{
  "id": "phi-ta-khon",
  "title": "Phi Ta Khon",
  "type": "custom",
  "summary": "The «ghost festival» of Dan Sai in northeastern Thailand, where villagers become spirits in towering painted masks — Buddhist merit-making wrapped in carnival.",
  "body": "Phi Ta Khon is a festival held in the district of Dan Sai, in Loei province in Thailand's northeast, as part of a larger merit-making celebration. Its signature is the costume: young men dress as playful, mischievous spirits — «ghosts» — in long ragged patchwork robes and huge, brilliantly painted masks built from a bamboo sticky-rice steamer for the crown and a carved coconut-palm sheath for the long-nosed face.\n\nThe masked spirits parade, dance and tease the crowd, carrying bawdy carved symbols of fertility through the streets in a loud, joyful procession that blurs the line between the reverent and the riotous. The festival is tied to a Buddhist story — a homecoming of the Buddha in a former life so joyous that even the spirits came out to celebrate — and it folds older animist and fertility elements into that Buddhist frame.\n\nThe masks are made fresh each year and the festival's dates are set by local divination rather than a fixed calendar, so it belongs to Dan Sai in a way no reproduction elsewhere quite captures. It is a striking example of living folk religion — improvised, local, and handed on by taking part.",
  "culture": "Thai (Dan Sai, Loei)",
  "region": "Loei Province, Thailand",
  "language": "th",
  "transmission": "oral",
  "tags": [
    "festival",
    "masks",
    "buddhism",
    "thailand",
    "custom"
  ],
  "sources": [],
  "confidence": "documented",
  "contributor": "seed",
  "added": "2026-07-12",
  "updated": "2026-07-12",
  "url": "https://crowdh.com/knowledge/phi-ta-khon.html"
}