Go into an older home in KwaZulu-Natal, or the Eastern Cape, or a good many places in between, and you may notice that the bed stands on bricks. Not for storage, and not for the damp. The bricks put the sleeper a hand’s breadth higher off the floor than a short creature can reach, and everybody in the house knows which creature is meant.

The tokoloshe (uthikoloshe in isiXhosa, utokoloshe in isiZulu, and a dozen spellings in English) is a small being of the rivers and the reeds. Descriptions vary by district and by who is telling it, but the common shape is a hairy, man-like thing no taller than a child, with a face like a baboon’s, strong for its size and quick. It can make itself invisible by swallowing a pebble or drinking water. It is mischievous by nature, and it is lecherous, which is why so many of the stories involve women who wake in the night. On its own it is a nuisance. The trouble starts when somebody sends it.

That is the heart of it. In the tradition the tokoloshe is a familiar: a person with ill will and the right knowledge can raise one and direct it against a neighbour, a rival, a family. Then the mischief turns to sickness, to bad luck, to children who wake screaming, to a death in the night that nobody can account for. A household that suspects it has been sent one goes to a sangoma or an inyanga, who can see it, name whoever sent it, and drive it off. The bricks are a precaution. The healer is the cure.

The name has been in print for nearly two centuries. The earliest written mention we have found is from 1833, when the Wesleyan missionary Stephen Kay noted that the Tikaloshi, as he spelt it, was spoken of much more often and more familiarly in the country he was travelling through than among the people further south. That is why this entry sits at 1833 on the timeline; the tradition is far older. By 1894 a settler writer was describing it as an evil spirit in the shape of a small man, and by 1949 an anthropologist was recording the knee-high hairy being with the baboon face that most people would describe today.

It has never stayed in the past. In 1955 the newspapers were full of it when a Natal man on trial for a string of murders claimed a tokoloshe had made him do it, and the courts have heard the name many times since, usually from the mouth of a defendant. In township slang of the 1970s, a tokoloshe was a policeman. There have been films, a good horror novel or two, and an unending supply of tabloid front pages.

The sceptical explanation for the bricks is a neat one. In a round hut with a cooking fire and a low bed, the heavier smoke and carbon monoxide settle near the floor, and a sleeper lifted above that layer is more likely to wake up. Deaths that a family blamed on a visitor in the night may have had a quieter cause, and the remedy worked either way.

That explanation does not tell you what it was that a great many people say they saw at the foot of the bed. It is worth remembering that for the people who put the bricks there, the tokoloshe is not a curiosity. It is a reason to be careful who you cross.