For starters, the Malagasy believe their ancestors live on in the afterworld, communicating with the living through spirit possession, taboos, and other means. The Malagasy hold to the inexorable forces of destiny, so much so that in former times babies born on unlucky days were put to death by, among other horrific practices, placing them alive in anthills. Some of these creatures are benign, many nefarious. Some are human, many decidedly not. Most sound mythical to the outsider, but some are possibly all too real.
Superstition has a long pedigree in Madagascar.
Before Christianity took hold of the country in the 19th century, many rural Malagasy revered pagan idols such as this one. Ghosts of the dead To the Malagasy, the ancestors are protective spirits if you treat them well, but angatra, or ghosts of the dead, are something else entirely. The Betsimisaraka, one of the island's 18 officially recognized tribes, have a particular dread of the angatra, which are said to haunt the graves of the individuals to whom they once belonged and can cause living persons who offend them to fall ill or suffer misfortunes. Loud talking and laughing is said to be particularly objectionable, and no Betsimisaraka would tread near a grave at night or even build a house too near a gravesite for fear of angering the angatra. Some of these ghosts of the dead are known as kinoly.