Thailand is a country obsessed with ghosts, known as phii. Here at WoWasis, we’ve learned never to joke about them, because joking about them is considered to bring on bad luck to the speaker as well as all listeners. And never joke about a ghost before your girlfriend enters the shower, especially at night: everyone knows that ghosts love to hang out in showers. But there’s more to worry about.

Krasue (กระสือ ), sometimes also spelled  Kra-Sue or Kra-Suea, is a malevolent spirit that appears at the night and appears to be a beautiful woman with her internal organs hanging down from the neck, trailing below the head toward the ground, and dripping blood. She is probably the most feared ghost in Thailand, and has a predilection for eating babies, sometimes right out of the womb. She has fanged teeth, and is enamored of eating the placentas of pregnant women, which she can reach with her elongated tongue. For this reason, country women cover their doorways with thorny vines, which will prevent Krasue from entering the house. She also dines on human excrement and dead bodies, which is why Thai people don’t like to live adjacent to cemeteries, always a source of food for Krasue. Presumably, she hangs out in toilets, too. 

She crosses borders, and is known in Isaan Thailand and Laos as Kasu, in Cambodia as Ap (អាប), and in Vietnam as Ma Da. No cemetery or outhouse in Southeast Asia is apparently immune. As we mentioned before, travelers to Thailand will find out soon enough that ghosts are no laughing matter. More than one punter has made the mistake of inviting a Thai lady up to his room, only to have her leave angrily (and prematurely) when he joked about a ghost in the bathroom. Now you know why.