Do More People Die During Hungry Ghost Festival? What 10 Years of Singapore Data Actually Shows

"7th month start, sure got more people die one" is something you'll hear from almost every older relative in Singapore, usually followed by a warning not to stay out too late. It's such a widely repeated belief that almost nobody actually checks it against real numbers, it's simply accepted as common knowledge. As a funeral director, more deaths during this period would, on paper, mean more business. So we pulled the actual government data and checked, rather than repeat the assumption.

We used SingStat's official monthly death counts for Singapore's Chinese ethnic population, 2016 to 2025. The 7th lunar month doesn't line up with a fixed Gregorian calendar month, it shifts every year, and often straddles two calendar months. For example, 2022's 7th lunar month ran 29 July to 27 August, while 2025's ran 23 August to 21 September. For each year, we identified the actual Gregorian start and end date of that year's 7th lunar month, then prorated the death count day-by-day across whichever calendar months it straddled, weighted by how many days of the lunar month fell in each. That figure was then compared against the average month for that same calendar year, not a fixed historical average, so each year is judged against its own baseline.

The pattern is clean, and it isn't subtle. 8 of the 10 years show the 7th lunar month running below that year's average month, several by a meaningful margin (2017 at −9.4%, 2020 at −7.9%). Only 2016 and 2022 tick very slightly above average, both under 1%, well within the range of ordinary month-to-month noise. In no year across the full decade does the 7th month show a real, meaningful spike above average.

Not "the 7th month is protective", the deviations, while consistently negative, are modest enough that overclaiming a protective effect would be just as dishonest as the original myth. The honest, careful read is: flat, no real correlation. Ten years of official Singapore data show no evidence that more Chinese Singaporeans die during the 7th lunar month than during an average month. If anything, the numbers lean slightly the other way, but not by enough to build a competing myth out of it. The straightforward version people actually came up with, that it's a more dangerous month to die in, simply doesn't hold up against the real numbers.

Singapore's data isn't an isolated finding. A peer-reviewed study of Hong Kong Chinese deaths from 1995 to 2000 found no increase in male deaths during Ghost Month, and a statistically significant decrease in female deaths in the first half of the month specifically. Separately, a Taiwan study covering 1981 to 2005 found drowning deaths were significantly lower during Ghost Month, likely because the widely observed taboo against swimming during this period genuinely changes behaviour, and that behaviour change measurably reduces real drowning deaths, a case where the superstition appears to be doing real, protective work, just not through the mechanism anyone believes. Singapore's own numbers sit consistently with both of these findings.

A death that happens during the 7th month is simply more likely to be culturally noticed and remembered as significant, a death in any other month doesn't carry the same weight attached to it, so it's less likely to become a story that gets repeated. The month also genuinely does coincide with more caution around specific real risks, like water safety, and that caution can be quietly protective without anyone crediting it correctly. And the belief itself is inherited as part of a much larger, meaningful cultural and religious tradition passed down through families, not something anyone checks against a spreadsheet each year, until now.

None of this is a reason to set aside the customs your family observes, the 7th lunar month remains a genuine, meaningful period of remembrance and connection to ancestors, worth honouring on its own terms. What the data does mean is that a family shouldn't feel any additional dread specifically because a loved one is unwell or elderly during this particular month, the real numbers simply don't support that added fear. For the practical side of the month, what to do, what to avoid, and what people actually burn, see 7th Month Dos and Don'ts Singapore and What People Burn During 7th Month.