Horrifying, but oddly compelling and -dare I say? even beautiful – new photograph of the gold-plated baby foetus charms discovered in a Bangkok suitcase this week.

Man arrested smuggling gold-plated baby foetuses out of Thailand

Barely a week after the discovery of a bag full of humans skulls by a Bangkok canal – stolen for use in black magic -comes another macabre bust. A man has been arrested with six gold-plated human foetuses. The man had purchased the roasted dead baby foetuses, known in Thai as “khumarn tong” and believed to possess incredibly strong powers to control peoples’ minds. They were plated in gold – whether to disguise them or as part of the ritual is unclear. The man told police he had paid US $6500 for the dead babies and was planning on taking them to Taiwan to sell on the internet.

It is not clear at this stage where the bodies originally came from.

Such cases are not unusual in Thailand, where dead foetuses are widely considered to be powerful talismans.

‘Korea cracks down on flesh capsules’

In case slathering snail entrails over your face wasn’t disgusting enough, the Koreans have found a new – and macabre – secret to staying young:

 

SEOUL, May 8 – South Korea has intensified a crackdown on the smuggling of capsules from China containing the powdered flesh of dead babies, taken by some as a cure for disease or a way to boost sexual performance, a customs official said on Tuesday.

Read the full article here.

Bangkok: Headshot, part one.

 

Five partially crushed and drilled human skulls were found dumped in a bag by a canal in Rangsit, in Bangkok’s Northern suburbs, this week. The skulls had been stolen from a temple morgue and were being used for the production of “skull powder”  used in amulets in the black magic trade.

First, there was snakes on a plane…

And now, there is….

 

The ghosts of airports past

Bangkok is full of bizarre, occult sites – strange temples with unexpected caves or pits of snapping crocodiles, or bizarre statues (golden David Beckham, Teenage Mutant Turtles in Hell…)

This blog has already explored the sites of Bangkok’s infamous hauntings, from the body snatcher temples to suburban homes of the damned. But it is not only creepy old mansions and ancient temples that have resident spirits. So does gleaming new Suvarnabhumi airport. Yes, even as you touch down in Thailand the weirdness begins.

Construction of the airport was holted after myserious appearances by a blue-faced old man, called Poo Ming, spooked construction workers  in 2006 after crashes on the motorway leading up to the then-construction site. Veiled figures appeared around the airport – and vanished – and when ninety nine monks were called in for a purification ceremony one began speaking in tongues, announcing himself as Poo Ming, and demanding to be placated with a shrine of his own.

With Thailand’s four billion US dollar new showpiece for modernisation at risk, what was a little spirit house extra? The authorities agreed.

With a four a.m. flight and time to kill, I decided to go searching for the airport spirit at his home (next to the Airport Novotel, about ten minutes walk from the main terminal exit Gate Four).

Disappointingly, the shrine is a fairly conventional Buddhist structure. I had hoped for an image of the ghost himself, but the offerings and artwork at the temple seemed much like those at any other Thai temple. A nearby shrine though, at the Aviation Broadcasting Authority of Thailand, did feature this creepy waxwork monk (or is it??).

Still, it was nice to take one final walk through the tropical night, and breathe in the fragrant incense smoke one last time, before leaving the land of ghosts.

Spirit Lamp

Old graveyard

Sitting almost underneath the Skytrain tracks at Chong Nonsi lies the remains of Bangkok’s spookiest and atmospheric cemetery. As I reported previously on the blog, much of it has already been destroyed and the bodies disinterred and transferred, to make way for construction of a glitzy condo tower that will be come Thailand’s tallest building (seemingly a  prime scenario for one of the horror movies the country pumps out so enthusiastically).

But the Chinese cemetery is still there, usually behind locked gates. I happened to be passing at midday though and the gates had been flung over to make access to an impromptu foodcourt in the carpark. It was a good opportunity to look around.

The site must have very poor drainage (not great for a graveyard, surely?) because much of it was flooded, lending it an even eerie, forlorn atmosphere. I was a little nervous too as I had heard it was a notorious haunt for stray dogs -and sure enough I saw a pack of about a dozen of them dozing on a sunny grave.

Other than them, the Skytrains whizzing by and the laughter echoing from the nearby foodcourt, I had the graves all to myself.

