Ghost Sightings in Thailand's Tsunami Zones

26 December 2004. The Indian Ocean tsunami struck the Andaman coast of southern Thailand. About 5,300 people died in the country, by one count nearly half of them foreign tourists. Most of the dead were at Khao Lak. Weeks later, many were still unidentified.

Thai belief holds that a spirit needs cremation and the blessing of relatives to rest. Many foreign victims had no relatives present. About four days after the waves, according to psychologist Wallop Piyamanotham, people began to see them.

Patong Beach, Phuket. Taxi drivers said they picked up a foreign man and his Thai girlfriend, going to the airport with all their baggage. Then they would "look in the rear-view mirror and find an empty seat."

One driver had a name. Lek. Late on the night of 6 January 2005, seven foreign tourists hired his tuk-tuk minivan at Patong for the ride to Kata Beach. They agreed a fare of 200 baht. He drove for a while. Then he felt numb all over his body. He looked around. The cab was empty.

On Ko Phi Phi and at Khao Lak, volunteer body searchers heard laughing and singing on the beach, "only to find darkness and empty sand." In Patong, a guard at a beachfront plaza quit his job after "hearing a foreign woman cry 'help me' all night long." Other guards reported "a foreign ghost walking along the shoreline at night calling for her child."

Lek began wearing religious charms for protection. He still could not drive at night. "I can't get over this. I'm going to have to get a new job. I have a daughter to support, but I'm too scared to go out driving at night." Napaporn Phroyrungthong, a bar manager in Patong, had visited Wat Baan Muang. "I'm very scared. I can't sleep at night and when the wind comes I'm sure it is the spirits." The foreigners, she said, "didn't know what happened and they all think they are still on the beach." At a half-demolished hotel in Khao Lak, some of the staff were afraid to come back after dark.

18 January 2005. 99 Buddhist monks held a ceremony at Patong Beach. At Khao Lak, Reuters filmed a spirit-release ceremony. Villagers burned paper money and paper clothes on the beach, then walked to the shore with lit candles to release krathong floats. Usa Muenthai was searching for her missing mother. "Maybe we will have the chance to find out where she is, maybe we will have the chance to call the spirit back…"

Wallop offered a clinical reading. "This is a type of mass hallucination that is a cue to the trauma being suffered by people who are missing so many dead people, and seeing so many dead people, and only talking about dead people." AFP reported that at least seven recovery workers were hospitalised for extreme psychological trauma. Journalist Richard S. Ehrlich treated the vanishing passenger tale as an urban legend, kin to the vanishing hitchhiker, spread by conversation, email and Thai media. In 2007 Siroj Sorajjakool read the ghosts as an expression of the collective psyche after traumatic loss. No source claims any witness invented an account.

The fear outlasted the headlines. Phuket taxi driver Somchai worried that Thai and Chinese investors would shun the resorts "because those places are bad luck." In September 2005 Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra tried to reassure Asian tourists. "The spirits of the dead are already reborn, as they are supposed to according to Buddhism. And I slept very well last night." Six years later, Ishinomaki in Japan would tell its own stories of ghost taxi passengers.