It’s that time of year again, when people walk around dressed like freaks, donning masks or slathering their faces in gothic makeup, and it’s considered normal. Like other holidays we barely understand yet have nevertheless embraced, Halloween is “celebrated” here, from nightclub theme parties to kids running around in Harry Potter costumes. But everyone knows that, in Thailand, ghosts don’t just come out on October 31st. Here, spirits are believed to be as real as the living, and it’s best not to defy these mysterious forces. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about them. In this issue we highlight some of our favorite terrifying tales that have been passed down throughout the generations.

The Red Elevator

This horror story is based on real events that took place at Thammasat University during the infamous October 14 incident, when armed soliders stormed the campus while students and teachers took shelter inside the university. Some of them went to hide in classrooms, and a few decided to hide in an elevator in the Faculty of Arts building. But after taking the lift upstairs, the elevator doors opened, and a group of soldiers who were waiting for them began firing their weapons, killing everybody inside. Years later, efforts were made to try and repaint the interior of the elevator, but no one could find a way to remove the blood stains, so they repainted the elevator red instead. It’s been said that those who dare take the elevator alone will see a reflection of those people who were killed inside.

Scare Score: 4 skulls

Pok Kruuu…d

Two female roommates were studying for their final exams in their dorm room late one night. One of the girls got hungry and asked her roommate if she wanted to go eat. Her roommate, however, was very sick and couldn’t get out of bed, so she decided to go out and bring back some food for her. The sick girl waited for her friend to come back, but it was getting too late and she had an exam early the next morning, so she decided to just go to sleep. Suddenly, she heard a noise down the hallway, approaching the room, “pok… kruu…d. pok… kruu…d.” The noise finally stopped in front of her door. She looked through the peephole, but there was nobody there. Then, she heard a knock on the door. It couldn’t be her roommate, since she had the key, so she waited a while before opening the door. There was still nobody there—all she found was a pack of noodles hanging on the doorknob. Wondering where her friend could be at this hour, she thought no more of it and decided to go to bed. Next morning, she found out that her roommate was murdered in the fields next to the dormitory. Her body was mutilated; all that was left attached to her body was her head. The noise that the girl heard that night? It is said to be her dead friend trying to drag her limbless body through the hallway with her chin to deliver dinner to her roommate.

Scare Score: 4 skulls

Grandma Speed

In Had Yai, Songkla province, a legend has been haunting motorcycle gangs at night for more than a decade. An old lady was killed near Wat Koak Nao in Had Yai in a hit-and-run incident, and her body was cut in half. There’s a long soi near the wat, which is a favorite among local motorcycle street racers, and whenever there’s a motorcycle race, or just anyone speeding through the soi without respecting the monastery nearby, the old lady will appear and create a crash. Motorcycle racers usually see the ghost of the old lady speeding alongside their bikes. The locals now know not to speed down the Khun Yai soi or they will meet a horrible death, just like the old lady.

Scare Score: 3 skulls

Sobbing Prison Cell

In Suphanburi in 2006, a woman was arrested and charged along with her husband for being involved in the yaba trade —although she was innocent. But both were convicted of the crime and jailed. After losing their house and money, the woman became very depressed and hung herself in the cell. A day after her suicide, inmates in the Suphanburi prison began hearing a sound of a woman crying hysterically, coming from the cell where the woman committed suicide. Many inmates reported this incident to the authorities, but the police thought they were just making trouble, as the surveillance videos revealed nothing. The dead woman’s cry, however, became increasingly noticeable over the following days, even by the authorities. The prison finally contacted the family of the dead woman and requested that a religious ceremony be held to release her soul from the prison cell. The crying then stopped.