Wasps nest?

Whenever life seems boring and predictable…

Think of this. A “centaur skeleton” on display at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Trouble in Paradise

Lamma is Hong Kong’s loveliest getaway, a laidback tropical island with fields and quaint hamlets and a population of fisherfolk and wealthy expat hippies. The island is a blissful breath of calm – there are no highrises, no cars, just the gentle whirring of the island’s windfarm turbine (and belching smoke from the coal-fueled power plant but lets overlook that for a moment). Huge black butterflies flutter through the undergrowth and waves gently lap. But there is trouble in paradise -a canine serial killer, no less. The Lamma dog-killer has struck seven times so far, leaving a furry corpse at each.

Evil has come to Eden and no dog is safe.

Modern day monsters

Photographer Rankin and artist Damien Hirst, two of the leading lights of Britain’s elite cool/creative scenes, have collaborated on an inspiring new exhibition titled “Monsters & Myths”. The high fashion reworkings of mythical figures are currently on show in London and (soon) L.A. and can also be seen in the current issue of “Dazed and Confused” magazine.

 

Happy Halloween

Ghostworld

On the streets around my home, I have noticed recently scenes like this; offerings of fruit or incense left on the curbside, or clusters of people throwing papers into fiery cannisters. I wondered if this had always been going on and I had never noticed, or if there had been a sudden spike.

Then I realised – its August. O-Bon in Japan, and in the Chinese world too, the festival of the ghosts. This is when the deceased come back to visit their descendants, and those who died alone with no-one to claim them fly back mournfully to haunt the living.

I patted myself on the back for my recent coffin donation at a Bangkok ‘body snatcher’ temple, saving one soul from this fate with a proper burial and at the same time topping up my karma,( much depleted from my run-in with the Causeway Bay Tiger ladies.)

On Lamma Island the local temple was especially decorated, with paper figures of white cranes (the standard funery symbol) and also lanky legged horses, ridden by paper ghosts. In Japan, people leave “eggplant horses” – vegetables propped up with four chopsticks – outside their homes for a similar purpose, to provide the spirits with a way to ride home to the Underworld.

I also noticed for the first time this grimacing giant, seemingly specially decorated for the occassion. I have never seen something like this at a Chinese shrine before; he looked like a Thai yaksha.

 

 

Offerings to the dark god

Shrine to Rahu, the god of eclipses (here seen swallowing the sun) and dark things, with characteristic offerings of black foods and flowers.

Temple of the bodysnatchers

Not far from the bright lights of Silom, the “Bodysnatcher Temple” sits at Sam Yan subway station. It is the headquarters for Ruamkatanyu, an organisation started from the purest of motives that has somehow become embroiled in seedy and macabre goings-on.

The organization was founded by Chinese immigrants to provide burials to the city’s poor, and later as a kind of quasi-emergency services to help accident and fire victims, in a city where government assistance was inadequate. But somewhere along the line, the organization’s name began to be tarnished by corruption. With a “prize” of one thousand baht for every body found and delivered to the city’s morgues, the organisation began to turn up at accident scenes to pillage for the dead. Not only that, but they would enter into virtual warfare with their rivals, the Chinatown-based Poh Teck Tung Foundation (who also have an elaborate temple on their home turf). The groups of “volunteers” would wait by their CV radios, listening in for accident reports, before screaming off to beat the police to accident sites. If they crossed paths, they would open fire on each other in the ‘battle’ over the bodies waiting in the wreckage. The organizations became known simply as “the bodysnatchers”.

Outside the Ruamkatanyu temple headquarters gory posters outline the work the foundation does in aiding victims. Inside, the temple is thronged with worshippers, come to donate money, especially on a Friday night. Apparently many Bangkok people consider this a good way to start the weekend. Outside the temple, a row of fortune tellers sits ready to tell people of the calamities that no doubt wait in store for them.

Inside the temple, worshippers accrue good karma by donating money to buy coffins for the city’s poor. (I did too, hoping to erase my bad karma from laying a curse in Hong Kong with one of the ‘tiger ladies’). Once paid, each donor is given a pink slip which is posted on to the coffin as a notice of generosity.

It is a surreal place.

