive, also sought, among its many functions, to protect the village from oily men.Footnote ⁷³ These mobilizations were not ad hoc but drew on long-standing arrangements of communal self-help: as in late imperial China, Malaya, and Singapore, neighbourhoods relied on surveillance and collective patrols to defend their interests.Footnote ⁷⁴ The oily man scare tapped into these traditions, making vigilance itself an embodied way of experiencing the figure’s ubiquity. Recent cases followed the same rhythm. In June 2002 Segamat villagers not only lodged police reports but also organized themselves into volunteer patrols in consultation with police officers.Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, in Kulim, Kedah, in 2007 the community security corps mobilized men who joined auxiliary policemen in their pursuit of an oily man who scaled rooftops and left behind blue-coloured footprints.Footnote ⁷⁶ Each formation shows how rumour repeatedly animated older structures of collective defence, often in coordination with the state but never wholly dependent on it. Oily man scares thus operated less as idioms of resistance than as threats that drew both communal vigilance and state authority into everyday life.

Scepticism and dismissal, however, were present from the beginning and remained part of the repertoire throughout. During the 1932 panic in Singapore, several letters to the English press mocked the scare as superstitious rubbish and a distraction from serious matters.Footnote ⁷⁷ At Zion Road in 1954 officials such as M. P. D. Nair insisted that ‘the real remedy lies in the hands of the City Council, street lights’, treating the panic as an infrastructural rather than supernatural threat.Footnote ⁷⁸ Police likewise sought to defuse disorder: on 1 June 1954 the Straits Times quoted Superintendent Song Kok Hoo, who ‘personally spoke over a police car loudspeaker and asked the crowds to go home’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Some of the strongest denials came from communities themselves. In Malacca in 1969, elderly residents smiled at reporters and dismissed claims of an invisible oily man at work as ‘all nonsense’, attributing disturbances to ‘a few young thugs’. They linked the scare to a recent spate of thefts in the vicinity but rejected its supernatural dimension outright.Footnote ⁸⁰ Dismissals became part of the circulation of rumours, shaping how they were lived, so that oily man scares remained contested rather than unanimously believed.

From the 1970s onwards oily man scares continued to intrude into everyday life. We have already seen how predominantly female environments such as the Institut Teknologi Mara (ITM) remained recurrent sites of panic in 1975. By the 1990s, encounters with oily men began to materialize in tangible form. In 1994 at Kota Tinggi a Malay settler woman claimed to have caught one in a bucket—infant-sized, ice-cold, with a wizened face—before summoning a specialist to subdue it.Footnote ⁸¹ A decade later in Pekan, Pahang, villagers discovered a 10-centimetre ‘wooden figure’ on a beach—bald, red-eyed, wrapped in black cloth, and sealed in a tin with sand and onions—described as an ‘oily man’ and as an object capable of harm.Footnote ⁸² Across East and Southeast Asia, figurines were a familiar ritual form believed to inflict harm; in Kota Tinggi and Pekan they became a way of confronting, trapping, and neutralizing the oily man’s presence.Footnote ⁸³ These were not abstract figures glimpsed fleetingly from rooftops or windowsills, but lived dangers that had to be ritually subdued.

Early suspects and plural society

In the wake of the dramatic ‘father’ letters of July 1932, the oily man label spread so quickly that it began to be attached to actual suspects. On 19 July, the Singapore Free Press felt compelled to clarify that a Malay man known only as ‘[illegible] bin Ali’, arrested for loitering and dishonestly receiving stolen property, was not the oily man—a disclaimer which hints at how swiftly the epithet had entered the everyday.Footnote ⁸⁵ Less than a year later, on 26 April 1933, the same paper reported the arrest of Haron bin Hamid, an ‘ex-sailor’, who on 1 March had assaulted Dorothy Puchas, a European resident at the Goodwood Park Hotel. Found naked at the Tanglin Club with his clothes bundled in his hand, he was explicitly associated with older reports of an ‘oily man’, though no oil was observed.Footnote ⁸⁶ Such cases show how readily the label attached itself and laid the ground for firmer consolidation in the mid-1930s.

