Krasue (กระสือ): Thai Ghost Folklore, Variants and Films

The Krasue (กระสือ) is a nocturnal female spirit of Southeast Asian folklore. It appears as the floating, disembodied head of a woman with her internal organs still attached and trailing from the neck [1], [13]. In Thai belief it looks like an ordinary person by day, then leaves its body at home at night and travels as a reddish or, more often, greenish light [2], [13]. It belongs to folklore and popular belief, and it has regional cousins such as the Ahp of Cambodia, the Kasu of Laos and the Malay penanggalan [1], [3].

Key facts

What is a Krasue in Thai folklore?

English-language references describe the Krasue as a floating head, usually of a young and beautiful woman, with the organs still attached below it [1]. It has no lower body and hovers above the ground [1]. The organs usually include the heart, the stomach and a length of intestine, which stands for the ghost's voracious nature [1].

The Thai-language Wikipedia entry gives a slightly different picture. It calls the Krasue a kind of ghost believed to possess women, most often elderly ones, and fond of raw and filthy things [2]. Such a woman is said to go out from early evening through the night and to return to her body near dawn [2]. By day she looks like anyone else, but is said to behave oddly: avoiding eye contact, staying quiet, keeping to herself and sometimes disliking bright light [2].

That same entry notes that the Krasue is normally said not to harm people. When it meets someone it floats away, though if angered it is said to hold a grudge [2]. Other accounts describe it attacking cattle and chickens at night and drinking their blood [1]. The two descriptions sit side by side in the folklore.

How did the familiar picture of the Krasue take shape?

Thai Wikipedia says that Phraya Anuman Rajadhon defined the Krasue as an old woman's ghost with only a head and glowing intestines, with no other organs [2]. According to the same entry, the now-familiar version with a heart and lungs comes from an imagined drawing by Thawee Wisanukorn (ทวี วิษณุกร) on the poster for the 1973 film Krasue Sao [2]. The Thai outlet The Standard likewise says the 1973 film created the "head and entrails" image of the Krasue that Thai audiences still hold [17]. Anuman Rajadhon established that spirits of this kind were not represented in paintings or drawings; English Wikipedia adds that most of their contemporary iconography comes from Thai films that became classics [6].

Thai Wikipedia adds that people of earlier times called the ghost Phi Lak Sai before the name Krasue became usual [2].

Where does the Krasue's glowing light come from?

Anuman Rajadhon described the Krasue as accompanied by a luminescent, will-o'-the-wisp-like glow [1]. Thai accounts record the light as a large ball, red in some tellings and mostly a faint green [2]. One proposed natural explanation is methane burning above marshy ground [1].

That explanation is contested. A renewable-energy researcher at King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Associate Professor Sirintornthep Towprayoon, has argued that rotting matter in fields does not release enough methane to ignite. The researcher adds that any flame would stay on the surface of the material and would not float [1], [2]. The same sources also point out that when a human head is removed, the heart, lungs and intestines do not come away with it [1], [2].

English Wikipedia records a 2014 case in Ayutthaya where red lights over a rice field drew crowds of teenagers; the landowner said the lights came from floating lanterns used to scare birds [1].

What does the Krasue eat, and why do the taboos mention newborns?

In folk belief the Krasue is cursed with constant hunger. English Wikipedia lists blood, raw flesh, and in the absence of those, feces or carrion [1]. Thai Wikipedia adds that the ghost likes raw, fishy food and filth, and says the scent of fresh blood after a birth is thought to draw it toward the new mother or infant [2]. The anthropologist Robert Textor called it the "filth ghost" in 1973, a label that Benjamin Baumann says the national film image of the ghost plays down [13].

Attributed household customs

These are reported as folk practice, not as methods that work.

• Thorns under the house. Thai Wikipedia says villagers put jujube thorns under the stilt house where there were gaps, because the Krasue is believed to fear having its intestines snagged [2]. English Wikipedia says house owners built spiky fences or grew spiky bamboo for the same reason [1].
• The laundry taboo. The belief holds that the ghost wipes its mouth on cloth left out overnight, leaving spotted stains. Villagers said that boiling the stained cloth would scald its mouth until it begged them to stop [2]. English Wikipedia gives the stains as blood and excrement and says clothes were therefore not left hanging out at night [1].
• Cambodian customs. In Cambodian belief about the Ahp, relatives of a pregnant woman set thorny branches around the house, and after the birth they bury the cut placenta far away so the spirit cannot find it [1].