Offerings

I Put A Spell On You

Earlier this week I went to Causeway Bay to put a spell on someone. A curse, to be exact. The glitzy shopping district might seem an odd location for it, but it is here (underneath a freeway overpass) that Hong Kong’s most sought-after avengers ply their trade. The grandmotherly women who sit at makeshift sidewalk shrines on Canal Road East “beat out the devil” in the service of the cult of the White Tiger.

Apparently rural women in Southern China had long worshipped a white tiger god and kept its effigy to rid their homes of pests, rats and other undesirables. Somehow in the twentieth century this concept morphed, giving the women wider powers to exterminate the bigger pests of modern life – incompetent bosses and unrepentant exs.

Forget the tiger moms. Its the claws of White Tiger Grannies you really have to worry about!

By a stroke of luck (or was it destiny?) I arrived in Hong Kong halfway through the annual White Tiger Festival. This is when the screeching pitch of vengeance reaches a crescendo and the wronged masses descend on the old White Tiger ladies to deal out retribution.

People line up all night to see their tormentors suffer, and the most famous of the Tiger women is said to work around the clock, clearing 30,000 HKD per day ( typical of Hong Kong that even the supernatural is discussed here in crassly commercial terms).

The process takes about ten minutes and costs 50 HKD. Not bad to destroy a life. First, the woman will ask you to hand over a picture of the subject of your spell, ( or failing that you can write their name on a piece of paper). Then she will place the paper or picture on a small brick and pound it with a shoe, kept at the ready for just this purpose, berating the hapless person all the while. This is “beating out the devil”. When some serious damage has been done, the tattered remains of the accursed’s identity will be placed in one of the cardboard tiger effigies, and ritually burnt.

Job done.

Incense is then burned and white rice thrown on the customer to cleanse them of any bad karma. Still, the people who were thronging to the vengenace shrines looked shifty. More than one turned away from my camera (or was it their own conscience?)

People warned me that any bad karma sent into the world would be returned, but I chose to take this as tacked-on moralist mumbo jumbo. I have a feeling in the original White Tiger cult, they really didn’t care.

So who did I curse? And will it work? Well, I won’t answer the first point but await with interest to find out the second…

Dead iPad

I met up with my old JET friend Antje (now living in Guangzhou) for a walk around Kowloon. She showed me this cool shop selling paper goods to be be burned at funerals, so that the dead can take objects with them – such as iPads – into the afterlife. You don’t want to be dead AND out of date.

The scariest house in Ramkhamhaeng

Just before I arrived in Bangkok, researching interesting things to do in the city, I stumbled on to this website: “Thailand’s ten scariest haunted houses” via the ever-reliable CNNGO.

I decided to pick one of the houses and go for a visit – and why not start at the top? The “scariest house in Thailand” (a country obsessed with ghosts as it is) is in Ramkhamhaeng, a lively Northern neighbourhood better known for its universtity and sports stadium of the same name, and also (although I didn’t know it then) for its own collection of gay bars in the district called “Lamsalee”.

I must have been around the corner, but I only had one thing on my mind mind: the Spanish mission house on Ramkhamhaeng Soi 32. First though, I got off the bus waaaay too early and had to trek a solid couple of kilometres down the traffic-choked main road, lined on one side with student-y fashion stalls and on the other by the university campus.

By the time I had got to the right street, an hour had passed and I was already starting to feel the effects of the sun.

Maybe it was my semi-delirious state, but there did seem something creepy about the street. There were black, dead vines crawling over the power lines, swings creaking in the empty yards of cracked concrete ranch houses and a dead rat stuck to the road.

But try though I might I could find no sign of the Spanish mission house. It was here that a maid had once been murdered by bandits in her employer’s absence. According to the “scariest haunted houses” website her ghost still hovered, and the house’s owner had moved out, leaving the mansion desolate and abandoned.

I didn’t see it though.  I looked and I looked but – nothing. I did see blocks of shiny new condominiums – surely not built on the site of the razed house? ( Although, I rationalized, it had been standing empty for 20 years).

Apartments of the damned?

But with the sun now out in dizzying, head-throbbing full force, and having walked seemingly hours to get here, I decided it was time to turn back before I became a ghost myself.

