One night as I sat in the Foodland supermarket on Sukhumvit Soi 5 in Bangkok, drinking a cocktail at a streetside bar amid a delectable chaos of vendors grilling gai yang chicken, men puffing on shisha pipes and young dreadlocked women dancing in the rain (I had already reflected that it was a scene no Istanbul supermarket could offer at 2 a.m.), a Thai friend called me and asked if I might be looking for an apartment in Bangkok. Did I want to come home?
There are moments when pure chance can flick a switch and change the direction of your internal electrical circuit. My friend told me to go to a tiny street behind Srinakharinwirot University in a residential area near the Khlong Saen Saep canal in Asoke — an affluent, central area of condo towers and hanging gardens where, nevertheless, a labyrinth of villagelike lanes lie hidden behind the neon lights among patches of jungle, ruined tobacco warehouses and mysterious Japanese hostess clubs (essentially glorified karaoke bars).
My new prospective home was a fortresslike tower with four blue Disney-esque roofs and a vast lobby not unlike the grandiose John Portman hotel atriums of the 1980s. It was called the Kiarti Thanee, and there was a moat along its front wall. A charming agent showed me to the 15th floor to a vast apartment of 2,000 square feet with a deck that overlooked the deranged towers and spires of the 21st century’s greatest Buddhist metropolis. It was dusk and the villas and gardens below were lit up with 100 spirit houses, the little shrines where the souls of the dead are housed and fed offerings of fruits. The chorus was of koel birds and wild peacocks and a tropical moon stood in the sky.
Within 30 minutes I had taken possession of the kind of place every depression-burdened writer with no trust fund should award themselves: a fairy castle with a gate staffed by men in coffee-colored uniforms. There was even a half-size Olympic pool shaded by frangipani trees, and all for the same price as a garage apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “Yes,” the lady conceded as we exchanged a handshake that constituted a contract, “but I just want to say that the building is haunted.”
“But it’s Bangkok,” I said. “Isn’t everything haunted?”
Even if a ghost had been standing right there in the room, I would have taken it. In Bangkok exorcisms are cheap, and ghosts — phi in Thai — are woven into the fabric of daily life.
It is a city filled with haunted sites. On Soi Watcharapol stands an entire abandoned village called the Piyaporn Gated Community that, as urban legend has it, was built over a cemetery. But the developers forgot to appease the spirits of the dead. Three children were also said to have drowned in the lake there, and no Thai will go near the place to this day. The Wat Prasat temple in Nonthaburi is also famously haunted, as is the abandoned shoe factory at Bangpu where the owner reportedly shot himself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/trav ... lture.html