PHUKET, Thailand — I never thought I would pay for a beachfront hotel on one of the most popular resort islands in the world. I prefer to stretch my dollars as well as my legs by staying a few blocks from the beach.

But it was the low season, and it was half a year after the tsunami. It was worth a try.

The sun was about to set on the Andaman Sea as my wife and I drove through Phuket's normally crowded Patong Beach. We noticed a small hotel only a few yards from the shore. It had great ocean views, plenty of vacancies and an unbeatable price: $20 per night. The prices had been slashed — and slashed again, thanks to the tsunami.

As we checked in, we realized the building next door was dark and silent. It had a mound of debris in front and concrete foundations where little shops once stood — a reminder of the powerful waves that struck on Dec. 26.

"I'm scared of ghosts," my wife, Tanyalux, said. Before my skeptical eyes could meet hers, she added, as if I had forgotten: "I'm Thai."

Most Thais — and many Asians — believe in ghosts, and that is one reason why the Andaman Sea resorts of southern Thailand have been hurting so much since the tsunami.

Asians — mostly from South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore — account for the bulk of low-season travelers, from May through October, and they have been staying away in droves.

Visiting Phuket

When to go

November through February is the high season. The water is calm, the weather is dry and the prices are high. Phuket becomes blazing hot from March through May. Lodging prices fall in half during the rainy season, which begins in May and runs through October.

Special deals

All kinds of promotions have been offered to lure back visitors. Many are package deals promoted by the airlines and are available through travel agents. To check out some of the packages, air ticket and hotel prices, see www.tourismthailand.org or www.thailandhotdeal.com, official Web sites for the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Or phone the Thai tourism office in Los Angeles at 323-461-9814.

We booked a two-night, return-air fare deal through Thai Airways, from Bangkok to Phuket. The package included a stay at a three-star hotel in quiet Karon Beach, plus pickup from the airport. The cost was about $300 for two. (Normal return airfare is about $140 per person.) The only problem? Extending the package couldn't be done at the hotel, only at a Thai Airways office.

Hotel booking

Often hotels are fully booked during Phuket's high season. But unless there's a miraculous turnaround, it'll be fairly easy to show up and shop around. All kinds of competitive walk-in rates were available during the low season. Car rental is about $25 per day.

More information

For more travel tips on Phuket, go to the Seattle Times Travel Web site, www.seattletimes.com/travel

The number of visitors to Phuket has plunged roughly 60 percent from a year ago. Hotels are lucky if they can fill a fifth of their rooms.

The result has been a low season unlike any other: empty, almost pristine beaches — and equally deserted hotels offering "special tsunami season discounts."

"Sometimes, nobody comes," said a man renting beach chairs in front of our hotel. "It's very bad. It's the worst."

Tour operators are hoping things will turn around when the high season starts next month. But several Bangkok-based travel agents said earlier this month they still had no bookings for the high season.

Asian tourists were continuing to avoid the tsunami-hit regions, they said, instead choosing to travel to beach resorts on the Gulf of Thailand. The Gulf is on the other side of the peninsula that connects Thailand to Malaysia and wasn't affected by the tsunami.

Westerners also have opted for the Gulf, preferring the island of Koh Samui. While Asians are afraid of ghosts, many Westerners feel it's "too sad" to visit the empty beaches and quiet towns of Phuket, said one travel agent.

Another theory is that Europeans are waiting until the last minute to make reservations to be sure it is safe to travel, said Zahid Ali, a spokesman for the five-star Sheraton Grande Laguna Phuket. Most of the high-season bookings come from Europeans, he said, with Americans accounting for 5 to 10 percent of visitors.

The irony is that Phuket (pronounced Pooh-get) was largely spared the wrath of the tsunami. Most of Thailand's worst damage occurred farther north in Phang Nga province. Of the nearly 5,400 lives lost, only 280 were in Phuket.

Still, that makes for quite a few ghosts.

When we told two employees of a scuba-diving shop where we were staying — the Seagull Home — their eyes grew wide and they looked at each other.

"What's the matter?" my wife asked.

"You're very brave," said Ma, the office manager.

Our hotel, it turns out, took the brunt of the waves, and there were many casualties. Ma specifically mentioned Seagull and its neighbor, the Absolute Sea Pearl, where nearly two dozen bodies washed up in the basement. Now the $20 rate was beginning to make sense.

