In Asia, there are many reasons why you may wish to dig up a road: to lay pipes, to remove pipes, or just for somewhere to sit and smoke a pipe. Or, of course, you may wish to build a traffic bypass to foil a killer ghost hitchhiker.

That’s what happened in India. Truckers driving from Mumbai to Pune used to see a female thumbing a lift in the mountains of Bhor Ghat. She would beckon them and they would drive off a 5000-foot drop to their deaths, their last words being something like: "Hi, sugar, wanna riiiiiiiiii—-" Splat.

But now a bypass has been built. "The old Bhor Ghat road now lies abandoned—and perhaps the phantom figure too has finished, with no truck drivers around to be lured to their deaths," reporter Vasantha Raghunath wrote in the Deccan Herald earlier this month.

Ghosts may be able to do clever things like walk through walls, but they are actually pretty dumb. In Hong Kong, where the number four is unlucky, floors are numbered one-two-three-five-six-seven because scientific tests have proved that Hong Kong ghosts cannot work out which is the fourth floor. They end up hot and bothered in the landing between floors numbered three and five, calling the Citizen’s Advice Bureau on their mobile phones. ("Excuse me, but what comes after three?") I reckon this gives them a level of numeracy less than the average three-year-old, but higher than me by nine pm on a Friday night.

But perhaps the award for dumbest ghosts should go to the pee-paubs (entrail-stealing demons) of Thailand. Whole herds of them can be rounded up using songbooks.

Pee paub panic broke out when rural Thais noticed that a number of elderly people had (cue scary music)… died! Using unshakeable logic, they deduced that ghosts must be killing very old people, it having entirely slipped their minds that the most popular pastimes of very old people are aging, dying, being dead and so on.

That summer, residents of the town of Phrae stuck banners on their homes saying (and this is not a joke): "Dear Pee-Paub, No Old People Here. Try Next Door." But the signs were abandoned after they were told pee-paubs couldn’t read.

To the rescue came a fearless ghostbuster from Wat Banpotwanaram temple, motivated by a noble and selfless desire to collect a one million baht fee from the villagers.

He sang from a songbook, incapacitating the ghosts. I cannot find any record of what he sang, but I know from personal experience that a karaoke rendition of Feelings can leave the manliest of men (ie, me) blubbering on the floor.

In 2004, an evil spirit took up residence in an outhouse toilet near Jaipur. People who used it were afterwards prone to fits, the United News of India reported. Of course, I would argue that anyone who used outhouse village toilets in India would afterwards be prone to fits. Indeed, the fits usually start as you approach.

In rural Malaysia in 2003, headless ghosts terrified school kids. The state education chief urged people to keep calm, saying: "I have not heard of anyone being injured from being mauled by these ghosts." If you think about it, headless ghosts would have a tough time mauling anyone.

They also wouldn’t be able to hear anyone singing Feelings. Lucky them.

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