3 Bangkok Horror Stories: The Krasue, the Bikini Killer and the Vanishing Taxi Passenger

1. The Krasue

In Thai folklore the Krasue is a woman's head that detaches at night and drifts above the old waterways and deserted industrial edges of the city, her organs hanging beneath her like a lantern, hungry for blood and flesh. Fishermen and late-night passersby along Bangkok's khlongs are the ones who claim to see her. The rule in every telling is the same: if you see her, do not stop to look, just flee. She is the Thai cousin of Malaysia's penanggalan, so if you grew up here, you have heard this one in a different accent.

2. The Bikini Killer

This one is not a myth. Charles Sobhraj, later called the Serpent, prowled the hippie trail in the 1970s, and Bangkok was one of his hunting grounds. He charmed young backpackers, gained their trust, offered to help them out of some difficulty, then drugged them, or sometimes killed them outright, and stole their passports to move under new identities. In October 1975, Teresa Knowlton, a 21-year-old from Seattle on her way to a monastery in Nepal, was found drowned in a tidal pool in the Gulf of Thailand wearing a floral bikini. That is where the nickname came from. Backpackers who thought they were on holiday vanished, leaving empty rooms and unanswered questions. Sobhraj was released from a Nepal prison in December 2022 and is still alive. Our reel called the victim Theresa Norton; the name in the record is Teresa Knowlton.

3. The missing passenger

There is a stretch of road in Bangkok where taxi drivers say they pick up a quiet woman late at night. She sits at the back, stares straight ahead, and gives a cemetery as her destination. The car always slows near the graveyard, and when the driver checks the rear-view mirror, the seat is empty. No door opened, no footsteps, nothing. Versions of this one appear again and again in taxi lore, and they are almost always tied to old burial grounds the city has built over and forgotten. Our own answer to "what would you do": floor it, do not look back. For Singapore's version of this genre, the KL Airbnb story is the one that still gets sent around.