Krasue

Thailand
the central Chao Phraya plain (Ayutthaya, Lopburi, Suphan Buri), with modern spread into the Isan region and cognate figures in Khmer, Lao and Malay areas

Krasue — a woman's head that detaches itself from the body at night and flies with its entrails hanging beneath, hunting for childbirth blood, raw meat and filth

Variants and names

Thai กระสือ, krasue; older texts also have กระสาง and the spelling กะสือ. The male counterpart is กระหัง krahang, written กระหาง krahang in the law codes. Pallegoix in 1854 transcribes Kasú and sets it beside Kaháng and Xakla (chakla).

A note issued by the Office of the Royal Society on 12 October 2011 warns that krasue in Thai does not name only the ghost: it is the name of a fungus that glows at night, of a wan (rhizome) which according to the wan manuals shines when mature, of firefly larvae and of the wingless female firefly (หนอนกระสือ, «krasue grub»); and a banana that stays hard and will not ripen is said to have been «sucked by a krasue».

On etymology there is little to build on: Phraya Anuman Rajadhon, in his handbook of linguistics, classes กระ- among the arbitrary prosthetic prefixes of Thai, added for euphony and carrying no meaning. The decompositions circulating online therefore have nothing to rest on.

In the North and in Isan the analogous being — nocturnal, luminous, eater of raw things — is called ผีโพง phi phong and has no fixed sex. Outside Thailand, Thai and comparative sources set alongside it the Khmer អាប ap, the Lao kasu, the Malay penanggalan (from tanggal, «to detach»), the Balinese leyak and the Tagalog manananggal.

What is told

A woman's head that detaches itself from the neck at night and flies off carrying stomach, liver and intestines, which hang beneath it like a glowing tail. The body stays at home, inert, and must be found again before dawn. Thai sources describe it as a female being — the male is called krahang — which «enters» a woman, often an old one, who by day lives normally. It eats raw and filthy things: fish, frogs, carrion, excrement. According to Phraya Anuman Rajadhon, if it catches the smell of fresh blood it goes to eat the woman who has just given birth, or the newborn; for that reason thorny jujube branches were piled under the floor of the house, at the gap used as a latrine, so that the dangling entrails would catch on them. It shows itself as a greenish ball of light moving over the paddy fields.

Pallegoix in 1854 records it in another form altogether: not a flying head, but a spirit that sorcerers send into an enemy's body, where it devours first the viscera and then the intestines, until the victim wastes away and dies.

What it was forthe author’s reading

The krasue holds together three village fears: childbirth, filth, and the old woman who lives alone. The rules drawn from it are practical. Do not leave the new mother and the newborn alone in the dark. Block the space under the house with thorns. Do not leave washing out overnight: the stains attributed in the morning to the krasue's mouth are — Anuman Rajadhon says so, not some modern folklorist — rainy-season mould, and the belief serves to get the laundry taken in.

It is also a weapon. To say of a woman that she is a krasue puts her outside the community. Siamese law did not treat the matter as superstition: it provided for the case, and laid down that a suspect be sent to the capital rather than killed on the spot by the provincial governor.

Where it is attested

The earliest dated description I have been able to read for myself is by Jean-Baptiste Pallegoix, vicar apostolic of Siam: Description du royaume Thai ou Siam, Paris 1854, second volume, p. 52. In a passage on the rites for a stillborn child and on sorcerers who «feed the devil» by keeping a foetus in the house, he lists the spirits they send into the body of whoever they wish to harm: «Kasú, Kaháng et Xakla», adding that these devour the victim's viscera and then the intestines. I read the page on the Internet Archive facsimile.

Two slightly earlier Thai texts use the word as a figure of comparison. The Ramphan philap of Sunthorn Phu, composed in a Year of the Tiger which current chronology places in 1842: at sea a light flares up «red as the light of a krasue», and the answer is to heap up fire and burn hide. And the first canto of Khun Chang Khun Phaen, where Nang Thepthong, pregnant and full of cravings, has «saliva running like a krasue».

In law, the Three Seals Code (compiled in 1805 from Ayutthaya statutes) names krasue alongside chamop, chakla and krahang in the Phra Aiyakan Betset and in the law on the admission of plaints. The standard ethnographic description is by Phraya Anuman Rajadhon (Sathian Koset), Rueang phi sang thewada, Bangkok 1952. On the cinema and on the «Khmer origin» the reference is Benjamin Baumann, «Tamnan Krasue — Constructing a Khmer Ghost for a Thai Film», Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 14, December 2013.

Caution

Grade B rather than A for three precise reasons. I read directly only Pallegoix 1854, the two Thai poetic texts on Wikisource, Baumann 2013 and the Royal Society note. The Three Seals Code I saw quoted — with the wording of the article — by reliable Thai sources, not in the edition itself; Anuman Rajadhon's 1952 book I saw only as a catalogued scan, and I cite it through Apilak Kasempholkoon's summary; Bradley's 1873 dictionary I could not open at the entry.

The «Khmer origin» taken as settled does not hold. Baumann shows that before the film Tamnan Krasue (2002) the krasue had no origin myth beyond local discourse, and that the older sources contain no reference to Khmer culture at all: the Khmer-magic link is a Thai construction postdating the 1997 crisis. The etymologies that break the word apart do not hold either: กระ- is a prefix added for euphony. Nor does the conflation of krasue and phi pop: Thai keeps them distinct, and so does Khmer (thmup answers to pop, ap to krasue); Sunthorn Phu's poem names the two separately. It must be said, though, that Pallegoix in 1854 puts them together, and that the flying head does not appear in his text: the clean separation we take to be ancient is, in the sources, recent.

One correction of usage, finally: Demonic Beauty is the international title of Tamnan Krasue, 2002, not of Krasue Valentine, which is a different film of 2006 whose details I have not verified.

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.