Nothing shows the vitality of the spirit house like its indifference to modernity. Bangkok's office towers, shopping malls, gas stations and condominiums keep spirit houses as a matter of course, often a grand pair serving the guardian of the land and other resident spirits. Corporate openings include their consecration; offerings appear daily at the base of glass skyscrapers, placed by staff whose employers budget for garlands.
The most famous public example, the Erawan Shrine at a central Bangkok intersection, began in 1956 as a remedy for construction misfortunes during the building of a hotel and grew into one of the city's busiest devotional sites, its four-faced Brahma image drawing petitioners and commissioned dance troupes around the clock. It is not a household spirit house, but it runs on the same grammar: place spirits acknowledged, housed and paid.
Justin McDaniel and other scholars of Thai Buddhism point to such sites as evidence against any neat separation of spirit religion from Buddhism in practice; the same people who keep precepts and give alms to monks also feed the lord of the land. Even the disposal problem has modern forms, with pickup trucks delivering superseded spirit houses to the banyan trees and temple boundaries where the city's retired shrines gather in weathered, respectful crowds.