The Tchinal are man-eating ogre-spirits of Manus folklore, imagined as dwelling in the bush and the uninhabited interior away from the pile-built villages of the lagoon. Cast as devourers of the careless and the lost, they are the standing menace of Manus cautionary tales and the supernatural counterweight to the domesticated, house-bound world of the Sir Ghost. They form a class rather than a single personage, and appear without genealogy or kin in the recorded stories.