When spirits come to your neighbourhood, you’d better serve up your best.

Ethnic Chinese Malaysians celebrated Hungry Ghost month in Malaysia’s capital of Kuala Lumpur on Sunday.

The tradition is associated with Buddhism and Taoism, and commonly practiced in Asian countries including China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Indonesia.

Legend has it that the gates to the underworld open once a year, and ghosts return to the land of the living in search of food.

Ghosts of memories

Gene Lin, Inkstone

My family frequently observed the Hungry Ghost Festival — also known as the “Zhongyuan” Festival — when I was growing up in Taiwan.

Each August, my grandmother would put up an altar of delicious food for our ancestors’ ghosts. It came as no surprise that they included my favorite sweets, since my grandmother knew someone had to eat them afterwards. But I never dared to take the food from the altar, from under the Buddha statues’ judgemental eyes.

The festival also presents a perfect opportunity for ghost stories.

Since wandering spirits were supposedly roaming everywhere, people would use ghost month to justify the greater numbers of drowning cases over the summer, blaming them on malevolent spirits playing with swimmers. Never mind that more people go swimming in the summer.

Nevertheless, for a while, it contributed to my paranoia of swimming in deep water in the hotter months.

Observers served up foods at the altar to appease the spirits. They also brought out the statue of “Da Shi Ye” — the guardian god of ghosts — to fend off wandering apparitions.

And just to be safe, they burned incense and effigies as well.

The festival falls on the 15th day of the 7th month of the Chinese lunar calendar, which falls this year on August 25.

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