The residents of Cam Re, a seaside community south of Danang in central Vietnam, can tell many vivid stories about the village’s ghosts. Cam Re’s enterprising Taoist priest calls these ghosts his “invisible neighbours”. Although some of the stories about these invisible neighbours might come across as unsettling or even creepy, most typically sound much like any other mundane neighbourly gossip that the people in this small semi-fishing and semi-farming community exchange on a daily basis. Others can even generate laughter, which was characteristic of stories about the spirit of a one-legged soldier. His apparition was almost always along the bifurcated point of a narrow footpath that connects the village’s two main residential clusters; the footpaths also lead to the ruins of an old ancestral temple and those of a former French garrison, favourite hangout places for children. The soldier ghost hops around on his left leg, having lost a leg to a landmine, and the children invented a play in which they competed to see who could best imitate the soldier’s unusual mode of mobility, accompanied by copious amounts of laughter.