15 of them, no addressThe rest of them ผีเมือง

ผีปู่ย่า

phi pu ya

The grandparents

The household's own dead, in a small house on a post in the compound. A northern family feeds them, tells them about a marriage or a move, and apologises to them. The national museum in Chiang Mai keeps this as the base of the whole system: before any of the rest of it, a house has its own dead in the yard.

กรมศิลปากร พิพิธภัณฑสถานแห่งชาติ เชียงใหม่ · Lanner

ผีมด

phi mot

The ant spirits

The dead of ordinary Lawa people — the ones who were in this valley before the Thai arrived. They are danced to by the families descended from them.

ศูนย์มานุษยวิทยาสิรินธร (SAC) · Culturio

ผีเม็ง

phi meng

The Mon spirits

The dead of Mon commanders, by the same account that gives ผีมด to the Lawa commoners. A Chiang Mai lineage knows which of the two it dances, and the distinction is a claim about where the family came from.

ศูนย์มานุษยวิทยาสิรินธร (SAC) · Culturio · Wikipedia (ไทย)

ผีเจ้านาย

phi chao nai

The lords

Dead rulers and nobles, who keep their rank. Three stops on this route are these: the founder on Ratchadamnoen, the dynasty at Lok Molee, the royal field at Suan Dok.

Lanner · Veridian E-Journal, Silpakorn University

ผีเสื้อบ้าน · ผีเสื้อวัด · ผีเสื้อเมือง

phi suea ban, suea wat, suea mueang

The guardians of a house, a wat, a city

เสื้อ here is not the shirt; it is the one that covers a place. The account collected in the north is that these are the spirits of whoever ruled or founded the ground, housed in a shrine so they can go on looking after it. A wat keeps its guardian when the monks leave, which is why an abandoned wat in Chiang Mai is not treated as an empty building.

Lanner · Veridian E-Journal, Silpakorn University

ผีขุนน้ำ · ผีนา

phi khun nam, phi na

The water source and the field

The spirit at the head of a stream and the spirit in a rice field. The muang fai irrigation that made this valley farmable was run by villages who made offerings at the intake, and the offering and the water schedule were the same institution.

Lanner

ผีตายโหง

phi tai hong

Died wrong

Killed, or dead suddenly, or dead away from home, and without the rites. The defining property is that they stay. Two stops on this route are made of them: the gate the executions and the corpses went through, and the house in the north-west quarter.

Lanner · Veridian E-Journal, Silpakorn University

ผีพราย

phi phrai

The drowned

Held in the water and, in the telling, able to get out only by putting somebody else in. It is the reason a northern grandmother will not let a child swim at dusk.

Lanner · Veridian E-Journal, Silpakorn University

ผีกะ

phi ka

The one a family inherits

The northern one that has done the most social damage. It lives with a household rather than in a place, and it passes down the mother's line — accounts differ on whether to the eldest daughter or the youngest, and say it depends on the family. It has to be fed. Fed, it leaves the household alone and goes out at night into other people's; neglected, it turns on the house that holds it.

The part that is not folklore is what a village does with the accusation. A house said to carry ผีกะ is a house nobody marries into, and the accusation lands on women.

ศิลปวัฒนธรรม (Silpa-mag) · Lanner

ผีโพง

phi phong

The one with the light in its nose

A living person who took up magic and lost hold of it, or who grew the wan called ว่านผีโพง — white, hot and sharp — which in the telling draws mercury into itself as it ages and starts to glow. They go out over the paddy at night after the slime off frogs, with a white-green light coming out of the nose to find it by. What the story describes, at the flat end of it, is marsh gas over a rice field at night.

Wikipedia (ไทย) · มติชนสุดสัปดาห์

ผีปกกะโหล้ง

phi pok ka long

The one in the deep forest

Lives in thick forest and arrives as a storm, or as an animal, or as a frightening old man whose beard has animals living in it. It is named for the noise it makes, which is the noise it is called.

กรุงเทพธุรกิจ · Lanner

ผีกองกอย

phi kong koi

The one-legged one

A single leg, and it hops. Beyond that the accounts thin out fast, which is worth saying rather than filling in.

กรุงเทพธุรกิจ

ผีนางไม้ · ผีป่า

phi nang mai, phi pa

The tree and the forest

A spirit resident in a particular tree, and the general run of forest spirits. This is why a big tree in Chiang Mai has cloth round it and why a contractor will pay a monk before taking one down.

Lanner · Veridian E-Journal, Silpakorn University

ฟ้อนผีมดผีเม็ง

fon phi mot phi meng

The dance

A lineage holds it — everyone descended from the same ancestors — once a year, or every two or three years, usually in May or June. A shelter goes up, the offerings are laid, music calls the ancestors, and the ancestors come into their own descendants, who then dance. It runs two or three days.

It is not a performance and it is not advertised. If you are in Chiang Mai in May and hear a long-drum ensemble going in a compound off a soi for a second day running, that is what it is.

ศูนย์มานุษยวิทยาสิรินธร (SAC) · Culturio · Wikipedia (ไทย) · OpenBase.in.th

ขึด

khuet

The things that must not be done

Not a ghost. ขึด is the northern category for an act that brings the bad down on you — ill-omened, polluting, not to be done — and the list is long and specific: things about wats, about a town's sacred objects, about public property, markets, farmland, particular trees, particular animals. Do one anyway and you are said to ตกขึด, to have fallen into it, and then there is a rite to get out.

The lists were written down in the palm-leaf manuscripts and have been collected and printed. It is the frame the rest of this page sits inside: the north's dead are not mainly a source of fright, they are a set of rules about how to behave on ground that belongs to somebody else.

คมเนตร เชษฐพัฒนวนิช (ed.); ปริวรรต บุญทา ศรีพิมพ์ชัย, ศรีเลา เกษพรหม · สำนักส่งเสริมศิลปวัฒนธรรม มหาวิทยาลัยเชียงใหม่ · nonilo