Do You Believe in Ghosts?

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"I told you, Jeff, I'm a skeptic."

"I've traveled the world, been to the sites of war crimes, genocides, murders, hotel fires, and I've not once, NOT ONCE seen a ghost."

"My offer still stands. One million dollars to anyone who can prove to me that ghosts exist."

"Look, Mr. Palmer..."

"Call me 'Jay,'" he interrupted.

"Jay, you didn't get to be a wealthy man by being gullible, but..."

Jay interrupted again, "Cut the flattery. You're saying that you can show me ghosts in Bangkok, and I say it's bullshit. The offer stands. Show me a ghost, I'll show you one million dollars. My secretary will email you my Bangkok itinerary. We'll be in touch."

And with that the call cut off.

For a couple years I'd been following Mr. Jay Palmer, on Twitter, and had been enthralled, entertained and annoyed at his tweets. No stranger to fame or controversy, the handsome young billionaire, the Wall Street hedge fund star had once been heralded as the next Warren Buffett.

He'd originally achieved fame for his business acumen but these days was known more for his brash, outspoken personality and relentless ridicule of the supernatural, ghosts, in particular, as well as his tendency to engage in social media spats, often with other celebs, and sometimes even random commenters.

I'd seen that Mr. Palmer, along with his starlet girlfriend, would be in Vietnam on business, so I'd tweeted him, thinking he'd probably ignore me.

But, to my astonishment, he'd replied, and we'd exchanged direct messages, then phone calls, and I'd challenged him to visit the haunted sites of Bangkok, which includes my street, and afterwards see if he still doubted the existence of ghosts.

He'd taken me up on my challenge, and I'd be seeing him in less than 48 hours...

As for me, I wholeheartedly believe in ghosts. I've seen plenty, been accustomed to their presence since I was a youngster. I'd seen several spirits in my childhood home, in Pittsburgh. The first I saw were tiny balls of light floating around and through the ceiling of my bedroom.

Later, I'd see misty silhouettes of human forms on the staircase by the living room.

There'd also routinely be doors closing, opening unexplainably, around the house.

My sister, too, had seen the blobs of light flying through the ceiling, in her room, but my parents refused to believe the ghosts were there. But I knew. And my sister knew. And the ghosts, they knew. And that was enough for me.

Fortunately, the ghosts in my house were not malicious spirits. They were only present. Remnants of the former owners, probably. Such is usually the case when one lives in a 100-year-old house. I never feared them, those ghosts, and simply accepted them as fellow occupants of the dwelling...

For as long as I can remember, ghosts have fascinated me. I've always enjoyed ghost stories, movies, books, more for the entertainment factor, history lessons, though, that they held.

The stories, the ghosts never scared me, really. More so, I'd pitied the ghosts, and I wondered if the ghosts in my house or the ghosts in the stories knew if they were ghosts.

What a tragedy, to be a ghost, and not know it...

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When I first came to Bangkok as a tourist, I was delighted to discover the city held such strong beliefs in ghosts.

The welcoming, warm and friendly Thai people, plus the climate, the hot weather, and the scrumptious, hot and spicy food agreed with me, and I decided to ditch the corporate world, and stay in Thailand, in Bangkok. For the last 7 years, it's where I've been. I've left only for border runs to Cambodia, Laos to renew my visas.

My first job in Thailand, like many expats here, was teaching English, but then I found my way into another, more exciting and lucrative business- paranormal tours, videos...

Along with my Thai partner, Somchai, we started the business as a side hustle, but it'd expanded well enough that we were able to turn it into a full-time gig.

Our tours consisted of taking clients out around Bangkok to local haunted sites, at night, and we made videos of these ghost tours that we'd post online, share on social media- video recordings of real footage of paranormal activity.

Our tours were provided on motorcycles, one driven by Somchai, one by me, and perhaps additional drivers if we had a larger group.

Motorcycles sure aren't the safest method of transport, but it's the fastest way of getting around in Bangkok, given the perpetually gridlocked city traffic.

Occasionally, though, we'd take clients out in a car if they were too squeamish to sit on the backseat of a motorcycle, or if they demanded AC.

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Our tours' itinerary included several spots. Many only provided entertaining, spooky tales, but not actual ghost sightings.

However, The Sathorn Unique Tower, Wat Don Cemetery, and the "Curve of 100 Corpses," these were the most reliable Bangkok locations to spot paranormal activity. Especially the Wat Don Cemetery. Practically every trip we took there yielded a ghost sighting or two.

