The radio show’s first caller began his story:
“The owner of a company that screens movies at temple fairs and outdoor festivals received a phone call from a man named Vinai to show ghost films at a Buddhist temple fair near Korat. When he arrived, the owner met Vinai, who asked him to screen the movies behind the temple. While the films were playing that night for an audience of 50 or 60 people, the projectionist noticed some women in really old-fashioned clothes and wondered why they were dressed that way. That night, the projectionist slept at the temple. The monks woke him up the next morning, asking why he’d shown films behind the temple—no one had asked him to do so. The monks were perturbed because some people had died under mysterious circumstances nearby. So the projectionist told them about Vinai. The old mortician at the temple, who prepared the bodies for cremation, then showed the projectionist a memorial plaque for a dead man named Vinai...”
And so began another eerie evening of ghost stories on one of Thailand’s most popular radio shows—‘Shock Radio’ on 102 FM. Hosted by Kapol ‘Pong’ Thongplub from the witching hour until 3am every Saturday and Sunday, the programme mostly involves callers sharing tales of the supernatural which they’ve personally experienced, or heard from friends and family members.
Most of the stories deal with traditional Thai spectres such as phi pop—a supernatural parasite that possesses people—and phi kraseu (‘filth ghost’), the villainess in many Thai horror movies. This ghoul, which flies around rice fields at night, has a hideous female face and a flashing green or red light in its head, while its body consists of dangling intestines. Its staple diet is blood, human excrement and the entrails, placentas and foetuses of pregnant women.
Since its first broadcast in 1992, the programme has built up an audience of more than 100,000 listeners per night. Before allowing callers on the air, Pong and his staff first screen the calls. Although there is a long tradition in Thailand of comedic ghost movies starring such satirical phantoms as ‘Miss Sexy Ghost’ and ‘Miss Universe Ghost’, the Shock Radio programmers are only interested in the hell-and-hair-raising tales. Listeners sometimes call in with anecdotes about aliens and paranormal phenomena, but mostly they tell spectral stories from all over Thailand.
One of the most repeated tales has become an urban legend around the country’s universities. “Two students are roommates, and one of them goes out at night to buy some food,” shock-jock Pong told me. “He ends up getting cut in half by some psychopath, but his ghost feels guilty about not bringing back the food, so he goes back home. The ghost’s roommate answers the door and sees his dead friend’s upper torso floating there holding a bag of noodles for him.”
Such tales, far-fetched as they seem, say a lot about the Thai sense of friendship, love of food and especially their faith in the spirit realm. As a matter of conjecture, Pong reckons that about 80 per cent of Thai people, particularly in rural areas, believe in the supernatural. One Thai friend, when asked about this, said many locals are unsure about the supernatural but, hedging their bets, are unwilling to say they are disbelievers.
The radio programme is also helping to keep the spirit of oral storytelling alive in Thailand. This is an age-old tradition that mostly relies on tales of the supernatural. In turn, this tradition has spawned countless comic books known as phi saam baht (‘three-baht ghost stories’, the Thai equivalent of the ‘penny dreadful’), and a lot of music, from northeastern folk tunes to indie rock. Vasit Mukdavijitr, one of Thailand’s most influential underground rockers, is a regular listener of Shock Radio. Some of his strange experiences on the island of Koh Chang inspired the creepy ballad ‘Death Star’ he wrote for Daytripper’s second album, Pop Music.
“I was walking along this dark beach with my girlfriend when these ghostly hands appeared out of nowhere and, I don’t remember this, but my girlfriend said I freaked out and tried to attack her. But I don’t know for sure. I was kind of drunk that night.”
Later in their bungalow, his girlfriend saw ‘strange colourful shapes appear’ just as the singer himself was spooked by a huge, seven-legged spider crawling up the wall. “My auntie told me that seven-legged spiders are signs of the Buddhist devil,” said Vasit.
