What the river keepsNawarat Bridge and the Ping สะพานนวรัฐ

What the river keeps

The drowned, who in northern telling do not leave the water

Rinto Jiang · Public domain · Commons

Where: Where Tha Phae Road crosses the Ping · 18.78764, 99.00440 from OpenStreetMap
Open: Any hour
Cost: Free
Who is dead: The drowned, who in northern telling do not leave the water
On: By bicycle, On a scooter, With a driver

The Ping is the reason the city is here and the reason the first capital had to be abandoned. The drowned are a separate category of dead in the northern reckoning — held in the water, not able to move on, and dangerous to swimmers for that reason.

The bridge is the third on this crossing. Under it, at the low season, the bed shows.

Best at dusk, when the lamps come on along the far bank.

What is said to be there

ผีพราย: the drowned, who in the northern classification do not move on, because the water keeps them. The belief has a mechanism attached — one of them gets out by putting somebody else in — and it is the reason a northern grandmother will not let a child swim in the Ping at dusk, and the reason the lamps go downstream at Loi Krathong rather than up.

The kind of dead this kind of place holds, in northern reckoning

Making merit here

A lamp floated, or water poured off the parapet. Loi Krathong is this by the hundred thousand, and the rest of the year the act is the same act.

Lighting a pang pratip ผางประทีป — A small clay saucer with a wick, lit at the base of a chedi. 5–20 ฿ each.
Pouring the water กรวดน้ำ — Pour a thin stream of water while the chanting runs, and say who it is for. Nothing.

Nawarat Bridge and the Ping — Christophe95 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Commons

Yours would be better

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Sources for this stop

What	Who published it	Note
ผี ไม่ได้มีแค่สยองขวัญ เมื่อ 'ผีล้านนา' คือการปกปักรักษา	Lanner	the Lanna split between ผีดี and ผีร้าย, and what เสื้อบ้าน เสื้อเมือง are
คำเรียกผีและความเชื่อเรื่องผีในภาษาไทยถิ่นเหนือ	Veridian E-Journal, Silpakorn University	the northern names for the dead, collected and classified