After being a hit movie in its native country, Death Whisperer came to Netflix for the international audience as well. But did you know that this story is supposedly based on a true story that really happened in rural Thailand decades ago?
“Death Whisperer,” also known as “Tee Yod,” (ธี่หยด) is a 2023 Thai supernatural horror film based on Krittanon’s novel of the same name. Directed by Thaweewat Wanta, the movie “Death Whisperer,” features a cast including Nadech Kugimiya, Rattanawadee Wongthong, Denise Jelilcha Kapaun, Karj-bundit Jaidee, Peerakit Patcharabunyakiat, Arisara Wongchalee, and Paramet Noi-um.
Set in a remote village in 1972, the plot of “Death Whisperer” revolves around a farmer family plagued by mysterious deaths and the illness of a young girl, Yam, in a remote village in Kanchanaburi province.
Read More: Check out all the ghost stories from Thailand
They then have several encounters with a ghostly woman in black and keeps hearing a mysterious voice, sounding like something resembling a prayer or unintelligible words like “Tee Yod…” As the supernatural threat escalates, the eldest son, Yak, a former soldier, returns home to confront the chilling forces at play and protect his family.
The Story Behind the Movie “Death Whisperer”
“Death Whisperer” is based on a horror story posted on Thai discussion forum, Pantip.com in late May 2015, which had over 2,000 comments and forwarded 130,000 times. The original thread still looks like it is up, although it has seen some modification. Check the whole thread in Thai here.
The story was first called “Ghost Fever… Let’s Hear My Secrets” and was rewritten into a novel released in 2017 by the same author, Kittisak Kittiwirayanont under the pseudonym “Kritanon”. A few months before the film “Death Whisperer” was released, it was also told again on a popular ghost program on the radio station.
The term “Tee Yod”, originating from a mysterious woman in black dress, remains enigmatic in both its meaning and linguistic origin. It has been suggested that it might be the Mon language, in connection with the Ohm mantra, and the story itself has many parts of Thai folklore behind it. However, Ong Bunjoon, an expert in Mon arts and culture says that this word has no meaning. Moreover, he himself had never heard this word before.
It is said that Khun Kit’s own mother who the story is told through was also unfamiliar with the source of the noise and the mantra that sounded like Tee Yod, and although it has persisted all this time, it is likely that the spellings of the word “Tee Yod” have become distorted over time. Even if they didn’t know what it meant, they kept insisting that they heard it being called by an entity, over and over again.
The True Ghost Story of Tee Yod
So what really happened that time? Although we don’t really have it retold before it appeared in the internet forum, the story follows the “Death Whisperer” pretty closely. Krittanon, the author behind Tee Yod claims that it is a true story that happened to his mother’s family in the past when she was 15 or 16 years old in a province in the central region. And although speculations online have been going on, the actual place has remained pretty secret.
His mother had a lot of siblings and they would walk through rice fields and wilderness for kilometers for hours every day to get to school, as they lived out in the countryside and were a part of a farmer family. On their way there was a tree with an old wooden shrine they had to walk past and his mother raised her hand for worship every time they walked by it.
One evening while they were walking by the shrine, they saw a woman standing next to it. She looked middle aged with shoulder length hair and wore black clothes. Although the girls didn’t think much of it at the time, the mother claims that the woman was staring at them, smiling.
Her younger sister Yam got ill that evening and the next morning, it didn’t get any better and had to stay home from school. During the night Yam started to behave strangely, startling and screaming to her mother that someone was coming for her to harm her. When they got her to the doctor, they told her it was a flu that would pass. It didn’t though.
They then called for another medicine man, more on the traditional side. He started to give herbal medicine, at first not believing when she kept insisting that someone was out to hurt her and said it was all a dream.
The medicine man did advise to not let strangers come by though, as their extended family came for a visit. Then Yam saw her again, the old woman standing outside their door, still smiling. But this time, the doctor saw her as well and started shouting at her, telling her not to smile and never come back.
The smiling woman walked smiling away and the family was left shocked. Had it not all been a nightmare caused by her fever? The medicine man asked if they knew the woman, they told him they did not.
The medicine man then said that the old woman most likely was used as some type of vessel, distorted and unnatural and if she ever came back, they had to chase her away. Under no circumstances could she enter the house. Could she be possessed by something evil?
Then strange things started to happen inside of the house. Yam started to sleepwalk, her fever gone, but her personality somehow… changed. She went for long periods without speaking to her family members, refused to go to school and stared at her siblings as they tried to sleep, freaking them out. She had the same strange smiling expression as the old lady had given them and it scared them all.
All the while the daughter in the family acted strangely, they started hearing this sound, almost like a prayer or a mantra being repeated in the night, although no one was to be seen. The mantra sounded something like Tee Yod.
One night, the parents had to travel out of town for a wedding, and left the eldest brother back from the military in charge of the rest of his siblings. During the night they heard laughter and whistling in the house as well as the same mantra being repeated over and over again. Tee Yod… Tee Yod…
The older brothers went outside and the little sisters were inside the house, listening as they fired gunshots against a woman standing still in the dark, only seen when they pointed a flashlight at her. The old woman appeared every night, etching closer and closer, only seen in the light of the flashlight, leaving only footprints in the grass. Even when they shot at her, she still came back.
Now, she started to come even during the day, and one day when the parents had returned they found her standing over Yam in her room. The mother threw a bucket of water at her, screaming she had to leave her house. The old woman obliged, smiling her creepy smile and left.
They brought the same medicine man back and when he asked Yam how she felt, she told her she wasn’t Yam. He then told the parents he suspected that Yam was being eaten by a sort of spirit or ghoul of a woman who lived not far from there and that he had heard stories about this woman wearing black from others as well.
When they visited the old lady, they found her lying on the mat with a cloth covering her face with her family around her. She was dead, covered with bruises and cuts.
But the death of the old lady, was not the end of the strange things happening. And the same mantra was whispered in the night, and the family had to protect themselves against the danger lurking outside of their home, wanting to get in. They would hear the voices of family members, claiming to be them to open the door.
The haunting continued until they found the source of the bamboo bush that had appeared when the old woman appeared. When they cut it up, they claimed something rotten and slimy, like organs hidden inside of the bamboo fields around the house. Humans or animals, who knows. They burned it all down.
This together with taking her to a bigger hospital looked for a couple of days to be helping. They started to wonder about her pains could be something physical, not the paranormal theories that had consumed the family for the past weeks. They did however find that her organs were severely damaged.
That was until one day at the hospital, the strange symptoms that had consumed Yam returned, this time she would not recover. And in the hallway of the hospital they saw the woman wearing the same dark clothes, smiling.
The Enduring Mystery of Tee Yod
Yam never made it back from the hospital and sadly died of her injuries, and rumors about what had happened spread. What really happened remained a mystery and the truth perhaps will get even more diluted when “Death Whisperer” was released. What illness did Yam really have, who was the old lady that kept coming to their house, and what were the things they found in the bamboo field?
Also what really did Tee Yod means, and did it have any connections to the strange shrine they first saw the old woman, that eventually got torn down according to the author.
Many of the answers will never be given, especially since the author himself doesn’t have all the answers.
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