In Thailand, too, some beliefs probably have practical strategies behind them.
One Thai belief is that if you hear someone calling in the middle of the night, you should never reply, because it is a ghost calling. If you respond, you let the ghost into your home.
In the old days, people would usually go to bed at nightfall or soon after, so anyone walking around at night was quite possibly a criminal.
If they called out and you opened the door to them, you were inviting trouble.
Labelling them as ghosts, rather than as bad people, was considerably more scary and more likely to keep people as quiet as mice when someone called to them from the street.
Piyatharin Ruengrong, 26, who was a mah song – a spirit medium – in the Vegetarian Festival for 11 years, says that she can see ghosts, though she has never heard them speak.
She says, “I used to follow this belief when I was a lot younger but now I don’t believe it has anything to do with the supernatural. It’s more like a strategy by our elders to keep youngsters quiet at night.”