Ghosts and Haunting
Edition 164: Apr-Jun 2026
Ask most people what comes to mind when they think of Indonesian ghosts, and the answer tends to be fairly predictable: kuntilanak, pocong, tuyul. The white-dressed female spirit, the hopping shrouded corpse, the bald child who steals coins. These are the ghosts of horror films and late-night storytelling sessions, and they are popular for a reason: they are vivid, frightening, and deeply embedded in Indonesian popular culture.
But ghosts, in Indonesia as elsewhere, are rarely just about fear.
This edition of Inside Indonesia takes the ghostly seriously. But not to debate whether ghosts are real or not. Through editing these articles and the conversations they provoked, we have realised that this may be the wrong question to ask. As the contributors to this edition show, ghosts do things. The articles gathered here reflect a range of voices from scholars, journalists, ethnographers, and community researchers who are writing from across Indonesia and beyond… Read more
Between worlds
Written by Christy Childs
Encounters with the unseen in Bali
Ghosts on Stone Hill
Written by Khairani Fitri Kananda and M. Cole Grady
‘They say that the people of Gunungkidul are shamans’
Haunted by the past
Written by Emmelia Helkins and Ronald Lukens-Bull
Ghosts and modernity in Indonesia
Dancing with ghosts
Written by Andrea Decker
Folk horror and the haunting of Indonesia’s past
Spirited pages
Written by Verena Meyer
Manuscripts have opinions
Headless soldiers
Written by Muhammad Afdillah
Haunting and uncertainty in Ponorogo
The bastion where spirits keep watch
Written by Noandha Dhegaska
The earth keeps what war leaves behind, only we reinterpret it
Can a sacred grove help?
Written by Bianca Smith
A child abduction in the Central Javanese hinterland
Learning to read ghosts
Titah AW in conversation with Tito Ambyo
A dialogue on haunting, journalism and anthropology
