Mae Nak: The Wife Whose Love Would Not Let Her Notice She Had Died
The most beloved ghost in all of Thailand — a spirit with her own shrine on the Phra Khanong canal in Bangkok, visited by thousands who bring her offerings and ask her favours to this day — is not a monster of malice but a wife of such overwhelming love that it kept her from noticing she had died. Mae Nak — "Lady Nak of Phra Khanong" — is the ghost of a young woman of old Bangkok, wife to a young man named Mak, and the tale is one of the most poignant in this whole chronicle. Nak and Mak were newly married and deeply in love, and Nak was with child, when Mak was conscripted and sent away to war. While he was gone, Nak went into labour — and she died in childbirth, she and the baby both, and were buried; but her love for her husband and her longing for his return were so absolute, so total, that her spirit would not accept the death — refused it, simply, out of the sheer force of her devotion — and when Mak came home from the war, wounded but alive, he found his beloved Nak ...