In addition to contributing a few classics to the growing genre of Asian horror—such as Nang Nak and the original version of The Eye (partly set and shot in Thailand by Hong Kong brothers Danny and Oxide Pang)—the Thai pantheon of the supernatural was also director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s main muse. In 2010, he became the first Thai to ever win the world’s most coveted film award: the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A profound meditation on science and reincarnation, cinema and mortality, and love and time travel, Loong Boonmee Raluek Chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) is a witch’s cauldron that boils over with surreal and supernatural elements such as scarlet-eyed monkey phantoms and a scene between a lonesome princess and a libidinous catfish whose whiskers tickle her fantasies. In his acceptance speech at Cannes, the director thanked the “all the ghosts and spirits of Thailand. They make it possible for me to be here.” The Jury Director, Tim Burton, called the film “a beautiful strange dream that you don’t see much of anymore”.
Some of the stories aired on Shock FM are just as bizarre. The callers are anywhere from seven to 75 years old. But the majority are teenagers. For many college students, the show is a thrilling diversion from late-night studying. Anchana recalled how, in her student nursing days, the students in her faculty played pranks on each other based on stories they’d heard on Shock Radio.
“A friend and I switched off the lights in a lab where some of the students were studying, and where they had dead babies floating in jars. We put surgeons’ masks over our faces, pulled our hair down over our eyes, and shuffled around the room like zombies, moaning, ‘Give us our children back.’ The other students started screaming. But after we switched the lights on, we saw that the babies were all floating upside down—completely the opposite of how they usually were. Playing jokes like that is bad luck.”
Chulalongkorn University is Thailand’s oldest and most venerable institution of higher learning. Consistently ranked in the top 20 of all Asian universities for its research facilities and international programmes, the institution has, over the course of a century, produced influential statesmen, award-winning scientists and great artists, authors and tycoons. In the Faculty of Science, however, freshman students are advised not to use the front stairway in the White Building (the faculty’s oldest structure), because corpses once used for studying medicine used to be buried there. In the Faculty of Political Science, the main icon which students and staff pray to is the Black Tiger God. Freshmen students should not have their photos taken with the statue of the ‘Serpent King’ (Phaya Nak) from Buddhist lore in the Faculty of Art, for fear they may not graduate. Conversely, graduating students are urged to get their photos taken at this auspicious place.
These strange beliefs and superstitions are not secrets whispered among the students and faculty. No, they are all included in an official history book on the university that I edited for them in 2010.
Among the younger generation, old traditions may be dying a slow death, but their devotion to animism is very much alive. One of my former colleagues, Lek, a 25-year-old woman with a dyed-red bob, told me, “I’m not going to celebrate the Loy Krathong festival this year by putting a banana-leaf float in the water, but by floating my brain in alcohol.” Then the smile faded and she said more seriously, “But I always pray to the ‘Goddess of Water’ before I go swimming or I might have an accident.”
Such beliefs also have a more practical value. In The Damage Done: Twelve Years Of Hell In A Bangkok Prison, Warren Fellows said that most of the Thai inmates did not crack the way the Westerners did. He attributed this to their ability to meditate and their faith in reincarnation and the spirit realm.
But the host of Shock Radio isn’t that concerned about the serious side of the supernatural and whether the stories set off his bullshit detector. “The show is about entertainment,” said Pong, who also co-hosts the weekly TV show Chuamong Pitsawongse (‘The Hour of Supernatural Encounters’) on Channel 7 every Tuesday night.
During the radio show’s reign of terror, Pong and his crew have generated more volts of shock value by using a mix of theme songs from famous Thai horror movies, and sound effects of everything from villainous chuckles and bloodcurdling screams to excerpts from a CD titled Demoniac Soundscapes. But for the most part, the emphasis remains on the anecdotes shared by the callers, which seem anything but rehearsed. After six or seven of them have recited their spooky stories, Pong reads some of the emails and other tales sent in by listeners. Usually, they receive more than a 100 emails per week.