How does a person become a Krasue in the belief?

Accounts of the origin differ. According to English Wikipedia, one Thai version holds that a woman who sinned or acted fraudulently in a previous life is reborn as a phut that lives on wasted or rotten food [1]. Others say a rich woman wearing black gauze round her head and neck was possessed, or that a woman learning black magic used a wrong spell [1].

Thai Wikipedia records the transmission belief: a dying Krasue cannot die until she has passed the condition on by transferring her saliva into the mouth of a descendant [2]. English Wikipedia adds that popular imagination ties the condition to relatives of women who practise witchcraft, especially daughters and granddaughters [1].

A note on suspicion

Belief that points at living women has a human cost. English Wikipedia states that women who act strangely in a community are often suspected by other villagers of becoming a Krasue at night [1]. The daytime signs in Thai sources, such as avoiding eye contact or disliking light, are traits attributed in the folklore, not a way to identify anyone.

The same pattern appears elsewhere in the region. In Bali, people sometimes attribute illness or death to a Leyak, and a traditional healer (balian) may hold a séance to name the culprit. English Wikipedia notes that revenge by the victim's family is usually counselled against [4].

Is the Krasue only Thai? Regional variants

English Wikipedia says these variants share a woman's head with organs hanging from the neck, and lists the Ahp in Cambodia, the Kasu in Laos, the Kuyang, Pok-Pok and Leyak in Indonesia, several names including penanggal in Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, ma lai in Vietnam and the manananggal in the Philippines [1]. Wikipedia's article on Thai ghosts likewise says the Krasue is shared with Cambodian, Lao and Malay cultures [5].

Cambodia: the Ahp (អាប)

English Wikipedia derives the name Ahp from a Sanskrit word, āpyati, "to cause anyone to suffer" [1]. In Cambodian folklore the Ahp is usually a woman who is half spirit and half mortal, appearing normal by day. At night she leaves her body with only her head and organs to find food, which is said to include blood, raw meat, farm animals, corpses, feces, placentas and newborns [1]. Some accounts call the Ahp a witch whose black magic went wrong. Others say she borrows a demon's power at night [1].

Thai Wikipedia adds that some presume the Krasue originated in Cambodia, from people who practised Khmer black magic and broke a taboo [2]. The Cambodian film My Mother Is Arb (also known as Krasue Mom) is based on the Ap myth and was the first film made in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge era, with the effect for the spirit reportedly made by gluing pig's entrails to a doll's head [12].

Laos and Vietnam

The Lao form is the Kasu (ກະສື), and the Vietnamese form is ma lai. The sources used here give the names only [1], [2].

Malay world: the penanggalan

English Wikipedia describes the penanggalan, or penanggal, as a nocturnal vampiric entity of Malay ghost myths, a floating woman's head with organs and entrails trailing from the neck [3]. The name comes from tanggal, "to remove or take off" [3]. In Malaysian folklore the penanggal is a mortal woman who practises black magic. To become one she must meditate in a ritual bath of vinegar, and the creature is said to soak its organs in vinegar to shrink them for re-entry, so that it smells of vinegar [3]. Traditional victims are pregnant women and young children [3].

The penanggal is mentioned in the Hikayat Abdullah, which Wikipedia dates to 1845 [3]. W. W. Skeat's Malay Magic (1900) quotes Abdullah's account, told to a European he calls "Mr. M.": a woman's head and neck fly with the intestines hanging down, she keeps vinegar in a jar to shrink them so they re-enter the body, and she dreads thorns that could catch them. Abdullah adds that he does not believe the story [18]. Thai Wikipedia says the Malay one is described with a yellow light, against the Krasue's green, and as fiercer [2].

Bali: the Leyak

The Leyak is a figure of Balinese folklore in the form of a flying head with entrails still attached, said to seek pregnant women or newborns in order to drink blood [4]. Folklore describes Leyak as humans practising black magic who haunt graveyards, feed on corpses, can turn into animals such as pigs, and have long tongues and large fangs [4]. Their "mistress" is the widow-witch Rangda, whose mask plays a part in public rituals [4].