In the cemetery, a place where over 10,000 victims of accidents were buried, many in unmarked graves, we'd often see "tai hong", which is Thai for an angry ghost, one that died in a sudden, tragic manner.

The "tai hong" we most frequently saw was a headless ghost that'd fall from a tree, crawl on its stomach like an alligator and disappear into dead air.

One time a ghost appeared in Somchai's car, in the backseat, the ghost bloody, missing limbs, screaming in agony. A couple German clients sitting next to it freaked out, yelling and demanding us to pull over, and when we did, they ran away, tearing off running into the crowded Bangkok streets.

Somchai said a prayer that let the ghost out, back into the night.

After that, Somchai bought a special green jade amulet, from a monk, and the amulet has since prevented ghosts from entering his car, though recently we found a legless ghost on the roof, and Somchai said a blessing that allowed it to leave...

The Sathorn Tower was a hotspot, too, for ghosts.

We'd often find ghosts of businessmen jumping from upper floors, reenacting their suicides. Somchai said they were trapped in repeat, in a purgatory of sorts, having to jump again and again until they'd be able to pass onto the next realm. Or maybe they were being punished, forced to relive their suicide because of the bad karma they'd created.

In addition to the jumpers, we could also, via telescope, spot the ghost of a middle-aged Swedish man, a tourist, hanging by a noose from a ceiling pipe. You could see him hanging lifeless there practically every night.

Occasionally, we could bribe a security guard to enter the building, have a look around, but never were we able to see the ghosts up close. The ghosts there seemed to prefer keeping their distance, only staying visible from afar...

The "Curve of 100 Corpses" yielded many sightings, ghosts on motorcycles, mostly, those lost in auto accidents. Somchai said they were also in a purgatory, riding around the same roads until they could pass. He said it was because their family members might not have performed the correct funerary rites, or that the ghosts were too angry to accept they'd died, refusing to believe it, continuing to ride back and forth along the same stretch of road, every day and night.

(I'd wondered, too, if some of the office workers I'd seen in subways, rush hour traffic, back in America were suffering the same fate...)

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Another famous ghost spot, the "Thawi Nakhon Deserted Mansion" was a point of contention between Somchai and me.

It was the only site he'd been genuinely afraid of, and he'd dissuaded me from adding it to our itinerary. His objections being that the site was haunted by a malicious ghost called "Dao."

It's common for ghosts of those who died in horrific, tragic manners to attempt to take vengeance on the living, particularly those similar to the people the ghosts are angry with; the ghosts doing this either out of sheer hatred, or so the living might take the ghost's place in the afterlife.

"Dao" was one such malicious ghost, the ghost of a young woman with long black hair, who always wore a white dress that resembled a nightgown.

Somchai said it was her that'd possessed many tourists, foreign men, Westerners in Bangkok, and caused their deaths.

Somchai told me his sister, a medium, once spoke to Dao. That his sister was contacted by her, randomly, as she slept, and the two of them spoke in a lush green rice field near the outskirts of Bangkok...

Dao said she'd been jilted by a foreigner, a handsome young man, a US soldier, around the time of the Vietnam War. The man was in Bangkok on R&R before he was to return to America, after completing his tour, being discharged. He'd met and seduced Dao, who was a chaste young woman from an upper-class family, and a practicing Buddhist, and he'd taken her virginity, promising to return later to marry her.

But he never returned.

Dao, in a fit of grief, jumped from a building, plunging to her death in the Chao Phraya River.

Her family had moved, abandoned the mansion, on the edge of Bangkok. With its bad karma coming from the inauspicious end of the family's daughter, it never found a buyer, and the mansion remains empty to this day. Dao's ghost its only resident.

Though in life Dao was said to be reserved, after death, her demeanor changed, and her grief shifted to rage. Her ghost not only resides in her family's abandoned mansion, but is said to be alive in Bangkok, floating from hotel to hotel, in search of vulnerable foreigners, those down on their luck, depressed, or with other issues. Dao enters their head, encourages them to commit suicide by jumping from a building or bridge.

Though she's mainly preyed on foreigners, she's also attacked Thais too, murdering 5 teens who'd disturbed her house, the teens belonging to a group that'd broken into the house late at night, to do drugs, drink and do whatever else teens do. Later, one by one, each died in various gruesome traffic accidents...

