Phi Pop

The water comes down through the gaps between the floorboards, and the people crouching in the dirt below do not move out of the way. Above them, inside a small wooden spirit house on stilts at Nakasang in southern Laos, two women in red are dancing, and one has just stirred a bucket of herb water with her bare feet before tipping it over. Twenty-eight people sat under that floor on the first of May in 2017 and let it soak them. In this part of the Mekong, having somebody’s feet above your head is close to the worst insult on offer, which is exactly why the ritual is built that way. Everyone underneath had signed a piece of paper agreeing that they were carrying a phi pop.

The ravenous spirit is one of the most feared things in the cosmology of ethnic Lao people, who live across Laos, northeastern Thailand and a corner of northeastern Cambodia. It does not haunt a crossroads or a banyan tree. It gets inside a person, and from there it feeds on other people, eating their livers and their other internal organs while they go about their day and notice nothing. Small children are the ones it is said to prefer. Water buffalo and cattle sicken and drop for the same reason. The victim feels only the illness, and by the time anyone connects the deaths to a cause, several households have buried someone.

It has no shape. Nobody has ever described its face, because there is no face to describe, and the tradition is quite comfortable with that. A phi pop is known entirely by what happens around it and by whose body it is thought to be sitting in, which means the description that matters is always the description of a living neighbour: how they look at people, how they got their money, whether they were seen handling anything they should not have been handling. In practice the spirit is invisible in the plainest possible sense. You are looking straight at it and seeing a man who collects the land tax.

How it arrives is a question of carelessness rather than invitation. The usual account holds that the host had been dabbling in magic, and that the practice went wrong or was misused, corrupting them and leaving them open. This is the line that separates a phi pop host from a spirit medium, who is a very different figure in Lao life. Mediums, the nang thiam of Laos and Cambodia, are entered by the spirits of respected ancestors and community founders, and nothing they say while possessed is held against them. The pop is not respected and it is not welcome, and although the host is not fully blamed for what the spirit does, they are blamed for the door they left open. Anthropologists have found the fit with witchcraft close enough to use the word, in the sense that a particular individual is understood to carry a mystical power capable of harming others whether they want to or not.

The moment everything turns on is the confession. In Lao it is called oke pak, and a village will press for it until it comes. The Thai folklorist Phya Anuman Rajadhon and his collaborator recorded the shape such an admission takes: the afflicted person speaks in the voice of the spirit, gives their own name and the names of a wife and children, names the village they come from, and states that they entered this particular body to avenge a wrong. It is confession and accusation at the same time, and once it has been spoken aloud there is no way back into the community.

In 1993, on Khone Island at the very southern tip of Laos, babies began dying in Hang Khone Village. The villagers eventually settled on a man named Bounsou, who kept the village accounts and collected land tax for the state, and who was said to have been practising magic. He denied it, then admitted it. He took what he could carry and left, his wife and daughter following soon after, and thirty years later he had still not been back. He resettled near the Mekong at Nakasang, then just inland, where he made a living building cement stupas.

The spirit shades into a more dangerous relative called phi phong, which villagers in northeastern Cambodia say does not merely sicken people but kills them outright, and which is thought to spread by spit. The name may simply mean glowing. Northern Thailand keeps a close cousin, the phi ka, which one anthropologist renders as the greedy spirit, and which unlike the southern pop is generally believed to run in families. The Shan of the northwest have their own version again. The record is not tidy on any of this. The same early Thai sources that describe the pop also insist it cannot harm its own kind, and that it leaves dignitaries and city people alone out of a fear of being unmanned.

Who ends up accused has shifted within living memory. A Thai psychiatrist working in Isan health stations in the late 1960s and early 1970s reported that the possessed were nearly always women, and described them as striking, theatrical, quick-tempered and easy to suggest things to. Recent fieldwork in southern Laos and Isan finds most accused hosts are now men. Almost nobody accused is poor. That last detail is the one that gives the game away, and villagers say it out loud: the belief is a working mechanism for expelling people the community has come to resent, and a headman will tell you frankly that once the resented person is gone, harmony returns.

Where they go is Nakasang, a fishing and trading town on the Mekong in Khong District, and the cluster of villages around it, which have taken in the accused for longer than anyone can remember. Roughly ten arrive each year, mostly with their families. There are rules. You must bring a signed and stamped letter from the headman of the village that expelled you, so that murderers and debtors cannot pass themselves off as ravenous spirits. A monk must disrobe first. And you must admit you are a phi pop, because the treatment cannot begin otherwise, even in the cases where everyone privately suspects the accusation was about something else entirely.

Then comes the three-year programme: two rituals a year, six in all, and missing one means starting again from the beginning. On arrival you give a pig to the local spirit medium, at a cost of around five hundred thousand kip. Come back a second time and it doubles. The days are fixed to the Lao lunar calendar, the third day of the third month and the third day of the sixth. Each household sends someone with candles, flowers, a little money, a bottle of rice whiskey and a hard-boiled egg, and the medium takes possession, ties a red scarf around her forehead, drinks the whiskey straight from the bottle and dances with an old sword with lit candles standing on the blade, while a drum, a khene and small cymbals keep her going. Three stamps of her foot on the floorboards is the signal. The accused scramble up out of the dirt, run through a shallow sacred pond called the nong cheut, and keep running to the river, where they swim downstream in front of the entire community before coming out to dry clothes held by waiting relatives.

The name of that pond carries the whole theory. Cheut means bland, watered down, weakened, and the pond exists to make the spirit tasteless. There is the limit of the ravenous thing: it can eat a child’s liver from a mile away and it cannot survive being made boring. It is powerful only through a body, expellable along with that body, and finally dissolvable in muddy water and a village’s collective attention. Buddhist monks take no part in any of it, and mediums take no part in Buddhism, which leaves the spirit in a category the temple will not touch. The headman of Nakasang closes each ritual with a short speech in which he calls the phi pop a disease. About seven in ten of the people who arrive never go home again.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Phi Pop?

A Phi Pop is a malevolent spirit in Thai and Lao folklore that lives inside a living human host and eats the internal organs of other people, especially young children, along with livestock. The victims feel only unexplained illness and do not know they are being consumed. The belief is strongest among ethnic Lao people in Laos, northeastern Thailand and northeastern Cambodia.

What does a Phi Pop look like?

Nothing in the tradition describes the spirit’s own appearance, because it has none. A Phi Pop is identified only by the human being it is believed to be hiding inside, so the “appearance” of a Phi Pop is always the ordinary appearance of a fellow villager.

How does someone become a Phi Pop?

The usual explanation is that the person had been practising or misusing magic, which corrupted them and left them open to possession. The host is not thought to have chosen the spirit, but is held partly responsible for the carelessness that let it in. This distinguishes a Phi Pop host from a spirit medium, who is entered voluntarily by respected ancestral spirits and is never blamed.

What happens to a person accused of being a Phi Pop?

They are driven out of their village, and in some cases their house is burned down behind them. Many of the accused in Laos and northeastern Cambodia travel to Nakasang village in Champasak Province, one of the few places that accepts them, where they must admit to being a Phi Pop and complete a three-year healing programme of six rituals.

Is the Phi Pop belief still active today?

Yes. Accusations continue in Lao and Isan villages, the Nakasang healing rituals still run twice a year, and researchers who have attended them describe communities that both believe in the spirit and openly acknowledge that most people accused of harbouring one are simply unpopular.

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