Chapter 10: Corpse Oil

Corpse Oil

Northern Chiang Mai: The Curse of the Long-Neck Village, 2019

North of Chiang Mai, past the last paved roads and the final scattering of guesthouses, a long-neck village lies hidden in mountain fog a thousand meters above sea level. The forest there never quite opens to daylight. Even at noon, mist gathers between the trees; by evening, the slopes seem almost to breathe.

In that place, hill-tribe faith and black magic have grown together like roots in wet earth. Of all the rites murmured about in the region, none inspires more dread than the making of corpse oil—Nam Man Prai.

I went there while investigating the strange death of a tourist, a British backpacker found outside the village graveyard. He lay on his back among the weeds, his skin the dull yellow of old candle wax. A black, tarry fluid clung to the corner of his mouth. Beside him was an empty glass bottle, and at the bottom of it, a smear of dark red grease.

The village headwoman wore silver rings stacked high around her neck. In rough, deliberate Thai, she told me, “He stole the soul oil. The spirits guarding the cemetery came to collect him.”

That night, my guide, Akai, took me into the graveyard.

The moon hung white over the burial mounds. Between the graves, several figures moved in silence, bent over the freshly buried body of a young girl. One of them drew out a narrow bamboo knife, its edge specially hardened, and cut into the corpse at the temples. What seeped from the wounds was neither blood nor fat, but something between the two. They caught it in a clay bowl, mixed it with corpse wax and bitter herbs, and poured the thickened substance into a black ceramic jar.

“It’s for a boss from Bangkok,” Akai whispered. His voice shook so badly I could hear his teeth click. “They say it can make a man rich in a single night.”

He had once helped with the rite himself. He admitted this without looking at me. He had stopped only after his younger sister was buried alive in that same cemetery, used as the “guide” meant to draw power from the dead.

Corpse oil, he told me, must be made on the night of the full moon. A young woman’s body serves as the vessel. Corpse wax is lit at the head of the grave, and the summoning spell is chanted until resentment and oil become one. As he spoke, I noticed that one of the diggers had arms covered in swollen blisters, as if scalding grease had splashed across his skin.

“That’s how it starts,” Akai said. “The oil is beginning to take him back.”

A week later, when the British tourist was cremated, black grease began to seep from his ashes. It clung to the inner wall of the furnace and filled the air with such a foul stench that even the monks covered their mouths.

Then the three villagers who had helped make the oil died, one after another.

The first was swept away while washing clothes by the river. When his body was recovered, the skin had slipped from him, leaving only white bone. The second burned to death in his own house, killed by the very corpse oil he had refined; afterward, the walls of the room were covered in black handprints. The last went into the hills to gather forest produce and was set upon by crows. They found what was left of him scattered beneath the trees.

The old headwoman said the spirits inside the corpse oil were looking for replacements. Every drop, she said, contains a soul that never accepted death. Once it fastens itself to the living, it does not let go until it has drained the final warmth from their blood.

Isan: The Skin Offering at the Ghost-Wife Temple, 2020

Isan, in Thailand’s northeast, is the heartland of the country’s shamanic traditions. Beneath its wide skies and dry fields, the folk worship of ghost wives conceals some of the most unnerving rituals I have ever witnessed.

In Ubon Province, I met a farmer named Phongchai. He had gone to the village ghost-wife temple because he wanted a son. On the altar stood the image he had been feeding: a female figure carved from camphorwood and painted head to foot in red pigment. Glass beads had been set into its eyes. In the lamplight, they looked almost wet.

“Give her a cup of fresh blood every night,” Phongchai told me, “and she will bless the house.”

He lifted the cloth beneath the offering table. Hidden in the shadows was an earthen jar filled with chicken blood and dog blood. Floating in it were several strands of a woman’s hair.

The ghost wife, he said, was a guardian spirit of Isan, born from the story of a pregnant woman who died in childbirth. Her resentment had never faded. Only blood and raw meat could soothe her. Only then would she grant fertility.

But after Phongchai began making offerings, his own wife changed. Her mind grew distant. At night, she walked in her sleep and spoke to empty rooms. Her skin lost its color until it was pale as paper.

With the help of a local medium, I secretly watched the temple’s midnight ceremony.

On the night of the full moon, the temple keeper drew a knife across his wrist and let the blood drip onto the lips of the ghost-wife image. Then he began to chant in an old tongue: “Lady Ghost-Wife, grant us children. With blood we bind ourselves to you, never to part.”

The statue’s eyes began to weep red.

The temple keeper gave a raw cry of pain. His body arched backward, then twisted sharply to one side. Something moved beneath his skin, sliding and pressing, as though another body were trying to force its way out.

Beside me, the medium whispered, “She is feeding on him. Every offering is a bargain. The one who feeds her will slowly be replaced. In the end, he becomes only a skin for her to wear.”

Half a month later, Phongchai’s wife gave birth to a stillborn child. The infant’s skin was the same red as the statue’s paint.

That night, Phongchai was found dead inside the ghost-wife temple. His body had been flayed. His skin hung from the rafters, while his blood dripped steadily into the jar beneath the altar. The statue, meanwhile, had changed. Its surface was no longer rough carved wood. It had become smooth, supple, almost warm—like living flesh.

The medium called it the ghost wife’s skin-changing rite. To keep her human form, she needed the skin of the living. Those who came begging for children were not worshippers to her. They were prey.

Later, the police sealed the temple. When the statue was burned, black smoke poured from it and gathered in the sky in the shape of a woman. Her scream lingered above the empty courtyard long after the flames had died.