In 1999, Pong opened the Shock Pub near the Chatuchak Weekend Market. Five years later he closed that down and moved into a much bigger venue on Ramintra Road, near the expressway and the Tesco-Lotus on Ladphrao Road. Above the Shock Khao Tom Phi Restaurant and Pub (khao tom phi is a ghostly version of ‘rice porridge’) sits a bust of the horror-movie villain Freddy Krueger lit by a spotlight. On the menu are a variety of specialties like ‘The Shock Khao Pat’ (a thermonuclear version of fried rice); a snakehead fish that comes served in a tiny black coffin; and the ‘Headless Ghost’ (shrimp heads fried in garlic).
In the back of the restaurant is the ‘Shock Gallery’. Bloodied with red light and air-conditioned to the freezing point of a morgue, the gallery has a boy’s ‘severed’ head dangling from the roof and a Grim Reaper-esque figure hanging from steel bars. It also displays dozens of photos purported to be phantom sightings. Some are sketchy at best. The fog shrouding the spire of a Buddhist temple at night could be, well, fog, or an abortion from a film-processing lab. Other images give credence to the incredible. Take, for instance, the snapshot of a car wreck and what looks like a ghostly figure emerging from it.
Many of the images were shot when the crew from Shock Radio went out hunting for phantoms at haunted hospitals, hotels and houses in and around Bangkok. Usually, Pong said, they survey the place first before taking a group of listeners there and doing live reports via mobile phone.
One night, they visited a derelict house in the Rangsit district of Bangkok that is supposedly the haunt of two ghostly lovers. Urban legend has it that the couple moved in there against the wishes of their parents and later committed suicide together.
“A young Thai actress was with us, and she went crazy inside the house,” said Pong. “We think the female ghost got inside her and made her jerk around and speak in this strange voice. It took seven of us to control her. When we finally got her out of the house and a few blocks down the street, she came out of this trance and said she couldn’t remember a thing about what had happened.”
Pong’s researcher for both the radio and TV shows, Kohprew na Ratchaburi, who also works as a DJ at the pub and restaurant, said the ghost-hunting expeditions have caused the show lots of trouble. “Some of our listeners hear the reports and then they go and visit these places, too. Sometimes the teenagers get into fights with other gangs and we’ve heard reports that thieves have also showed up later on to rob people. That’s why we’ve now been going to other nearby provinces and we also always take a policeman with us.”
To celebrate the show’s 13th anniversary, they released a DVD titled The Reality Shock in which 13 people agreed to spend 13 hours in 13 different spots allegedly infested with spirits. Some of the contestants, said Kohphrew, could not handle the experience and left early. It wasn’t what they saw—Hollywood has given us an overblown version of the occult—so much as what they felt.
“It’s very difficult to get the supernatural on videotape, but a lot of the time when we’re out there, it’s just the atmosphere, this horrible feeling of dread, that gets to me,” he said.
The DVD cover proclaims that watching it will reveal ‘13 ways to meet ghosts’, many of them based on ancient Siamese superstitions such as smearing your eyelids with the ash from a cremated corpse, or covering your face with a death shroud. Kohprew said the reality show was a precursor to a feature-length ghost story he and Pong are scripting, loosely based on the five CDs and anthologies of weird tales they’ve compiled from their radio show.
In all his years of hosting the radio and TV shows, and reporting from graveyards and abandoned hospitals, Pong said the creepiest experience was when they paid a midnight visit to the shrine for Thailand’s most famous wraith, Mae Nak, at the Buddhist temple nicknamed after her on Sukhumvit Soi 77. They were there with director Nonzee Nimibutr, whose 1999 film, Nang Nak—about a woman who died in childbirth in 19th-century Bangkok—is still one of the highest-grossing Thai films of all time and a cult phenomenon in the genre of ‘Asian horror’.
“The minute we lit some joss-sticks to pay respect to her, this big wind came up,” said Pong. “It suddenly stopped when we planted them in the ground. Later on, I tried to play the theme music for the film on the show. But the tape didn’t work, so I gave it to a technician, and he ended up taking it home with him. A few weeks later, he died in a motorcycle accident. At his funeral, I spoke with his widow. She told me that she’d had all sorts of nightmares about Nang Nak, who said she wanted to take him away to the spirit world.”