Krasue

The krasue is a Thai ghost pictured as a woman's floating head with her innards hanging beneath, said to feed at night on raw or rotting food. Neighbouring countries tell of close relatives.

The Bangkok Post described the krasue in 2016 as a female head that floats with its innards dangling below, a night spirit said to feed only on raw, bloody or rotting food.

The same flying head turns up across the region. The Bangkok Post names the penanggalan of Malaysia, the ahp of Cambodia and the palasik of Indonesia. Wikipedia adds the kasu of Laos; the kuyang, pok-pok and leyak of Indonesia; the pelasik, pelesit and penanggal, which Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore share; and the ma lai of Vietnam. It gives the manananggal, whose lower half is detached, as the Tagalog counterpart, and records that the Maranao call the head-detaching creature kalibadot and the Visayans call it ok-ok, ungga-ungga and wugwug.

Benjamin Baumann, writing in the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia in 2014, says the krasue, like most beings given the broad prefix phi, had no origin story beyond local telling until the 2002 film Tamnan Krasue. Bin Banluerit's film placed its origin in thirteenth-century Angkorian Khmer culture. Baumann asks why this Khmer origin appeared soon after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and why nobody examined it critically when it departs from how Thai oral tradition usually works.

In 2017 Channel 8 reported that a viral video of a krasue flying past and snagging in a tree turned out to be a human face fixed to a drone. In 2023 Thairath reported a clip of a red light hovering above the treetops at night near a house in Ratchaburi. The young woman who saw it said she had never seen such a thing before and thought it was a krasue.