In early 1990s Cambodia, Chanda and her husband were being drained — literally. Night after night, they woke exhausted, covered in small puncture wounds, haunted by suffocating dreams. The source turned out to be closer than they imagined: their next-door neighbor, an ahp — a vampiric entity from Khmer folklore that hunts as a disembodied floating head with trailing entrails behind it. When a Buddhist monk's blessing finally let Chanda see what had been feeding on them in the dark, she knew exactly what she was dealing with. But defeating it would take something bigger — the sacred festival of Pchum Ben, when the gates of the underworld open and the ancestors come to help. What happens when you fight a vampire with faith, family, and a ring of thorn branches? Listen to find out.

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