Krahang and Phi Pop: related spirits

The Krahang (กระหัง) is a male spirit of Thai folklore that appears as a shirtless man in a loincloth who flies at night [8]. It uses two large round rice-winnowing baskets (kradong) to fly and often rides the long wooden pestle of a rice pounder [8]. It is said to haunt the same areas as the Krasue, and the two are often mentioned together [8]. A list of Thai ghosts describes the Krahang as related to the Krasue as her husband [5].

The Phi Pop (ผีปอบ) is a different ghost, described as one that eats raw meat; humans and animals can be possessed by it and their internal organs eaten [5]. A 2017 case in Kalasin Province shows how such beliefs can meet public health. After two men and several animals died, villagers blamed phi pop and hired an exorcist and a monk, with 370 households paying 124 baht each. The provincial public health office later identified the cause of death as leptospirosis and high blood pressure [5].

In August 2012, villagers in Nakhon Ratchasima blamed the Krahang for night attacks on local women, and the culprit was later found to be a drug-addicted person [8].

The Krasue in Thai language and culture

Thai Wikipedia, citing the Royal Institute, lists ways the belief has entered everyday speech and naming [2]:

• A glutton may be called "a glutton like the Krasue ghost" [2].
• A glowing mushroom is called the "Krasue mushroom" [2].
• A village in Huai Kapi subdistrict, Chonburi, once named Nong Krasue, was renamed Nong Kasem (หนองเกษม) to sound less frightening, after rumours of a sighting in B.E. 2530 (1987 CE) [2].

Thai elders used folk tales to instill beliefs in the young, and spirit stories taught children to be careful and stay at home at night [7].

Krasue in Thai film and television

The Krasue was on screen long before the recent films. The 1973 film Krasue Sao (กระสือสาว, "Ghosts of Guts Eater") with Sombat Metanee is named among the early Thai horror movies that featured her [1], [9]. A later boom followed Nonzee Nimibutr's ghost story Nang Nak (1999), based on a folkloric theme already depicted dozens of times. It earned 149.6 million baht, then the highest for a Thai film, and gave rise to a new crop of Thai horror and suspense films [9].

Tamnan Krasue and the Khmer origin story

Benjamin Baumann writes that before Tamnan Krasue (2002) the Krasue had no origin myth reaching beyond local tellings, and that older sources make no reference to Khmer culture [13]. The film, set in 1220, has a Siamese nobleman sentence a Khmer princess to death on a pyre, while a Khmer "witch" uses magic that produces the Krasue. The being then uses as its host a village girl who resembles the executed princess [13]. English Wikipedia describes this as an attempt to give a folk story a royal beginning for entertainment and commercial purposes [1].

Krasue Valentine and Inhuman Kiss

In Krasue Valentine (2006), the nurse Sao takes a job at an older Bangkok hospital. She has been left by a boyfriend because she turns into a ghost, and she does so that night [10]. Inhuman Kiss (2019) was selected by a Thai committee as the country's entry for the 92nd Academy Awards, but was not nominated [11], [16]. K. Ancuta's 2017 study in eTropic reads Krasue Valentine as one of two films that move Thai ghosts into contemporary Bangkok [19].

On television, the Krasue lakhon aired between 20 December 1994 and 21 March 1995, and a remake called Krasue Cham Sin followed in 2011 [1].

Krasue sightings in the news

English Wikipedia lists reported sightings from across Thailand since 2008, including photographs, CCTV clips and videos of lights over fields [1].

One widely reported episode came from Lopburi in October 2023. The Nation reported that villagers in Mueang and Tha Wung districts panicked after one villager said he had seen a krasue, and that the Mueang district chief, Phitsanu Praphathanan, said the figure was a chicken thief wearing a mask of an old woman with long greying hair and fangs. He told local administrators and village heads to warn residents to beware of thieves [14].

A resort owner in Saraburi who had offered a reward of 1 million baht (2023) to anyone who caught a krasue withdrew it after an official in Lopburi said that many people were searching for a krasue and that teenagers' motorbikes were disturbing residents at night. The report says the owner himself did not believe in krasue [15]. Neither report identified any woman as a krasue; the figure in the story was said to be a disguised thief [14], [15].

These accounts are news about a belief, and a reported "sighting" is a claim, not evidence about any person.