Do You Believe in Ghosts?

Passing by a row of street food vendors, Jay yelled into my ear, "Smells great, those noodles. I'd almost eat them if they wouldn't give me diarrhea. If it wasn't probably rat meat in there..."

"Thais are a rather cleanly people. The street food here is quite safe, generally. Even as safe as many upscale restaurants." I screamed back to him over the din of the traffic...

We hit our top three spots in succession, the Sathorn Tower, the cemetery, the "Curve of 100 Corpses." But nothing. For the first time, ever, not a single ghost showed themselves.

We had to dig deeper, so we took him by the "Prostitute Graveyard," an abandoned brothel where women were forced into sex slavery and many were killed and buried in the yard behind what was now an abandoned building, a rather shoddy structure, that looked more like an old empty factory.

It was usual to hear cries there at night. See the ghost of a crying woman pacing outside the building entrance. But, again, nothing.

I decided to go with the most reliable ghosts I know. Those living near my apartment.

My apartment is near the site of the infamous Santika Club fire, where 66 people burned to death. At night, it's common to see ghosts of the club-goers, either on fire, or as charred corpses, running up and down the street where the club once stood, the ghosts probably seeking the exit doors they tragically couldn't find that fateful night.

We pulled up to the site of the club. Waited.

No ghosts.

Then we drove to the front of my apartment building. My building is one of many on a side street, off Sukhumvit Road, in an alley. The Art Deco style, pastel pink building next to mine was the site of a shocking murder where a British man, angry over his money allegedly being stolen, threw his bargirl girlfriend off the balcony, and she fell to her death in front of my building.

The Brit is rotting in the Bangkok Hilton, but the girl lives on as a ghost, as a "preta," a hungry ghost.

Pretas are ghosts of those who were too materialistic or greedy and are doomed to wander as ghosts with small mouths, and elongated, super thin necks. They are always hungry or thirsty, but their mouths and necks are too tiny for them to eat or drink.

The girl thrown off the balcony was supposedly such a preta, and me, the neighbors, would see her wandering the alley both day and night. A tormented ghost, the sun would freeze her, and the moon would burn her. My landlady would regularly say prayers for the preta and hoped the ghost could one day pass on to a new life.

I'd taken a few pictures of the preta, video too, had seen her several times per week.

When we rode into the alley, sure enough, the preta was there, wandering around the spot on the pavement where she'd fallen to her death.

"There, there, look!" I hit the brakes, craned my neck and yelled to Jay. But when I looked back, the preta was gone.

"I didn't see anything. This is getting boring," said Jay, flipping up his helmet's visor and snarling at me with an upturned lip.

Looking back at Jay, I was ready to reaffirm what I'd seen, when behind him, the preta had reappeared.

She'd grown too, was over 7 feet tall, and was cupping her palms to her face, like a scream mask. Her belly was growing as well, was terribly distended and her skin was pale as bone and mummified.

Somchai jumped off his bike, took several steps back, held up his amulet.

"She's... Behind you..." I whispered and pointed in the direction of the ghost.

"No, no, she's not," Jay shot back, with a tone of exasperation.

"I swear. She is." I affirmed, "seriously."

Jay shook his head derisively, sighed and shifted around in his seat, looked back.

As soon as his gaze turned in her direction, the preta vanished into thin air.

Jay let loose a shrill burst of sardonic laughter, shifted back and checked his phone to take a look at a stock ticker, then switched to YouTube, showed me a clip of Bill Maher.

"This guy is such an asshole, Bill Maher, but he gets it. He gets the human condition, the stupidity of human beings, people like you. He gets it probably better than anyone, except Bill Hicks, or George Carlin."

"You're oh for six, Jeffyboy. It's a double strikeout. Oh wait, maybe you can show me a snake that crawls up from a toilet! I hear that happens in Bangkok, like you'll be on the toilet, and a cobra pops up, bites you in the ass! I'd say that's probably more likely than a ghost... Can you show me that?"

Something like that had happened once or twice since I'd been in Bangkok, though fortunately not to me. I was about to reply to Jay, along those lines, and opened my mouth to speak when he beat me to the punch...

"Nah, forget about it," he sneered, his New Yawk accent really coming out, "you can take me back now. I knew this was fake. Hold on, I'm gonna call Amber before we go, I'll have you drop me off at the party. You're basically my chauffeur at this point. I fucking OWNED you, bro..."

He brought his phone up to his face, tapped on it and the image of the heavily made-up starlet appeared on the device's screen.

"Hey, Amber, what's shaking, sugar tits..."

His voice trailed off a bit as he walked down the alley, yapping to his girl on his Bluetooth headset. I could see her at a party, in a glitzy club somewhere, next to her was an impossibly gorgeous Asian girl I recognized, who I think was Lisa from the K-Pop girl group BLACKPINK...

