The Krasue · The Head That Flies Off at Night

What the Thai countryside fears is not ghosts but the krasue: the belief that a woman who looks ordinary by day flies out at night, her head and entrails leaving her body behind to go and feed.

In the telling, the person she fixes on dreams the same dream several nights running — someone standing at the bedside asking “may I come in” — and falls ill the next day.

The town’s remedy is a practical one: scatter thorns under the eaves, or stand the household broom upside down. Whether it works, nobody has dared to say they have not tried it.

Folklore / Nakhon Ratchasima · Thailand / Time immemorial