The tchinal is a man-eating ogre of the bush and mangrove, a stock figure of Manus narrative and of the fears instilled in children. For the sea-dwelling Manus, whose houses stood on piles over the lagoon, the forested interior was the domain of danger, and the tchinal personifies that danger as a devouring monster. Sources treat it less as an object of cult than as a being of folktale and admonition, distinct from the ancestral ghosts who governed everyday religious life.