I asked Ma if Thais were still afraid of tsunami spirits.

"One hundred percent," she said. "There have been many stories about ghosts."

Several taxi drivers, she told us, reported picking up foreign passengers at Patong Beach who "disappeared" before reaching their destinations. Another story had a driver putting the fare from a family of foreigners into his wallet. But by the time he got home, the money had turned into "leaves."

We had heard similar stories when we visited southern Thailand six months earlier, to report on the tsunami for The Seattle Times. Foreign ghosts were seen playing in the water, while Thai ghosts haunted survivors in the night.

Thais are overwhelmingly Buddhist and believe in reincarnation. Like many other Asians, they believe that when a person dies unexpectedly, the spirit is temporarily lost and haunts the area where the accident occurred. The spirit doesn't know how to move on to the next life.

We didn't see any ghosts during our visit immediately after the tsunami, but we did see plenty of death and tragedy — mostly in Phang Nga province.

We visited morgues and saw survivors searching for loved ones. We walked through a fishing village that had been nearly wiped off the map. We lived with the stench of death for days — a smell that lingers in the air and sticks to your skin even after you have washed. It was emotionally exhausting.

When we returned to our home in Chiang Mai, in the mountainous north of Thailand, my wife developed a fever. Her friends and family were convinced that some of the ghosts had followed her. The spirits must have been attracted to her "good aura," she figured, and apparently held on for the 760-mile flight.

The solution to my wife's ghost problem was simple. Her mother gave her a tangle of knotted red yarn, which had been blessed by a Buddhist monk. My wife attached it to the underside of her shirt with a safety pin. By the next morning, the fever had "lifted like a cloud." She has worn the amulet ever since.

I wasn't sure if I could persuade my wife to return to the south. This time, she was seven months pregnant, and Thais believe that unborn children should stay away from funerals and graveyards. It's bad luck.

Tanyalux admitted she was scared, but, like me, she was curious to see how the recovery was going and whether Phuket was still haunted. Her only ground rule was that I was not to mention the word "ghost" after dark.

On the surface, most of Phuket looked normal. A few buildings, like the one next to us, were vacant. But the main roads had long been cleared of debris, and the beaches were cleaner and less cluttered.

Along the waterfront, small shops like Starbucks, which had lost everything, had been up and running since February. Some hotels were still carrying out repairs and renovations. The sound of electric drills filled the air, competing with the roar of monsoon waves.

We slept well at our hotel for the first couple of nights. It wasn't until a maid told us that several foreigners had been killed while sleeping downstairs that my wife confessed: "The first night my hair stood up a little bit. That's a sign of ghosts for Thais, you know?"

We learned that the entire ground floor of our hotel had been destroyed. The hotel had already demolished 12 guest rooms and replaced them with an open-air restaurant and a staff lounge.

When the waves came crashing in, they dumped 22 cars into the hotel's tiny swimming pool and flooded the second floor.

The owner of our hotel, Manirat Upatising, better known as Lily, insisted that only two people were killed. One was an employee who ran back to his room to get something and was trapped by the water. The other was a Malaysian guest who got caught in the waves while shooting video.

"Why are you so interested in ghosts?" Lily asked.

She preferred to talk about old guests who were starting to come back again, and who were happy that most of her staff was still alive.

But they were European guests, it turned out. She admitted Asians were staying away. "Even if you offer a low price, they won't come."

Lily, too, believes in ghosts, but swears she hasn't seen any. "The ghosts are all over the world, not only in Thailand," she said. "If you don't think the ghosts will appear, they won't appear."

My wife's theory is that Lily was protected because her office was packed with so many gleaming Buddha images it was like a shrine.

By all accounts, the ghosts should be gone.

Dozens of multifaith religious ceremonies have been held to honor the dead and appease the spirits. A group of amateur mediums from Bangkok even cleansed the beach.

But as hard as they tried, some ghosts "probably fell through the cracks," according to my wife.

We never saw any ghosts during our vacation. But when we flew home to Chiang Mai — just to be on the safe side — my wife made sure the little knot of red yarn was securely fastened to her dress.

This time, I'm pretty sure she wasn't followed.

Jeff Hodson, who grew up in Seattle, is a former reporter for The Seattle Times who now teaches journalism in Southeast Asia. He met his wife, Tanyalux, who provided translations for this article, on a diving trip in Phuket.