Mae Nak

The legend is set in Phra Khanong, then a suburb of wooden stilt houses along a canal on the edge of Bangkok, and tradition dates it to the middle of the nineteenth century. Nak was a young woman of the area, married to Mak and carrying his child, when her husband was conscripted for the war. In his absence she died in childbirth, and the child with her. The neighbours buried her and waited for him to come back so they could tell him. Mak came back, and what he found in his house was his wife waiting for him with a baby in her arms. He lived with them as if nothing had happened: he ate what she cooked, slept at her side and kept the house, not knowing he had spent weeks living with a dead woman. The neighbours did know, and there lies the knot of the story: those who came near to warn him turned up dead, and the rest learned to keep quiet. The force of the tale is not in the fright but in that sustained domesticity, in a dead woman who goes on performing, point by point, the part she held in life.

The scene by which the story is recognised all over Thailand is domestic and lasts three seconds. Nak is preparing food on the floor of the house, which like every house there is raised on stilts, and something she is using slips through a gap between the boards, in the most widespread version a lime. Instead of going down the ladder, she reaches through the gap. And the arm goes on down, and down, to the ground below, and picks up the fruit. Mak sees it. All the terror of the legend is condensed there: not in a monster, but in the most everyday gesture in the world performed by a body that no longer has any reason to obey the measurements of a body. From that moment Mak knows, and the story becomes a flight. He runs for the temple of Wat Mahabut, because consecrated ground is the one place she cannot enter, and tradition adds the detail that he crosses a thicket of plants whose thorny leaves spirits avoid. She chases him to the edge of the precinct and stops: she can master the neighbours and she can master death, but not the threshold.

The end of the story varies with who tells it, and that variation is itself part of the material. The most repeated version credits the subduing of the spirit to the monk Somdet To, a nineteenth-century historical figure venerated across Thailand, who is said to have bound her into a fragment of bone from her own brow, later set into a belt. Other versions are content to shut her in a jar thrown into the canal. What no version does is destroy her, and there the Buddhist ground of the tale shows: a spirit of attachment is not annihilated, it is held or persuaded to let go. In time, the legend that served as a warning turned into a cult. Today the shrine dedicated to her beside the temple of Wat Mahabut receives daily offerings of dresses, toys, cosmetics and garlands, and two things are asked of her above all others: luck in the lottery and exemption from military service. That second request is exact in its irony, since her whole misfortune began with a conscription. One geographical note that is often confused: after the district boundary change of 1997 the temple ended up inside Suan Luang rather than Phra Khanong, even though the name of the legend has not moved.

In the Thai classification of spirits, Mae Nak is a phi tai hong, one of the dead by sudden or bad death who did not receive the proper rite and stays fixed to the exact place where they died. Within that class, death in childbirth is held to be the most potent, which is why she works as the example everyone cites. The ritual counterpart of her story is documented from early on: Ernest Young, in The Kingdom of the Yellow Robe (1898), describes the Siamese birth with the mother beside a fire, protective fruit scattered under the house and a cord blessed by the monks strung around the dwelling, all of it to keep off the spirits that would otherwise carry away the life of the child. Mae Nak is what happens when those defences fail. And she is not a Thai isolate: the woman who dies in childbirth and returns is a figure of the whole of Southeast Asia and beyond. The Malay pontianak and langsuir, gathered by Walter Skeat in Malay Magic (1900), the Indian churel and the Japanese ubume are the same idea told by four different traditions. What sets Mae Nak apart within that family is that the others are categories and she is a woman with a name, an address and a temple where you can leave her a dress.