A knee-high, hairy, ill-tempered creature of Zulu and Xhosa tradition — a water sprite in the oldest tellings, but in modern South Africa overwhelmingly a sent thing: a tokoloshe does not simply wander into a home, it is dispatched to one by someone wishing the household harm. That social dimension — the entity as a weapon in a grudge — distinguishes it from nearly everything else in this archive.
It can make itself unseen (by swallowing a pebble, in the classic account), and its documented behaviors range from poltergeist mischief to night assaults: pressure on the chest, pinch-pattern bruising, and the paralysis file the archive cross-references, with appropriate caution, to sleep phenomena worldwide.
The defense is famous enough to be a national idiom: beds raised on bricks — one per leg, sometimes three — to put the sleeper above the tokoloshe's reach. Furniture retailers in South Africa have historically stocked accordingly. The archive does not laugh at load-bearing folklore.