Central Bangkok: The Kuman Thong Factory on the Chao Phraya, 2021

Behind Bangkok’s glittering surface—the glass towers, the gold temples, the ferries carving through brown river water—there exists an underground trade darker than any alley. It is the trade in Kuman Thong, the spirit children.

A source told me of an illegal workshop hidden in the slums along the Chao Phraya River. There, he said, stillborn infants were being turned into Kuman Thong and sold to celebrities and businessmen. Each figure could fetch as much as a million baht.

I entered the place disguised as a buyer.

The smell hit me first: rot, incense, damp wood, and beneath it all, something sweetly rancid. Glass jars crowded the floor. Inside them floated the bodies of infants. Some had been wrapped entirely in gold leaf. Others were held in unnatural poses by thin wires, their limbs arranged like dolls.

The owner of the workshop was a middle-aged man named Khun Phan. He opened a wooden crate and showed me more than a dozen tiny bodies, each no larger than the palm of a hand. A copper nail had been driven into the center of every forehead.

“These are golden boys,” he said. “Seven-month stillborns. The most spiritual kind.”

He described the process without the slightest hint of shame. First, the fetus was dried over flame. Then charms were painted across the body with cinnabar, and a soul-binding spell was recited. After that, the corpse was shaped into an idol and buried beneath a temple stupa for forty-nine days, so that resentment and Buddhist merit could mingle into a power strong enough to serve its owner.

In one corner of the room lay a pile of gold leaf.

“The gold seals in the resentment,” Khun Phan said. “That way, they obey only their master.”

But the workers in that shop looked less like men than things already emptied out. Their faces were bloodless. Their eyes had a flat, vacant shine. One young worker had a dark red ring around his throat, as though a baby’s hands had closed there and squeezed.

“Last month,” Khun Phan said, “one of them stole a Kuman Thong and took it home. The next day, they found him dead by the river. His body was swollen from the water, but he was still clutching the idol.”

There was no pity in his voice.

I hid a pinhole camera in the workshop and recorded Khun Phan’s entire process. But just as I was preparing to leave, every Kuman Thong figure in the room began to tremble.

The infant corpses inside the jars started crying.

It was a thin, piercing sound, impossible to mistake for wind or rats or old pipes. Khun Phan’s face collapsed in terror. He dropped to his knees and knocked his forehead against the floor again and again.

“Babies, forgive me,” he begged. “I will never do it again.”

The idols did not forgive him.

One by one, they stood.

Their small arms reached for him. Tiny hands closed around his ankles. At once, Khun Phan’s skin began to shrivel. His hair came away in clumps. Before my eyes, he aged years in seconds. His cheeks sank inward. His spine curled. His body dried and tightened until, at last, only a skeleton remained on the floor.

When the police arrived, the workshop was empty. Nothing remained but broken glass, scattered gold leaf, and the lingering sound of infants weeping in the air.

Later, I saw the reports on the news. The Kuman Thong figures that had already left the workshop had begun turning against their owners. A wealthy businessman was strangled in his home, his body withered in the same manner as Khun Phan’s. A famous actress lost her mind during a shoot and slashed her own face with a knife, screaming, “The baby wants me dead.”

The Chao Phraya continued flowing through Bangkok, thick and muddy as ever. But beneath the water, I imagined countless infant spirits drifting in the dark, waiting in silence for the next person who would call them lucky.

Southern Songkhla: The Grave-Soil Curse of the Witchcraft Village, 2022

Songkhla Province lies in Thailand’s south, near the Malaysian border. There, witchcraft has absorbed elements of both Islam and Buddhism, and among its most feared practices is the grave-soil curse.

I met a fisherman named Ali whose wife had been cursed by a neighbor. Every night, terrible pains tore through her belly. Beneath her skin, faint trails rose and shifted, as if insects were crawling through her flesh. Doctors examined her and found nothing.

Ali took me to see a Malay bomoh.

The healer’s clinic was hung with the dried bodies of animals. In one corner stood a heap of grave soil, giving off the damp, rotten smell of opened earth.

“This is a blood gu,” the bomoh said. “It is made from grave soil, venomous insects, and the blood of a black dog. Once it enters the body, the insects eat the organs from within. The victim dies in agony.”

He took out a black clay jar. Inside was a dark red powder.

“To break it, we need the hair of the person who cast it. Mix the hair with rooster blood and sticky rice, burn it beneath the full moon, and recite the driving spell.”

But the one who had cast the curse was Ali’s neighbor. The two families had become enemies over a land dispute. There was no chance the man would willingly give up so much as a single strand of hair.

So I followed the bomoh to gather grave soil instead.

At midnight, the Muslim cemetery was all cold shadows. Arabic script covered the headstones. Under the moonlight, the bomoh used a hoe to open a fresh grave, took a handful of earth, and murmured prayers under his breath.

Then a woman began crying inside the grave.

The bomoh’s face went gray. He seized my arm and ran.

“The grave guardian,” he gasped. “We woke it.”

Behind us, the earth began to swell. A black shape climbed out of the open grave and drifted in our direction. Its face was rotten. Black blood ran from its eyes.

We hid behind a large tree and watched the shadow wander through the cemetery until dawn finally thinned the sky and it vanished.

The next day, the bomoh was found dead in his clinic. Insects had eaten his body full of holes. The black jar had overturned, spilling grave soil across the floor. The soil writhed with black bugs.

Ali’s wife did not survive either. On a rainy night, she died in unbearable pain. At the moment of death, her skin split open, and countless black insects crawled out of her body and disappeared into the mud.