Doll with a dead fetus’ spirit? How Hongkongers have embraced Thai occult charms

Off a dusty corridor in an industrial block in working-class Kwun Tong, a self-proclaimed spiritual guide, sells amulets laced with human bone fragments sourced from Thailand, and tends to her makeshift shrine.

Children’s toys hang next to religious statuettes among droplets of wax and incense ash. An open box of pizza with congealed cheese lies on the floor next to fruit that has begun to rot: these are offerings to the ghosts and spirits believed to reside here.

Hong Kong has plenty of ghost stories. With ancestor worship woven deeply into the social fabric of southern China, and real estate prices affected by fear of hauntings, belief that the boundaries between the living and the dead are porous is pervasive.

The region has always been a melting pot of spiritual beliefs, with Thai Buddhist deities and Japanese atonement practices - a tradition of making a sacrifice to make right a wrong - incorporated in the very southern Chinese methods of appeasing ghoulish forces trapped in the living world.

But Thai occult stores such as the one in Kwun Tong are a relatively new phenomenon, and one that is gaining popularity in Hong Kong. They offer a window into a murky, complex world of Buddhist and animist beliefs with a strong flavour of black magic.