From this point the oily man label was repeated so freely that embellishment, misremembering, and retrospective attribution hardened the repertoire. On 2 April 1935 the Malaya Tribune ran ‘Another “Oily Man” in Singapore’, misidentifying an earlier oily man as Indian and (wrongly?) backdating a similar attack to 1934 with a Malay girl as victim.Footnote ⁸⁷ The next day the Singapore Free Press named Haroon bin Ali, a Javanese man, as having trespassed at Telok Kurau. Again, no oil was observed, though the paper admitted he had already managed to ‘catch the popular imagination as Singapore’s oily man’. That same day the Malaya Tribune instead called him ‘a Malay crouching behind the hedges’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Only in May, once Haroon bin Ali was securely arrested, did reports add that his arms were ‘covered with oil’, the Straits Times claiming that ‘two Javanese passers-by’ failed to hold him.Footnote ⁸⁹ Whether fact or retrospective invention, repetition and improvisation were now fleshing out the repertoire.

In 1936 the oily man resurfaced in Kuala Lumpur, where the label was attached to an English-speaking Tamil servant—evidence that it could cross ethnic lines and urban settings with ease. The accused, Frank Joseph Paul Amedius, described in a 2 January report, had Hainanese victims: Wee Teow Eng and her husband, Chan Chew Yong, a cook employed in European residential quarters. Amedius lodged in the servants’ annex of the same flats, separated from their room by only a partition.Footnote ⁹⁰ The oily man here was neither Malay nor a kampong intruder. Instead the label fixed itself to a Tamil suspect whose proximity arose from the entanglements of domestic service. No oil was observed; nocturnal entry and theft sufficed for the press to revive the epithet, underscoring how easily it traversed ethnic and social boundaries.

Throughout the late 1930s, confusion over names, ethnicities, and charges showed how the oily man label clung to a variety of suspects. Haroon bin Ali and Haron bin Hamid were almost certainly conflated by journalists, their names variously spelled (as Haroun or Haroon bin Hamid), and their ethnicities described in turn as Malay, Javanese, or Indian. From 1937 the moniker fixed most firmly on Haron bin Hamid. On 28 April that year, the Malaya Tribune reported his rearrest as a returned banishee, describing him as the ‘alleged oily man of Singapore’ and noting his claim to Dutch subjecthood and to having been swept ashore by accident.Footnote ⁹¹ In fresh charges brought three years later—‘housebreaking and theft of a watch’ on Jervois Road in September 1940—no oil was alleged, yet the label stuck. Haron, who claimed he ‘bought a watch from an Indian’ after arriving from Rhio (Riau), openly resented the epithet and protested to a detective: ‘How do you know I am the “oily man”?’ The reply was blunt: ‘In 1935, several people tried to arrest you, but your body was covered with oil.’Footnote ⁹²

Together these 1930s cases show that the oily man was less a village intruder than a figure that took shape within British Malaya’s plural society and the intimate proximities of colonial life. Suspects and victims could be Malay, Javanese, Tamil, Hainanese, or European, and the label crossed these boundaries without ever fixing on one group, attaching instead to whichever suspects proximity and circumstance made available. Haron bin Hamid, for example, claimed to be a Dutch subject who arrived from Riau—underscoring, as Koh Keng We notes, the porousness of the British–Dutch maritime border—while Frank Amedius’s Catholic-sounding name pointed to similar diasporic entanglements.Footnote ⁹³ Victims likewise reflected these structures: the couple attacked by Amedius in Kuala Lumpur exemplified the Hainanese occupational niche of cooking and domestic service in European households.Footnote ⁹⁴ What enabled such encounters was not invasion from outside but proximity within colonial residential enclaves, where cooks, maids, and lodgers were separated by only a partition. The oily man label thus never mapped neatly onto a single ethnicity or setting; it drew its force from overlapping, unstable social worlds. By the end of the 1930s, the oily man was no longer a fixed culprit but a flexible repertoire, primed for the sexualized and supernatural elaborations of the 1950s.