Scare Score: 2 skulls

Red String

At Siriraj Hospital, one of Bangkok’s oldest hospitals, there’s an old story told to generations of nursing students about a man with a red string. One night a supervising nurse was in the middle of her routine checks on the nursing student trainees in different wards of the hospital. The nurse was done with her last round on that floor and got into the elevator. As the doors were closing, a man in a patient gown held them open, came inside and pressed the button for the fifth floor. It was very late at night and odd for a patient to be walking around the hospital, so the nurse asked him what he was doing walking around.

“Aren’t you scared?” she asked.

“Scared of what?”

“The ghosts,” she replied. “There are ghosts around this old hospital.”

“What are ghosts?” he asked.

“Ghosts are the souls of the dead people. They usually walk around here with a red string tied to their wrists. All the nurses here know about it,” the nurse replied.

As the elevator came to a stop on the fifth floor, the patient turned around to the nurse and said, “A red string? Like this?” He showed her his wrist that was tied with a red string before walking out and disappearing into the hallway leading to the morgue.

Scare Score: 5skulls

Air Duct Lady

After a show in a pub at a hotel, six musicians decided to book a room for the night upstairs and checked in the last available room—numbered 409. The night was going along fine as they passed the time by playing cards, until one of the musicians saw a piece of white cloth hanging from the air duct on the ceiling. So he grabbed a chair and decided to take it out, and he stepped up to remove the grill. After a peek inside, he froze, and quickly ran out of the room to the bewilderment of his friends. So another one of the guys noticed that the vent was still open, so he got up on the chair and decided to close it. Sure enough, the same thing happened to him. One by one, they went up and ran away until just two were left in the room. They both wanted to find out what the fuss was all about, so one of them held the chair as the other got up to take a look. In shock, they saw a face staring back at them with vengeful eyes. It was a head of a girl with her hair tied to the metal tubes inside the air duct. Then, over the course of the next seven days, each of the six musicians died mysteriously, one at a time, in freak accidents, until just the last two were left. Realizing their predicament, they went to a monk for help, who said that the ghost of the girl had been following them and they should make merit for her to remove this curse. The last two indeed later got into accidents but neither of them were killed. It turns out that the ghost is the spirit of a bar girl who was killed in that very hotel room. She had been decapitated and her head was hidden in the air duct with her hair tied to the metal poles inside.

Scare Score: 4 skulls

Typing Room

Back in the days when there were no computers, mobile phones or even aircon, there was a room in the Faculty of Architecture building in Chulalongkorn University where students used to go to type their work after school. The room was big and filled with desks with typewriters and tiny windows just big enough to let in a little light. A girl was finishing up her final assignment of the term in the room after everybody had gone home, but it was getting quite late and she became very tired and fell asleep behind the typewriter. The janitor did his final round of the building before closing it down for the three-month holiday, but he didn’t see her, and she didn’t hear him, so he locked the room and left the building. When the semester started again, she was found dead in the typing room. Since then, people have reported hearing the click, click, click of the typewriter when no one is in the room, and at night, you can supposedly hear the soft cry of a girl.

Scare Score: 4 skulls

Midnight Radio

This story has been told through generations of students at a university in the Northeast. The university is well-known for its haunted radio station. When students in the old days studied late at night, the only thing that kept them company was the student radio on campus, which played music to soothe the students’ stressful nights. There was a freshman who would call the radio and request the same song every night, at midnight. It went on like this until he started his second year of college—the year he committed suicide near the radio tower. His body was found at 2pm, but later, at midnight, somebody called into the station using his name and requested the same song. Everybody thought this was someone playing a practical joke, but after the DJ played back the recorded conversation on the radio, they were able to confirm that it wasn’t a prank, as the voice of the caller sounded exactly like the student who died. The calls kept coming at the same time, so the station decided to play the song at midnight every night so they wouldn’t have to answer calls from the dead student. Supposedly, the campus radio station still plays the song at midnight to this day.