I’ll save myself for the next round: the parking garage for buses that have been involved in fatal accidents, or the industrial estate where a shoe-making machine once exploded killing workers, and sending phantom shoes still flying through the air….

Bangkok Gothic

At first glance, Bangkok might seem like the least Goth city in the world. Decked out in hot pink, screaming orange and butter yellow, overflowing with cutesiness and with its very un-introspective preoccupations with food and sex, you could be forgiven for thinking the city doesn’t have a moody side. But you would be wrong. Death and the macabre are also one of the main factors at play in the city’s imagination as this, this, this and most of all this illustrate only too well.

I had even discovered this site detailing the city’s “ten scariest haunted houses” – which hopefully I will be able to report back on in more detail soon. But in the meantime, I decided to take a look at another (perhaps tamer) slice of life on the Bangkok dark side.

Mansion7 is a “boutique thriller mall”, a themepark-ish collection of bars and restaurants clustered around a “neglected garden” and a stageset of a haunted house in a hangar-sized property in the Rachada nightlife district. It opened last Halloween. Inside, under a floating “full moon” lamp, shoppers can check out upmarket little sexy lingerie shops, or eat at a som tam (papaya salad) restaurant where meals are determined by your blood type. There is also a fantastically noir and forboding cocktail lounge, whose soaring walls are lined with shelves of evil-looking gnomes, and slowly turning fans in industrial vents.

But the real star attraction is the “haunted house’ tour. The back story is this: During the reign of Rama V (the 19th century) the king’s physician lost his only daughter, and driven mad by grief, installed a basement laboratory to conduct experiments trying to revive her. The complex centred around a “dissection” room where wanderers ended up “donating” different organs, after which they were never seen again.

All of this is narrated in a spooky-looking courtyard (airconditioned to enduce goosebumps) and then in pairs, you are sent to wander (or run) through the winding, darkened corridors of the “haunted house”, holding a rope so you don’t get separated, as actors jump out at you from side doors screaming.

It is all great fun.

Mansion7 is not the city’s only establishment with a ‘dark vibe’ however. Another I loved was “Iron Fairies,” a dimly lit speakeasy, entered through a black curtain with live jazz band playing from the rafters above (!)

Most amazing though is that it is also a blacksmithy. The bar is scattered with iron creatures (hence the name) and metal-working equipment, kind of a 1920s/pre-industrial chic/ jazz age bar with a “beautiful people” crowd. As Daisuke and I sat with our drinks, Ananda Everingham walked in. He was ushered up to a little “secret room” (entered through a revolving book case, no less!) but I could still watch him through a little peephole. Although I didn’t, because that would have been creepy. Also, I didn’t really want to be seen waving my camera around since there was a celebrity on site, so these pics, with the exception of the last are “borrowed” from other people.

Bangkok: fireworks and foetuses

Although overshadowed by the horrific stampede in neighbouring Cambodia ( 400 dead at a riverside festival), Thailand also struggled through its annual “Loy Krathong” celebrations this week, with another macabre discovery.

Loy Krathong is one of Thailand’s most beautiful and important festivals. People flock to rivers and canals to set afloat little boats made of folded banana leaves, each carrying a garland of flowers and a burning candle. As they push the boats out into the water, lit by displays of fireworks and lanterns, pious Thais let go of their bad luck over the last 12 months and welcome in a fresh start.

This year, rainclouds threatened an already flood-logged Bangkok. Meanwhile, Daisuke was working feverishly to prepare the hotel’s “Loy Krathong” events, like viewing parties for the planned fireworks spectacular above the Chao Phraya river. On the night though, all went well and the flotilla of glimmering little boats set out into the tropical night, carrying with them the multitude of their owners’ sins and sorrows.

It was ironic then that across town in Sukhumvit, just two streets from our Bangkok apartment, that a grisly discovery was being made that would hit headlines worldwide. Thousands of foetuses were discovered in a temple storage room; evidence of an underground abortion clinic but also perhaps, of the well-established black market trade in unborn babies for Thai magic, reported on earlier here.

No doubt as the flickering lights of the banana-boat flotilla disappeared into the darkness, and fireworks burst through the clouds above, a few silent tears were shed across Bangkok – tears for memories of visits to that temple in Sukhumvit, memories now being pushed away into the dark, eventually to sink into murky waters.