This ambiguity did not extend to Europeans. Europeans do not appear in our material as oily men. Unlike accusations of headhunting in Indonesia or organ-theft in late imperial China, where foreigners often became rumoured culprits, in Malaya and Singapore Europeans appeared instead as visible victims. This divergence may reflect the region’s comparatively peaceful decolonization: although Britain retained deep stakes in Malaya’s shipping, mining, and plantation economies, withdrawal was negotiated rather than revolutionary, leaving fewer circumstances in which Europeans could be recast as the threatening figure itself.Footnote ⁹⁵ Visibility worked in reverse. Europeans, socially conspicuous and newsworthy, appeared disproportionately as victims, and it was precisely this prominence that kept oily man incidents in circulation. An earlier antecedent already hinted at this asymmetry: John Thomson’s 1898 travelogue, for example, concluded with a European acquaintance who failed to arrest one such Chinese thief, who ‘slipp[ed] like an eel from the grasp of his antagonist’ because he was covered in ‘a coat of oil’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Press coverage turned European encounters into a recurring spectacle. Haron bin Hamid, as we have seen, assaulted Dorothy Puchas at Goodwood Park Hotel and was also charged with breaking into the home of R. J. Fenny. Frank Amedius was said to have similarly ‘terrorised the European residential area around the Sam Peng flats’ in Kuala Lumpur. In June 1947 Ipoh ‘oily men’ dressed in their underwear and covered in grease made off with $5,000 worth of jewellery from European homes.Footnote ⁹⁷ The pattern continued after Malaya’s independence in 1957: in October that year, an incident in Ayer Rajah, Singapore, saw Ida Wilson, a housewife, discover oil stains at her door and window, while in January 1962, in Butterworth, Penang, a nocturnal intrusion at a European household on Pantai Road was likewise attributed to an oily man.Footnote ⁹⁸ Perpetrators do not appear as European in the available reports, yet European households and bodies repeatedly served as the stage for oily man intrusions.

From prowlers to predators

After the Japanese Occupation the oily man repertoire tilted toward sexual menace, and journalists blurred the line between burglary, voyeurism, and assault. In 1947 the Straits Times exemplified this slippage when it reported Khoo Phang Hua’s conviction in Sitiawan for housebreaking and attempted outrage of modesty. Oil was not mentioned, yet he was dubbed an ‘oily man’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The association deepened in 1953 at Kellock Road near Tiong Bahru, when the Sunday Standard reported a prowler who climbed a drainpipe to a communal bathroom and peeped at Mrs Andrea Ortega, a European resident. Neighbours said women were so frightened they no longer dared use the bathrooms or latrines at night. No oil was mentioned, but at Havelock Road police station the culprit was nonetheless christened ‘orang minyak’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Journalists and police thus collapsed burglary, voyeurism, and sexual menace into a single category, entrenching the oily man as catch-all figure of nocturnal intrusion.

By the late 1950s, newspapers were already acknowledging that the oily man label did not always match the facts, even as they continued to use it. On 30 October 1957 Sin Chew Jit Poh reported incidents in Ipoh where its oily men perpetrators were ‘believed neither Indian nor Malay but Chinese youths’. The paper contrasted these cases with Singapore: there, it explained, the oily man operates alone and applies oil all over his body, whereas in Ipoh three to five intruders wore only shorts, applied no oil, and entered young women’s rooms when men were absent.Footnote ¹⁰¹ By applying the label and simultaneously acknowledging its inaccuracy, the report exposed the repertoire’s contradictions.

Before the label fully loosened in the 1960s and 1970s, the contradiction was already visible: newspapers themselves recognized that some ‘oily men’ did not fit the expected profile. Indeed, the label had stretched so far that sightings no longer required oil. Communal fears of prowlers and outsiders attached themselves easily to the name. In June 1960 the Singapore Free Press reported an ‘oily man scare’ in Kranji village after a 12-year-old boy spotted a loiterer during hide-and-seek: ‘tall, dark and handsome’, ‘scantily dressed and is believed to haunt the village in the evenings’, with no hint of oil.Footnote ¹⁰² The next day Sin Chew Jit Poh ran a story about a 20-year-old male found under a bed at the Central Hospital nurses’ dormitory in Kuala Lumpur at 10 in the morning—no oil, no molestation, daytime intrusion, and alleged theft of medicine rather than valuables—yet the label applied.Footnote ¹⁰³ Other reports continued to stretch the category. The oily man was no longer just a rumoured ghost but a guise which criminals chose to inhabit. On 6 October 1961 both Berita Harian and the Straits Times reported the capture of an ‘oily man’ in Seremban. At 3.30 am on 31 July taxi driver Jaafar bin Kifli and factory clerk Lee Weng Choy apprehended an intruder, describing him as naked and slick with oil. The accused, R. Kanapan, a 27-year-old Indian man, was charged with housebreaking.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Here the repertoire was no longer imposed by reporters alone; the accused deliberately appropriated oil as a getaway technique.

