The kaftar is a decrepit female spirit, half-hag and half-ghoul, in the demonology shared by the Tsakhur with the wider Daghestani world. She keeps to the marginal and abandoned places, the watermill after the grinding is done, tumbledown ruins, and the graveyard, and she is linked with the disturbance and gnawing of corpses, a trait that betrays the name's origin in a word for the hyena. Travelers caught out alone at night were her likeliest victims, and her presence was one reason such places were shunned after dark. Sources record considerable local variation, some communities blurring her with the witch or with the al, and her cult is attested only through cautionary belief rather than any propitiatory rite.