Scare Score: 3 skulls

Black Clad Women

To this day, female passengers who ask to go to Wat Samien Naree at Chatuchak are told this tale. A taxi driver was about to drive his car back to the taxi station when two girls dressed in black hailed his cab. Though it was at the end of his shift, he decided to stop and pick them up. The girls told him to take them to Wat Samien Naree. Everything seemed fine until he reached the railway tracks just near the temple. As he crossed the tracks, he looked over at the temple and he saw the vague silhouettes of the girls who were riding in his taxi walking into the temple. He didn’t stop the car, there was no sound of the car door opening and there was no way the girls could have gotten out. Maybe it was his imagination, he thought, so he glanced back at the temple again. This time he could clearly see the girls—and they were missing their legs. It is believed that they were the spirits of two girls who were run over by a train while on their way to the temple. 

Scare Score: 3 skulls

Curve of 100 Bodies

There’s a sharp curve on the highway to Ubon Ratchathani, where accidents occur a few times a week, sometimes resulting in death. At the end of the curve stands a big Jamjuree tree, which is where most people end up, and it is revered by the locals as one of the most holy, as well as most haunted, places in the area. Every person that drives past this curve honks their horns all the way to the other end as a way to pay respect, and also to save their own lives. The scariest nights are those that take place on special Buddhist days (four times a month), where you can hear the sounds of screeching tires, and the sounds of car crashes, and screams and cries of the dead throughout the night—even when there isn’t a single car in sight.

Scare Score: 4 skulls

Kind-Hearted Grandma

An old Chinese uncle was doing his usual morning routine—opening up his all-purpose store, getting ready to start the business for the day. But there was a group of por teck tung volunteers gathering in front of his store, looking at something on the ground. The old man approached to see what it was all about and he saw a body of an old, white-haired skinny lady lying on the floor all curled up with a B10 coin in her hand. The old man realized that he had just seen this lady the night before when she came in just before he closed up shop and asked for a sweater to keep herself warm. With only 10 baht in her pocket, she couldn’t afford it, so he sent her away. After thinking about it, though, he felt guilty about his decision, so he decided to donate the sweater that the lady wanted to buy to charity. Later that day, his daughter came home from Bangkok to visit him. She told him about how she lost her wallet on the bus and couldn’t pay for the fee. He asked her how she was still able to make it on the bus, she said there was an old lady who said she knew her father and decided to lend her 10 baht. The old man asked what the lady looked like and his daughter said to him, “The skinny white-haired lady who used to come to your store. She also wants me to thank you for the sweater.”

Scare Score: 5 skulls

Motorway Driver

Back when the Pira Circuit Race Track was still around, kids used to go there to race their cars on weekends. The racing continued on a newly built motorway nearby. One kid in a black Volvo got into an accident, dying at the scene. The legend about freak accident victims is that the spirit will never be reborn until someone else dies and takes the person’s place. But the kids continued racing around the motorway, until something strange started happening. One night, a black Volvo sped past a kid, who took it as a challenge and gave chase. Following Volvo’s tail lights, the kid wrecked his car on a curve and was fatally injured. The legend has it that the driver of the black Volvo was then reborn, and his victim, in turn, became the ghost racer that would cause motorway racers to get into accidents.

Scare Score: 5 skulls

Baan Pisanulok

There’s a house in Bangkok where elected prime ministers get a chance to stay during their time in office—but no one dares to. The tale of the house is renowned and known through generations of politicians and authorities who have visited the house. While prepping up the meeting room to welcome delegates, a young maid at Baan Pisanulok collapsed onto the floor and her spirit was instantly turned into an old lady’s. She kept cleaning the floor and did not respond to her name, but replied with an old raspy voice, mumbling to herself about how dirty this house has become. At a political party meeting once, a member stood up in the middle of the room, and pointed to the rest of the group shouting, “What are you doing in my house?” before collapsing. Many other people have been possessed in this house and there have been incidents where people heard a stampede coming towards the house. The sound is believed to come from the statue of red horses that stands in front of the house.

Scare Score: 4 skulls