Once the label had stretched, police and journalists tried to define what counted as a ‘real’ oily man—but their efforts only showed how incoherent the category already was. Even when culprits did not claim the role, the authorities themselves perpetuated the confusion. On 12 October 1972 the Straits Times reported that Hamdan bin Abdul Hamid, a student caught with housebreaking tools, was an alleged oily man in Kuala Lumpur. The association prompted Woman Inspector Helen Loh Kuen Chow to clarify: ‘But he is not an oily man as he only rubs himself with oil to avoid being caught. He is but a skilful cat burglar’, implying that sexual assault was necessary for the label to apply.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In November 1972 a grisly Orchard Road accident was reported: a Malay thief, naked from the waist up and shoeless, fell to his death from a ninth-floor lift shaft; his partial nudity was enough for him to be labelled an ‘oily man’ by the journalist covering the story.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In January 1974 Nanyang Siang Pau described disturbances in Sungai Way New Village, Selangor, where a naked night visitor who took nothing was variously called an oily man or a lunatic.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Arbitrary attributions of loosely related phenomena to the oily man bound these repertoires to public memory, keeping him in headlines long after oil was no longer observed. By the 1970s, press coverage and cinematic tropes of the oily man as a sexual predator had, at least among some communities, reshaped expectations so deeply that oil and burglary seemed insufficient; even the police presumed sexual menace. In trying to police the boundary, they only confirmed its incoherence.

Decades later, the repertoire emerged in a more violent form, showing that the older script could still be consciously replayed. Later in 1997 some 20 robberies around Batu Arang, a new village 30 kilometres from Kuala Lumpur, were said to have been carried out by three to four men ‘entirely covered with oil’, and dressed only in white underwear and plastic sandals. They struck at night; some victims were bound, others threatened, and in one case a family was set on fire.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The repertoire, already decades old, re-emerged aggressively.

Neighbours, insiders, and outsiders

Not all oily men were faceless prowlers; sometimes they were recognized as neighbours or acquaintances, showing how the label could remake the familiar into nocturnal threat. Recall how Kuala Lumpur’s ‘oily man’ was Frank Joseph Paul Amedius, an English-speaking Tamil servant who lodged only a partition away from his Hainanese colleagues. Two decades later, in July 1958, three men—Dollah bin Sujah, Abdul Hamid Othman, and Chan Chin Lay—were arrested in Seremban after breaking into the home of Siti binte Kartanom, a 32-year-old widow, at two in the morning, leaving ‘oil stains on the kitchen door and mosquito net’. During the assault Siti recognized one of the men and informed police, leading to their arrest. Oil stains were found on the suspects’ bodies, and ‘oil-stained swimming trunks’ were later discovered among their possessions.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ These were not costumes but material traces reframed in the wake of the two oily man movies, released the same year, which gave police and press a ready grammar to frame the case. The label also served as shorthand for molesters. In Butterworth, Penang, a 23-year-old Indian widow reported in 1972 that she had been molested twice in her sleep. She told police that her late husband had once slapped the ‘oily man’ in the kampong, and she recognized the same figure as her assailant.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Oil was unmentioned; here ‘oily man’ functioned as a moniker for a sexual assailant. Across these episodes the repertoire showed its elasticity, able to recast neighbours as oily men and embed the label into everyday life.