Not wishing to disturb such a spirit, we'd stayed away from the mansion. Until a wealthy Italian, with a large pile of cash, too much to refuse, demanded that we take him and his wife there. At night!

Which we did, armed with Somchai's most powerful amulet, and a protective spell from his monk, bestowed on us after a generous donation to the temple...

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The mansion was situated on a large empty lot, flanked by endless green rice fields, a patch of jungle, and a highway to its far left. A fence around its perimeter precluded entrance.

On the back of twin motorcycles, one driven by me, one by Somchai, with the Italians riding on the motorcycle backseats, the wife on Somchai's, and the man on mine, and damn, was the portly fellow weighing down my bike, draining the gas gauge as we rode slowly up to the mansion and parked for a peak at the house.

A chalky white, three storey manor, with hulking Grecian columns in its front, it'd stood up to time, the elements rather well, I thought, showing only mild dilapidation, weather wear.

At first the manor was totally dark, but suddenly, a light went on in an upstairs room. The Italians shrieked in Italian. Somchai screamed something in Thai. And I followed his lead as he tore off back to the highway.

A week afterwards, the wife, holding large handfuls of shopping bags, was struck by a motorcycle taxi while crossing Sukhumvit Road and died on the scene.

Perhaps out of grief, or something else as well, the husband jumped to his death from the fifth floor of the Terminal 21 shopping mall, landing face first on the ground floor, horrifying the surrounding shoppers, staff alike... The mall was only a block from where his wife had died...

"Dao," Somchai told me.

We both immediately went and received further blessings from the temple after learning of the suicide.

Somchai also had his sister, the medium, attempt to contact Dao, which she did, meeting Dao again in the rice field in a dream, though this time, the rice field was on fire. Dao appeared as a burn victim, horrific scars covering her body.

This time, Dao wouldn't speak, and instead summoned a driverless motorcycle to ride off, disappear into the conflagration. Then she twisted her burnt lips into a grin and walked slowly into the fire.

Somchai reckoned that it was a sign, a warning to keep away from the house and that we were lucky to be alive. He told me he wouldn't go there again, even for a million dollars...

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Mr. Jay Palmer and his girlfriend, the lovely Miss Amber Royal, reality TV star, Instagram influencer, model, socialite, etc., arrived in Bangkok with much fanfare. Local paparazzi were there to snap pictures of their early afternoon arrival at Suvarnabhumi airport.

After passing by a contingent of Thai fans, signing a handful of autographs, they traveled via limo to the Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok's premier luxury hotel, where I met them, for a pre-tour meeting.

When I rode my motorcycle into the hotel's parking lot, I saw a throng of fans, paparazzi and press camped outside the hotel. Seeing the clumped masses, wide-eyed and wielding microphones, cameras, and phones, I wasn't envious of the pair's fame. Their money, yes, I did envy that, but being hounded by photographers, having people with their smartphones chasing after them anywhere they went, even in Thailand, that level of fame, nope, didn't envy that at all...

We met in the hotel's ritzy "Author's Lounge" for late afternoon tea.

I must admit I was a tad starstruck when they entered and sat down to our table. Heads all around the wooden room were turning, everyone collectively marveling at the pair's celebrity and perfect facial structures.

Aside from what appeared a very forced smile and perfunctory "hello", Amber said nothing, ate nothing, only sipped sparingly on a glass of sparkling water, and stared and tapped at her phone unflinchingly.

Jay, on the other hand, was animated.

"Jeff, I can't believe you make money doing this. People are idiots. It's that they WANT to believe in ghosts. That's why they see them."

He continued, heatedly, between healthy bites from a splendid plate of assorted tropical fruits, "It's hallucinations. Mind tricks."

I opened my mouth to chime in and he seemed to notice that I was about to speak, so he, perhaps preemptively, continued his anti-superstition jeremiad.

"I see you're about to show me something on your phone," he said in a mocking tone, nodding his chin at the phone in my hand, "don't bother, I've seen the bullshit footage you post online. I know it's faked. All 'ghost' footage is faked," he'd thrown up air quotes around "ghost footage."

"Amityville House, or should I say, Amityville Hoax, fake. All those paranormal shows, fake. Just doctored images, sounds, permutations of white noise, static. I mean, humans have existed for over 200,000 years, right? Why don't we ever hear of caveman ghosts? A monkey man ghost outside your house, rubbing sticks together for a fire... Never hear of that. Nope, always some asshole in a top hat. Only Slash gets to wear a top hat, okay?! Fucking ghost bullshit.

