The Goddess Kali Palace
Video: https://youtu.be/2uTK_6Sfs4Q
I shot this series at a wild place, the abandoned Goddess Kali Palace in Suan Luang, central Bangkok. I went in with my good friend Kang, a local ghost hunter who knows a neighbour and caretaker of the property, who provided us with a ladder to climb over the gate. Kang gathered the sketchy details of the history and supposed happenings at this location. The information I have is what Kang has gathered from local residents, how much of it you choose to believe is entirely up to you.
In the late 1980’s an affluent family of 4 lived here, a father, mother and two daughters. The father was the pillar of both his family and the local community, a successful prosecutor, a man of noted wealth and prestige.
This all came to an end when the father had a quarrel with a neighbour in the middle of an alley near his home, which ended with the neighbour shooting the father and killing him. This situation is unfortunately quite common in Thailand as the combination of face culture & fragile male egos often leads to violence.
Once the family’s provider was no longer there, the mother had to find a way to support her family, which is when she appointed herself to be an avatar of powerful and wrathful Hindu Goddess Kali (known as ‘Jai Mae Kali’), with the house becoming a palace/shrine, a place to worship and make merit (i.e. give the goddess money to bring about good fortune). The family was Thai-Buddhist, but Hindu deities are often incorporated with Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and sanctified alongside Buddhist teachings. The mother ‘befriended’ a police officer who was somehow able to provide her with 4 servants to work for her at the palace.
According to the story, the mother/goddess was insufferably cruel to her servants, torturing them when she thought they misbehaved and keeping them captive in the palace, treating them as prisoners who lived to serve the ‘goddess’. Evenntually, the servants had enough, and devised a plan to escape their imprisonment and punish their captor in the process. The plan was fairly simple: they used a blunt object to beat the woman to death. As they were leaving, both of the daughters awoke and saw what they had done. They then murdered the daughters in the same way as the mother, and left all three bodies on the second floor of the house and exiting the scene.
A few days later, after neighbours noticed that lights had been left on, police were summoned. The police entered and found the bodies. The been abandoned ever since the killings, with large parts of it having been demolished and made uninhabitable.
According to legend, when local people sneak into the grounds to fish in the adjacent canal, they have seen the goddess standing and pointing at them or heard strange noises coming from inside the palace. When they enter the demolished structure to find the source of the noises, they find nothing.
The Thai portion of the sign reads' 'Palace of the Goddess Kali' with the year 1989, no idea what the Sanskrit translation is.
I don’t know that this is one of the more ‘photogenic’ abandoned sites that I’ve documented, but it does have one of the more morbidly curious backstories. The interiors are certainly unusual, and the darkness and dampness adds to an atmosphere of morbidity. In a way, the murky, decrepit condition of the palace is metaphorically fitting for both the way the servants were treated and the wickedness of their alleged vengeance.
Read MoreI shot this series at a wild place, the abandoned Goddess Kali Palace in Suan Luang, central Bangkok. I went in with my good friend Kang, a local ghost hunter who knows a neighbour and caretaker of the property, who provided us with a ladder to climb over the gate. Kang gathered the sketchy details of the history and supposed happenings at this location. The information I have is what Kang has gathered from local residents, how much of it you choose to believe is entirely up to you.
In the late 1980’s an affluent family of 4 lived here, a father, mother and two daughters. The father was the pillar of both his family and the local community, a successful prosecutor, a man of noted wealth and prestige.
This all came to an end when the father had a quarrel with a neighbour in the middle of an alley near his home, which ended with the neighbour shooting the father and killing him. This situation is unfortunately quite common in Thailand as the combination of face culture & fragile male egos often leads to violence.
Once the family’s provider was no longer there, the mother had to find a way to support her family, which is when she appointed herself to be an avatar of powerful and wrathful Hindu Goddess Kali (known as ‘Jai Mae Kali’), with the house becoming a palace/shrine, a place to worship and make merit (i.e. give the goddess money to bring about good fortune). The family was Thai-Buddhist, but Hindu deities are often incorporated with Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and sanctified alongside Buddhist teachings. The mother ‘befriended’ a police officer who was somehow able to provide her with 4 servants to work for her at the palace.
According to the story, the mother/goddess was insufferably cruel to her servants, torturing them when she thought they misbehaved and keeping them captive in the palace, treating them as prisoners who lived to serve the ‘goddess’. Evenntually, the servants had enough, and devised a plan to escape their imprisonment and punish their captor in the process. The plan was fairly simple: they used a blunt object to beat the woman to death. As they were leaving, both of the daughters awoke and saw what they had done. They then murdered the daughters in the same way as the mother, and left all three bodies on the second floor of the house and exiting the scene.
A few days later, after neighbours noticed that lights had been left on, police were summoned. The police entered and found the bodies. The been abandoned ever since the killings, with large parts of it having been demolished and made uninhabitable.
According to legend, when local people sneak into the grounds to fish in the adjacent canal, they have seen the goddess standing and pointing at them or heard strange noises coming from inside the palace. When they enter the demolished structure to find the source of the noises, they find nothing.
The Thai portion of the sign reads' 'Palace of the Goddess Kali' with the year 1989, no idea what the Sanskrit translation is.
I don’t know that this is one of the more ‘photogenic’ abandoned sites that I’ve documented, but it does have one of the more morbidly curious backstories. The interiors are certainly unusual, and the darkness and dampness adds to an atmosphere of morbidity. In a way, the murky, decrepit condition of the palace is metaphorically fitting for both the way the servants were treated and the wickedness of their alleged vengeance.
