The Empty Desk at the Back

In the fall of 2005, I was cramming for the bar exams at a cramped review center tucked above a printing shop on a busy street in Quiapo, Manila. The place was a labyrinth of narrow corridors and cramped rooms, and our classroom, Room 4, was a cavernous space that had once been a warehouse. It could easily seat sixty, but our group of twelve huddled near the front, our desks arranged in a tight cluster like survivors around a fire. The rest of the room lay in a dim, dusty expanse, the back rows fading into gloom, punctuated by the occasional broken chair or forgotten bookshelf.

For the first month, everything was ordinary. Our instructor, a stern but thorough woman named Mrs. Villanueva, drilled us on commercial law until we saw articles in our sleep. We grew accustomed to the fluorescent lights that hummed with a tired buzz, and the occasional rat skittering behind the wall. But with the exam date looming, our sessions stretched later into the night, and it was then that the ordinary began to fray.

It was a Thursday, the eighth of September, at around 6:30 in the evening. Mrs. Villanueva was explaining the intricacies of negotiable instruments, her voice a steady drone that lulled us into a half-daze. I was scribbling notes, my pen scratching against the paper, when I heard it: a soft, muffled cry, like a child smothering sobs in a pillow. I paused, my hand frozen. I glanced at my seatmate, who had also looked up, his brow furrowed. The others seemed not to notice, or were too tired to care. I reasoned it was a stray cat outside, or a television from the shops below. But the cry persisted, growing in volume until it was unmistakably a woman’s wail, anguished and raw, coming from somewhere behind us.

We all turned. The back of the room was a mausoleum of shadows. The rows of empty desks stood in silent, ordered lines. The wailing seemed to emanate from the very last row, in the farthest corner, where a single desk sat apart from the others, its surface covered in a thin layer of dust. It was a sound that pressed against the eardrums, that crawled up the spine and settled in the base of the skull. Mrs. Villanueva stopped mid-sentence, her pointer still raised, and stared at the back of the room, her face pale.

‘Who is there?’ she called out, her voice thin, but there was no reply. The wailing continued, louder now, a high-pitched keen that seemed to echo off the walls. We could see nothing, and yet the sound was undeniably human. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and my heart began to pound. One of my classmates, a wiry guy named Arnel, stood up abruptly. ‘I’ll check,’ he said, but his voice trembled. He took a few steps into the aisle, but then stopped. The wailing suddenly ceased, replaced by a profound silence. We waited, our breaths held, but there was only the hum of the lights.

Then, in the silence, we heard it again, but this time it was different: a low, guttural chuckle, deep and malevolent, coming from that same corner. It sent a chill through me that was colder than the air conditioning. No one moved. We sat in stunned terror, our eyes fixed on the darkness. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, the lights flickered and went out, plunging the room into an abyss of pitch black. Someone screamed—a high-pitched shriek that cut off abruptly, and I felt a cold breath on the back of my neck. I scrambled to my feet, my chair clattering to the floor, and fled toward the door, which I knew was behind us. I collided with others in the dark, but everyone was pushing, desperate to escape.

We stumbled into the hallway, where the emergency lights bathed everything in a sickly green glow. We looked at each other, faces white with fear, and then Arnel screamed. We followed his gaze back into the room. Through the open door, in the faint light, we could see the desks in the back row. There, in the farthest corner, sat a figure—a dark silhouette with glowing red eyes, its mouth stretched in a grotesque grin. It raised a hand, as if in greeting, and the door slammed shut with a bang that echoed through the empty corridor.

We never entered Room 4 again. We demanded new quarters, but the school administration dismissed our story, attributing the wailing to a plumbing issue and our imaginations to exam stress. But we knew what we had seen. For the rest of the review period, we were moved to a smaller room on the ground floor. But every night, as we passed by the old classroom on our way out, we could hear it—a faint, pitiful weeping, and sometimes, a low chuckle. We never looked back.

I passed the bar that year, and I’ve been a lawyer now for over a decade. I’ve handled cases that would turn your stomach, but nothing has ever terrified me as much as that empty desk in the back of Room 4. To this day, I can’t sit with my back to an empty corner in a large room, and sometimes, in the quiet of the night, I still hear that cry—as if something is waiting for the next group of desperate, exhausted students to forget themselves, and turn around.