"And how come no animals are ghosts? They don't get to be ghosts? The chicken you ate for lunch comes back to haunt you? Oh, hold up, it does, food poisoning!"

Jay broke into hearty laughter at his own joke, nudged Amber with his elbow, but she ignored him, scrolled on her phone.

"Have you read Richard Dawkins?" he asked, after catching his breath, his eyes flickering and his facial expression turning serious. Dead serious. Angry even.

"Yes, I know of..." I began to say when he interrupted again.

"There is no God. No ghosts, either. God is the biggest ghost. The best ghost story ever told if you ask me. Don't tell anyone I said this, though. I can't have the religious freaks after me. Baptists buy stocks, too, you know. I hope you read the waiver you signed."

"Sure, I read it word for word, and don't..." and he interrupted me once more after sinking another double shot of espresso in one swift gulp, sucking it down like it was a shot of whisky.

He smacked his lips loudly and continued, "You're taking me out on your tour tonight. You meet me at the back entrance of the hotel so we can avoid the press. I'm planning to only pay you for the tour, but if you really can show me a ghost, even just one, I pay you a million dollars. It's in the contract.

"But you won't show me anything. I know you won't. And you know you won't.

"You really sure you want to take this challenge? I'm going to post it on Instagram, tweet it, add you to my list of the vanquished. I've got like over 40 million followers. You want that heat?"

"I've already accepted your offer and am confident I can show you not only one, but multiple ghosts. And, at the risk of sounding cliché, and with all due respect, sir, I wouldn't live in Bangkok if I couldn't take the heat, or the ghosts," I answered and took a sip of the extremely bitter and strong espresso. The stuff numbed my mouth. It was like liquid cocaine.

"I admire your confidence, Jeff. I'll see you tonight." Jay said as he reached over the table and gave me a fist bump.

He and Amber both rose, and she peered up for a second, waved a goodbye with another forced smile, then went immediately back to her phone, glued to it as she walked off, arm in arm with Jay, the couple ushered out of the lounge dotingly by hotel staff wearing bow ties and perfectly creased blazers.

I sat back in my chair, looked up at the stunning architecture of the building, the intricate transoms, glittering chandelier, and assorted black and white photographs hanging on the walls.

I glanced admiringly at a photograph of Somerset Maugham, the famous author who'd suffered through a bout of malaria at this hotel.

I finished my plate of assorted pastries, finger cakes. They were delectable and immaculate. Rich people really eat well.

Gazing out towards the Chao Phraya River, I wondered where exactly Dao had jumped. Was it here? From the hotel? With the hotel's long history, having been built in 1876, there must be many ghosts around. Maybe Mr. Maugham's ghost drops by, from time to time...

Hopefully more than one or two ghosts were ready to show up later tonight... A million dollars was riding on it...

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When Somchai and I showed up that evening, around 10 p.m., I could tell Mr. Palmer was slightly tipsy.

"Too many glasses of red wine at Le Normandie," he grunted. His blond hair was combed and slicked back neatly, and he'd changed into blue jeans and a black Guns N' Roses t-shirt.

(I was surprised he was into classic rock. I thought he'd be more into mumble rap, for whatever reason...)

I passed him a motorcycle helmet to wear. I'd picked a helmet for him that had a super dark visor, to help conceal his identity from the press, fans.

"And where is Miss Royal?" I asked Jay, who was struggling to figure out how to sit properly on the back of the motorcycle. Somchai rushed over, helped him up and on.

"Nah, no Amber, she's going to a party, with a Thai princess she's pals with. She doesn't want to be outside much anyway, in this heat.

"And I don't blame her. How could anyone live in a place this fucking hot? Dammit, the whole place stinks like ass. And just look at that pole up there, the electric pole, all those twisted wires... What a shithole...

"And speaking of shit, Amber said she knows you're full of shit, and you don't need to prove it to her. Me, on the other hand, I like a good joke, shattering superstitions. Science is the only truth, Jeffyboy. Let's do this, bro."

And with that, we set off into the humid Bangkok night. We rode around the concrete jungle, and Jay scanned around quietly at its backdrop of neon lights and shimmering skyscrapers, bustling city streets.