From the Archives is an ongoing series where Sticky Rice Staff Historian, Teresa Derr, takes a deep dive into the archives of Sticky Rice. We’ll travel all the way back to 1966 and into the more recent past to see how life for PCVs in Thailand has both changed… and stayed the same.
Cover image created by Nathan J. Anderson via deviantart.com
Teresa Derr, 134 YinD
I like to sing. I’ll sing any time of day, venting a range of emotions from happy to angry, complete with dance moves, drumming, and air guitars to back me up. With American songs, of course, comes the occasional whistling. And while my host family looks at me with amusement any time I break into song, the attitude changes if I start whistling.
“The ghosts!” they scold, gesturing for me to stop. “Don’t whistle!”
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There are lots of times students are creating decorations for various activities instead of learning, and my co-teacher’s classroom is the place to be for this. She’ll turn on whatever YouTube series is most popular at the moment, which is, inevitably, a ghost series. I’ll walk in to find a screen displaying clunky, animated heads with entrails trailing after them chasing after cars, women with holes in their stomachs stepping out of spirit houses, or a floating skull trying to possess someone. Being rather wimpy when it comes to scary things, I tend to gasp in fear and cover my eyes anytime a new ghost comes on screen, which makes my students laugh.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” they ask, and I’m not sure they believe me when I say no.
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Ghosts are a fact of life in Thailand. And when I run into them, at school, at home, at the Temple, or at the อบต (aw baw taw or local government office), I’m usually confused. I don’t have any frame of reference for the stories I’m hearing, the ghost-repelling advice I’m just supposed to know, or even how to figure out which ghosts are evil and which can bring me good luck. Luckily, though, I’m not the first volunteer to have these questions and several people have dug into them much more thoroughly than I could have. So, in this “From the Archives” article, I’ll be looking at some of the ghost knowledge we as volunteers have accumulated.
The most popular ghost articles written for Sticky Rice are “Thai Ghost Guide” and “On Ghosts”. The “Thai Ghost Guide” by Carissa Sutter is one of the most clicked-on articles on the site because it, very helpfully, lists the most common ghosts people might encounter in Thailand. It’s where I learned one reason people don’t like me whistling, possibly:
Phi Peta – A hungry ghost. It is said that anyone that is more preoccupied with material attachments and exclude the spiritual will be reborn as a Peta once they die. They have a giant belly and a mouth as small as the eye of a needle with an enormous appetite for almost everything, food, money, power or sex. A Peta ghost can sometimes be heard whistling at night, looking for someone to make merit for them. This ghost is ill tempered and aggressive as they constantly remain unsatisfied.
I also know I’ll appreciate this article after I’ve done my Halloween activity at school. I can open the article up and try to match the descriptions to the ghosts my students dress up as!
“On Ghosts” by Tim Connors contains a much smaller list of ghosts, but includes a more well-rounded experience of the way ghosts co-exist with locals in Thailand. It also, thankfully for my ability to sleep at night, details the best way to deal with a Pii Graseur, the floating heads I kept seeing in videos:
1. Build a barbed wire fence around your home. Pii Graseur will avoid constructions like this because its dangling viscera may snag on the wire.
2. Find and destroy the host body. The Graseur’s host body is left alone while the head and organs float around. If the body is destroyed, the Grasuer will suffer torment before being destroyed as well.
3. Fire!!!!
Or, of course, call a witch doctor. Thailand is a community; no one has to deal with ghosts alone!
There are also several ghost stories on Sticky Rice, volunteers sharing their own ghostly encounters. From way back in 1967 with Richard Davis’ Steaming-Pot Spirit, to just last year with Dito Montaña’s Chaa Thai podcast episode, it seems volunteers have always been finding ghosts as part of their service! And for every volunteer who shares their ghost story, there’s one reflecting on their time at site and mentioning convincing people they don’t believe in ghosts.
Every part of Thailand has different ghost stories and traditions that have been passed down since long before the Peace Corps even came to Thailand. Reading about them is one way to feel connected with current and past volunteers. Whatever you believe, I hope you have a wonderful Spooky Season and only meet the ghosts that bring good luck!
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