Hantu (ghosts, spirits and/or demons in the Malay language) occupy an important place in Malaysian traditional belief and contemporary popular culture alike. From Malaysia’s significant production of pontianak (female vampire-ghost) films to infamous real-life instances of demon-induced mass hysteria in young women and girls, hantu have also come to represent Malaysia internationally, on and off the screen. This paper connects the changing role of spirit entities in postcolonial Malaysia with shifting local attitudes toward music and sound. I explore how music and sound are still today used to summon, negotiate and repel hantu as well as what these entities themselves “sound like” to modern Malaysians—following anthropologists such as Aihwa Ong and Emily Ng in taking ghosts seriously as an object of research. Indeed, while spirit possession, folklore, and belief in the supernatural are well documented in anthropological texts on Malaysia, and representations of such entities are an emerging topic in screen, media, and film studies, scholarship focused on music and sound in this area is relatively scarce. Working across texts in music and sound studies, hauntology, screen studies, postcolonial studies and folklore studies, I use ethnographic data collected in two fieldwork periods in 2025 to discuss the place of hantu in contemporary Malaysia. Through conversations with Malaysian musicians in both traditional (mak yong, wayang kulit) and popular music contexts, I argue that attitudes toward hantu are inextricably linked to music and sound’s subjugated and heavily-regulated place in Malaysian society.