Krasue

In the traditions surveyed the Krasue is most often described as a transformed or cursed human, frequently a woman, whose condition is linked in popular accounts to moral transgression, failed or misused magic, or other social sins; transmission via contact with the saliva or flesh of an existing Krasue is also reported. In Cambodian sources (Ahp/Aap) the being is explicitly described as 'half spirit and half-mortal' by day, appearing normal in daylight and detaching at night to seek food. The available sources emphasize these causes as regional/folk explanations rather than a single canonical origin narrative.

The creature is commonly described as the floating, disembodied head of a young and often beautiful woman with internal organs — heart, stomach, intestines, and sometimes lungs or liver — trailing below the neck, frequently daubed with blood and sometimes glowing. Thai ethnographer Phraya Anuman Rajadhon recorded an accompanying will-o'-the-wisp–like luminescent glow, and contemporary popular media sometimes add features such as pointed fangs or exaggerated halos; regional variants and cinematic reinventions produce variation in specific details.

Krasue and its regional analogues are nocturnal and move by hovering or flying because they lack a lower body. They are characterized by a voracious appetite for foul or raw substances: Cambodian Ahp accounts enumerate foods including blood, raw meats, corpses, feces, placentas, newborns, and livestock, while other regional traditions emphasize carrion, uncooked food or other smelly matter. Socially, women who behave oddly may be suspected of being Krasue; transformation is framed as punitive and stigmatizing in village cosmologies. The association with witchcraft and shared habitat with other local spirits (for example the Thai Krahang) is regularly noted in the sources.