Somchai told me that there was nothing we could do to prove ghosts to Jay.

Not because ghosts didn't exist, but that Jay didn't believe in them, and not just didn't believe, but didn't want to believe. As long as he held such a determination to not believe, his energy, his cynicism would force away ghosts, especially the non-malicious spirits.

Fear attracts ghosts. Disbelief, and cynicism, pessimism, especially, repels them. This is what Somchai had always told me. It was seeming to be right.

I checked my phone and noticed that I had thousands of messages on Twitter. Our company was being bombarded by trolls mocking us. Jay had been tweeting his experience the whole night, ruthlessly roasting us.

At first, I felt a spear of pain, was hurt to see hundreds of tweets full of invective, belligerence, stuff like "fuck u" "scamers". Worse was the racist language against Asian people. But when I noticed our company's follower count had gone from around 5,000 to 90,000, in the span of a couple hours, I felt better.

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Jay ended his facetime call with an air kiss, sauntered back over to us. I thought we'd take him to wherever this party was, but with an annoyed expression, he made one final request.

"Okay, so one of Amber's Thai friends, some model floozy, actually believes in this bullshit. She was all worried that we might have gone to this abandoned mansion. We didn't, though, and she's like saying something in Thai, which was translated as warning me 'never to go there'...

"So, of course we have to go there. Then after that, you take me to the party."

"Was it the Thawi Nakhon Mansion?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

Jay peered down at his phone, scrolled through a Google map, looked back up at me.

"Yup, that's the one. Let's go," said Jay, strapping his helmet back on.

Somchai was staring at me intently. I stared back. It was our last chance for one million dollars, Somchai, come on!

But Somchai wanted no part of it. He shook his head, got on his bike, and zipped off.

Jay held up his phone, shoved it at my face, on it was the 1980s music video for the song "Ghostbusters," and he jokingly shimmied and sang along to it.

"I ain't afraid of no..."

One million dollars was on the line. Although Dao might not show herself, given the fate that'd befallen everyone who'd disturbed her, I had to make it clear to Jay what he was getting into. And I did. I explained Dao's story and clearly told Jay what happened to the teenagers, to the Italians, and about the medium's dreams and warnings.

Jay laughed through the whole thing and snapped back at me, "Look, I don't believe a word of that. With the way I've seen the Thais driving, anyone anytime could be killed in a traffic accident. And I know, for sure, and more so than ever, after tonight, that ghosts are BULL FUCKING SHIT.

"But, you know, I admire your patience, persistence. I can't tell you how many arguments I've been in with people over this subject, fucking whiny little bitches. And here you are, a gentleman the entire time, even looking out for my well-being after I shit on you all night, destroyed you on Twitter, got millions of people laughing at you right this second, on their phones...

"So, here's what we'll do. We're going to that house, and get this, if I die, within the next month, in a 'tragic' accident, you get one million dollars. Hold up, I'll have a lawyer put that in writing right now."

Jay made a quick facetime call to his lawyer, who was eating breakfast, and had the old guy draw him up a contract. Then we sat for a few minutes watching Anthony Jeselnik's comedy special "Caligula."

"Ah shit, that holocaust joke is gold. A Nike factory," Jay guffawed, and then showed me the contract stipulating that if he died in the next month, in an accident, I'd get the one million dollars.

"You sign it AFTER we see the mansion. AFTER you drop me off," Jay said, slipping his phone into a front pocket of his jeans...

We drove out there, and as with the other sites, nothing happened. No light went on in the house. It was just an old mansion to Jay, who quipped that maybe he'd buy the house, turn it into a museum about ghosts, and that probably lots of people would be stupid enough to pay to visit it.

"Hey, what's with the little temple type house over there? I've seen a buncha those..." asked Jay, pointing over at the spirit house on the side of the road.

"That's a spirit house. It's common here in Southeast Asia. The locals set them outside their houses, businesses, to honor and shelter whatever spirits might be in the surrounding area. They figure it's better to have them in the spirit house than have the ghost coming into their house or apartment. You'll see people go out there in the morning, bringing gifts of juice or fruit for the sp..."

"You believe that shit, Jeff?" Jay asked, cutting me off, walking up to the small brown wooden spirit house that sat atop a dais. He stuck his face up close to it, had a long look around its inside.

I was about to answer when he yelled out, "I don't see any ghosts in it! Hey, ghosts? You there? You there?"

Then he grabbed the spirit house, shook it.

"Maybe I can shake the spirits out! Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

"Jay, please, stop, if a local drives by and sees you doing that, he might..." I pleaded.

