Note 82 — Chapter V · Magic Rites connected with the Several Departments of Nature

The power of becoming a man- or were-tiger (as it has sometimes been called), is supposed to be confined to one tribe of Sumatrans, the Korinchi Malays, many of whom are to be met with in the Malay Native States. This belief is very strongly held, and on one occasion, when I asked some Malays at Jugra how it could be proved that the man really became a tiger, they told me the case of a man some of whose teeth were plated with gold, and who had been accidentally killed in the tiger stage, when the same gold plating was discovered in the tiger’s mouth.82