The repertoire could also shift from recognized individuals to a more diffuse suspicion that the threat lay within the community itself. Particularly revealing was the 1968 Kampong Penaga scare in Selangor, near Sungai Way, where the oily man appeared not as an outside prowler or a clearly identifiable assailant, but as a danger believed to reside within the village. Fear spread among women and girls until nightly rituals drew some 120 villagers into action. Leading them, 28-year-old Enche Mahmud bin Haji Hashim claimed to have overcome an oily man who left ‘dripping with blood’. Yet the evildoer’s identity was contested. One villager, Enche Jantan, described the village as having ‘an enemy within’ (musoh dalam selimut) the community, while Mahmud did not address the question of local belonging so much as recast the oily man as human—someone who had become such through the pursuit of occult knowledge.Footnote ¹¹¹ All agreed that the figure had been defeated, but not on who—or what—he was. Kampong Penaga thus lays bare the repertoire’s deepest instability: the oily man could appear simultaneously as supernatural danger, human wrongdoer, and internal threat.

If oily men could be neighbours, they could also be foreigners. By the 1980s the repertoire increasingly mapped nocturnal menace onto migrant workers, casting them as the collective face of potential disorder—a variant of the fear and scapegoating of itinerant strangers noted elsewhere. Earlier scares often involved locals, but by this period rumours in Malaysia and Singapore persistently identified outsiders, reflecting both societies’ position as wealthier hosts to labourers from less well-off parts of Southeast Asia.Footnote ¹¹² At times the label attached not to individuals but to whole groups. On 12 June 1986 Xin Ming Ri Bao reported fears in Petaling, Selangor: residents warned that ‘oily men’ could strike anytime; one, Chen Tianxing, 47, described them as ‘troublesome thieves dressed in black clothing who darkened their skin when committing crimes’—though oil was not explicitly mentioned. His home was targeted three times over two months, and suspicion fell on construction workers in the newly settled region.Footnote ¹¹³ Here the oily man became a shorthand for collective migrant menace, invoked without the need for any specific assailant.

By the 1990s the oily man was repeatedly mapped onto regional outsiders—Indonesian labourers, Thai migrants, and other foreign intruders.Footnote ¹¹⁴ On 13 January 1993 two oily man incidents were reported in Bukit Meiwa Garden, an affluent enclave off Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur—one so terrifying that a 60-year-old victim with a heart condition collapsed and died. Victims claimed four men, naked but for underwear and ‘entirely covered in a layer of oil’, broke in with knives and axes, chanting in an ‘Indonesian-accented Malay’. Residents who were interviewed readily blamed the 500 to 600 Indonesian workers living nearby.Footnote ¹¹⁵ On 11 November 1999 an oily man at Bukit Batok Industrial Park A, Singapore—dressed in black underwear and ‘covered in black oil’—was arrested after hiding for six hours in a drain. The suspect, a 32-year-old Thai national, was linked to more than 35 robberies and immigration offences.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In July 2007 Lianhe Wanbao described a MacPherson break-in by a man in underwear and a T-shirt mask. A reader later called the station and linked the case to earlier oily men, claiming they originated predominantly from Indonesia.Footnote ¹¹⁷ By the turn of the millennium, oil, underwear, and burglary still marked the repertoire, but the oily man menace was amplified by anxieties about migrant labour, illegality, and the vulnerability of urban households.

Cinema and the Faustian pact: Hybridity and sorcerous bargains

Even before cinema, communities framed the oily man through various supernatural registers—for example, in 1954, as a psychopomp who shadowed the dying or as a practitioner of ‘oily chicken’ magic. Malay films in 1958 did not create this repertoire but amplified its otherworldly motifs. P. Ramlee’s Sumpah Orang Minyak (Oath of the Oily Man) fixed in memory the Faustian pact of a deformed outcast who sold his soul to the devil to become handsome, on condition that he raped 21 virgins within seven days, thereby gaining supernatural powers—invulnerability and the ability to slip away from capture when covered in oil. After 1958, press reports oscillated between worldly burglar, foreign intruder, and apprentice sorcerer—the boundary never secure. In fact, 1958 was not a rupture but a vantage point, when rumour, reportage, and film converged; modern media—press, cinema, theatre—became instruments of secular re-enchantment.Footnote ¹²² On screen, audiences consumed stylized terrors; off screen, the oily man evoked dread of sorcery and assault whenever his presence was rumoured.

