Self-guided · เดินเองGhost Chiang Maiผีเจียงใหม่

Mangrai built this city in 1296. Fifteen years later he was walking through its market when a storm came in, and the chronicle gives his death one line: struck by lightning, dead in the middle of his own town.

There is a shrine on the spot — a Lanna-roofed hall under a bodhi tree on Ratchadamnoen, with a cast figure of him inside. Three different places claim to be the spot. This one is the one people kneel at.

24 stories, one a stop. 6 of them are told here by somebody who printed them first and is named on the page. The rest say which kind of dead belongs to that kind of place — a gate the corpses went out of, a wat left empty for two hundred years, a river, a moved grave — because the north classifies its dead, and the class is the story.

The oldest ones on the route are not ghosts of anybody. Pu Sae and Ya Sae were giants who ate the people of this valley, one after another, until the town emptied. The Buddha taught them; they took the five precepts; then they asked whether the precepts might stretch to one person a month, and when that was refused, one a year. The deal that finally held was a buffalo, once a year, against their word to keep this valley safe for five thousand years. They have kept it. So has everyone else — the buffalo is still paid, below Doi Kham, every year, and the page for that stop says exactly what happens to it.

15 more of them on their own page: the dead a northern household feeds in the yard, the ones it keeps off, the one a family inherits down the mother's line, the one with a light coming out of its nose over the paddy at night, the dance where the ancestors come into their own descendants for two days in May — and ขึด, which is not a ghost at all but the list of things you must not do, and is the frame the rest of it sits in.

A tour of places where people died, run past by someone who does nothing at any of them, is sightseeing with a theme. Every stop on this site carries one act you can do standing there — what it is called, what it costs, and how to do it without getting it wrong.

Most of them cost between nothing and two hundred baht. The northern one, ตานขันข้าว, is a tray of rice handed to a monk in a named dead person's name, and it is what people here actually mean when they say they made merit for someone.