"IT'S BULLSHIT!" he screamed and shoved the spirit house down. It, along with the offerings of fruit and plastic bottles of juice, crashed to the ground.

"See, no ghosts! If they existed, wouldn't they show themselves after I trashed their house?"

"Jay, no, you can't..." I begged him, stepped towards him, about to yank him away, when he unzipped his pants, and screamed out, "Fuck your ghosts! I'm Jay FUCKING Palmer, bitch! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"

Then he flung out his cock and began to piss on the spirit house.

I stood frozen in disbelief, grimaced, shut my eyes and hung my head in shame. I couldn't even comprehend how many visits I'd need to make to the temple to atone for this...

He finished his business, zipped up his fly and proclaimed, "Now, take me to the fucking party. I'm sick of this charade..."

I clutched my protective amulet tightly, hurried over to my bike. Jay jogged over, jumped on the back and we rode off...

Riding to the nightclub in lower Sukhumvit where his party was, I rode the motorbike like a grandma, extra careful.

Normally I'd never been afraid of ghosts, but after what he'd done to that spirit house, I couldn't shake the mental image of Dao, enraged, her hair on fire, the taste of blood in her mouth. I felt a change in the air, too; it'd gotten at least 5 degrees cooler once we'd left the site of the mansion; I was getting gooseflesh.

When I pulled up to the front of the club, the bouncers growled at us, their angry eyes like those of mad dogs. One promptly attempted to block us from pulling further towards the entrance.

"Excuse me, can I help you?" pointedly inquired the tallest of the lot, a lanky bouncer with a long scar on his right cheek. He appeared to be French by the sound of his accent.

Not too many of this nightclub's patrons arrived via motorcycle. Dude probably thought we were deliverymen or in the wrong place.

"I hope you can help me, or else you'd be pretty shitty at your job," said Jay, flipping up his visor.

"Mr. Palmer, I apologize, sir, I did not..." the Frenchie bouncer started to stammer and stepped back.

Jay hopped off the bike, passed me the helmet, gave me a fist bump.

"As much as I shit on you tonight, this was fun, I must say, riding around, seeing the city. I don't get out like this too often... Here, sign this..."

He handed me the phone, and I read over and then signed the new contract on his iPhone's touchscreen, using my finger.

"You been a sport, Jeffyboy. I don't know how good your reading comprehension is, but hopefully you saw in there that I'm giving you an extra 20k. You probably won't have many clients after this, so you'll need the cash. Take care, bro."

And with that, Jay looked over and nodded to the bouncer who ushered him into the club.

Before riding off, I checked my phone again. It was burning up with tweets, none of them nice either and an online brawl between the comedians Steven Crowder and Nick Di Paolo versus the actress Alyssa Milano had broken out in the thread of comments. The rapper Tekashi69 had even trolled me.

But on the bright side, my followers had grown to over 140,000, and a rep from the Discovery Channel had sent me a DM, asking about appearing on a ghost-themed reality show.

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Two days later, as Jay and Amber were outside the Mandarin Oriental, waiting for a private boat to take them on a tour of the Chao Phraya River, a young Thai girl, of university age, plunged from the roof of the building, landed on top of Jay, crushing him and killing him instantly.

The girl had worked at the hotel and had recently broken up with her boyfriend, so it was thought she'd committed suicide. But she'd left no note, not spoken or told anyone of suicidal thoughts and was known as a gregarious, friendly, and optimistic girl.

She'd also been a fan of Amber and had been taking photos of her before she fell, leading some to believe maybe she'd tried to snap a selfie with Amber in the background and wound up falling.

The subsequent police investigation was inconclusive...

Amber's fame only rocketed after the event, the tragic tale. Her follower count soaring to over 75 million on Instagram, and she did a series of tell-all interviews, launched a new product line of clothing in the months after...

As for me, my business had grown exponentially from the publicity of Jay's tweets and then even more so after the media firestorm surrounding his untimely death. We had more clients and deals than we could handle and had to hire additional staff. What's more, we signed a deal for a series of episodes on the Discovery Channel, about ghosts in Bangkok.

And about 5 months later, I was shocked when I went to the ATM to withdraw some cash and found there was over $1,000,000 that had appeared in the account, sent to me by the late Mr. Palmer's estate.

With business being as good as it was, and with the TV deal we'd inked, I knew what to do with the cash.

I tracked down the family of the girl who'd died at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the one who'd fallen to her death. Her family turned out to be destitute, living in a shack alongside the Chao Phraya River, in a slum, on the outskirts of Bangkok.

When I spoke with the girl's mother, I learned she was a single mom, who was struggling to put her 15-year-old boy through school.

Somchai and I took the lady and her son to Bangkok Bank, and transferred them $1,000,000.