From the 1960s the oily man was increasingly refracted through cinematic motifs, religious cosmologies, and competing explanatory frameworks. In 1965 Malacca, the oily man was presented both as a source of village alarm and a possible human practitioner of ‘supernatural knowledge’ (ilmu ghaib), rather than as a fully fixed supernatural being.Footnote ¹²³ This hybridity climaxed three years later in Kampong Penaga, Selangor, where the pawang cum spirit-medium Enche Mahmud claimed to have overcome an oily man who had terrorized the region. Mahmud explained that the monster was an ordinary man on the cusp of fulfilling a spiritual bargain that demanded the victimization of 44 women in exchange for otherworldly powers—an account that transparently recycled P. Ramlee’s cinematic Faustian pact.Footnote ¹²⁴ Film fiction thus returned as lived fact, authorized through Mahmud’s asserted success as the medium of a manifest spirit and through the villagers’ prayers, recasting the oily man as a force countered through spirit mediumship, prayer, and supernatural discipline. The figure endured not as fixed spectre but as a node where cinema supplied narratives, participants sustained them as truth, and local religious and communal frameworks sought to discipline it.

The oily man was also recast through the idiom of apprenticeship and pact, confirming the afterlife of cinematic motifs. In 1978, Sin Chew Jit Poh, reporting on a spate of oily man sightings in Kampong Tan Miau, Kota Tinggi, explained that ‘these oily men, who possess strange arts, must undergo forty days of cultivation before their skills are perfected, after which they will be unstoppable. Judging from the behaviour of this current group of oily men, however, their training is not yet mature—when committing crimes, they still leave behind certain traces.’Footnote ¹²⁵ The vocabulary of ‘cultivation’ and ‘maturity of training’ positioned the oily man within the repertoire of sorcerous bargains: a novice whose pact remained incomplete. As in the films, the logic assumed a trade-off between supernatural power and human predation. This schema of staged empowerment—cultivation, sacrifice, invulnerability—shows how the cinematic motif of the devil’s pact continued to shape rumour, recycled not as allegory but as explanation.

Reform, expansion, and elastic afterlives

By the 1990s, Malay-language newspapers increasingly sought to contain the oily man by reclassifying him as superstition, reflecting the growing influence of the dakwah movement in Malaysia and Singapore over the preceding decade.Footnote ¹²⁶ Reformist commentary cast kampong ghosts not as menaces but as distractions from true faith. A 1997 Berita Harian piece mocked the oily man’s evidentiary emptiness—‘not a single drop of oil ever found’—and grouped him with the pontianak as backward superstitions to be transcended. Ramadan was invoked as frame: Malays were urged to abandon ghostly fears for Quranic discipline.Footnote ¹²⁷ By the late twentieth century, the Malay press rarely portrayed the oily man as myth, panic, or spectacle, but as a sign of that which obstructed rationality, modernity, and Islamic progress, thereby disciplining the repertoire within a reformist horizon. This narrowing reflected how, in the wake of Islamic resurgence, ghostly fears could be recast as symptoms of superstition and insufficient religious discipline.

Yet beyond this reformist narrowing, Chinese-language reportage in the 1990s and 2000s continued to multiply the oily man’s forms. In Pontian, Johor, in 1993, a Malay mother reported seeing eyes gleaming in the dark; a local bomoh identified the intruder as a water ghost seeking her child’s life to reincarnate. Residents described doors rattling at night and a slick figure with unnaturally large eyes and a fishy smell, leaving behind ‘slippery residue’. Pursued to the river, it vanished in a ‘whirlpool’. Reports variously identified him as water spirit, child-ghost, pontianak, or oily man, depending on the idiom of interpretation. A recent spate of drownings among illegal Indonesian migrant labourers in the same river lent the haunting further resonance, interpreted as the restless dead of outsiders intruding into local space.Footnote ¹²⁸ Demonological tropes of spirit-substitution familiar from Chinese lore were thus redeployed to explain both the figure and these deaths. Such tropes were not new to this period, but drawn from a familiar religious vocabulary through which Chinese-language reportage made supernatural events legible to its readership.

Where reformist Malay commentary sought to narrow the repertoire, Chinese-language reportage moved in the opposite direction, actively expanding it. At one level it repeated the cinematic idiom of the Faustian pact. In response to oily man sightings in Kampung Sempalit, Raub, Pahang, in 2001, reports noted that ‘according to Malay folklore, those who practise black magic must sacrifice boys and girls in order to attain invulnerability and the ability to fly’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Yet other Malay interviewees offered different rationalizations. Abdullah Saad, head of the Kampung Sempalit Village Security Committee, suggested the oily man was ‘deliberately disturbing villagers to test his supernatural powers’, while a Kelantanese teacher described him as ‘an Indonesian sorcerer who crossed the sea to make a living’.Footnote ¹³⁰ In this idiom the oily man was not merely prowler but esoteric experimenter and transnational menace. Where the Malay press narrowed, the Chinese press diversified, sustaining the repertoire in multiple directions.

By the turn of the millennium the oily man was less a fixed figure than a repertoire in motion—watery revenant, prowler, child-like familiar, pontianak-linked predator, myth-historical sorcerer, or fetish-object. Journalists amplified these contradictions, staging the very uncertainty that sustained the myth. This elasticity was most vividly displayed in Segamat, Johor, in 2002. Rumours spread that an oily man had to harass 40 unmarried girls to strengthen his sorcery, triggering panic: families fled, bamboo stalks were placed outside windows (likely informed by Chinese demonological practice), while volunteer patrols mobilized by the police took to the streets.Footnote ¹³¹ Days later a Kuala Lumpur bomoh staged a midnight exorcism before villagers, policemen, journalists, and television crews. A Malay girl was deployed as bait; during the ritual the bomoh cast a net over her, whereupon her body shook, and her expression contorted before she collapsed into unconsciousness. At that moment a grotesque anthropomorphic figure appeared in a jar of coffee, which the bomoh brandished as proof of capture, before throwing the bottle into the river. Villagers, ‘[b]elieving the oily man had been subdued, enjoyed their most peaceful night’s sleep in weeks, free at last from the fear of harassment’.Footnote ¹³²

Segamat also showed how far the repertoire could stretch. For the first time the figure appeared not as male predator but as a ‘female oily ghost’, a gender inversion that unsettled earlier terrors. Upon capture, it was described as a ‘wooden doll-like human figure, about a foot tall’, recalling lore on child-ghosts, while its ‘bald head and swollen belly’ were taken by villagers as signs of ‘a ghost of a woman who had killed herself while pregnant’, drawing the incident into the orbit of pontianak traditions.Footnote ¹³³ Three repertoires—sexual menace (rapist oily man), child-like appearance (miniaturization), reproductive menace (pontianak)—were collapsed into a single apparition. The dramatis personae—bomohs—were indisputably Malay, yet its ritual grammar was noticeably hybrid: possession of a human intermediary formed the evidentiary hinge, drawing on a well-documented Chinese religious lexicon of spirit interrogations (kaozhao 考召) through human bodies, though here the entity was materialized into a vessel rather than questioned.Footnote ¹³⁴ By the early 2000s the oily man was no longer just the kampong rapist of 1950s lore but an elastic label through which disparate logics—Islamic reformist, Malay supernatural, Chinese demonological, and media spectacular—could be assembled.

Mythic elaborations broadened the repertoire by tying the oily man to wider cosmologies of reproduction and myth-history. On 16 November 2005, following reports that a female nurse was raped by an oily man in Kuala Lumpur, the Xin Ming Ri Bao carried a story situating him within Malay sorcery: initiates were said to sit naked beneath a banana tree for a hundred days to seal a pact with evil spirits, thereby gaining powers to slip through walls and steal from homes. The rape of virgin women was also described as central to their practice.Footnote ¹³⁵ The banana tree—a staple of pontianak lore—thus linked the oily man to a perversion of reproduction and the restless dead.Footnote ¹³⁶ Later retellings stretched the repertoire still further. In 2015, when reporting on the Sar Kong Vigilante Corps’ efforts to protect its kampong from oily men, a journalist traced the latter’s origin to a Sumatran missionary who had once offended a sultan, been executed, and left behind books detailing the ‘method’ of creating an oily man.Footnote ¹³⁷ Almost certainly a reworking of the Sejarah Melayu tale of Tuan Jana Khatib—the Pasai mystic executed by the jealous sultan of Singapura after demonstrating his powers before the queen—the story shows how older narratives were readily grafted onto the oily man.Footnote ¹³⁸ Myth here did not stabilize the repertoire but continually recycled and recombined it.