The Gift of the Final Session

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. I was the kind of person who needed evidence, something I could measure or photograph. That all changed during the last two weeks of my senior year, in a small campus tucked away in the hills of Batangas, not far from the factories and malls of the south.

My name is Andrei, and I was about to fail a subject I’d forgotten I even enrolled in—a mandatory ‘Thesis Practicum’ that I’d skipped half the semester. It turned out two other students were in the same boat: Marco, a quiet guy who always wore headphones, and Liza, a nervous girl who bit her nails. Our professor, Dr. Villanueva, was a frail old man with thick glasses and a voice like dry leaves. He’d been teaching for forty years, and rumor had it he was still teaching because he couldn’t bear to leave his late wife’s ghost behind. But I didn’t pay attention to rumors back then.

The makeup class was scheduled for two weeks, three sessions per week, in an old annex building that smelled of mothballs and chalk dust. The first week went smoothly. We reviewed our thesis drafts, and Dr. Villanueva offered gentle corrections, occasionally pausing to stare at an empty chair in the corner. We thought it was just his age.

But the second week began with an ominous email: Dr. Villanueva was sick, but he insisted on continuing the class. When we arrived on Tuesday, he was coughing into a handkerchief, his face pale as the moon. He shuffled to the lectern and started the lesson, his voice breaking mid-sentence. That’s when we decided to do something nice for him—a small appreciation gift, since it might be the last time we saw him.

So, Liza, Marco, and I pooled our money and bought a large pizza and a box of pasta. We set up the food in the front of the room thirty minutes before the class started. The room was dim, lit only by the fluorescent tubes that hummed like a dying bee. On the whiteboard, we wrote: ‘Thank you, Dr. Villanueva!’ with a smiley face. Then we waited.

The door creaked open, but it was just the janitor, an old man named Mang Tony, who looked at us with a strange sadness. ‘He won’t come tonight,’ Mang Tony said, his voice hoarse. ‘The doctor said he’s in the hospital.’ We stared at him, confused. But then Dr. Villanueva appeared to us, walking through the door as if Mang Tony wasn’t there. He wore the same brown suit, but his eyes seemed hollow. He smiled weakly and said, ‘Let’s begin.’

We took our seats, but something felt off. The air grew colder, and the chalk on the board started to write on its own. Dr. Villanueva didn’t touch it, yet equations appeared in his handwriting. He stood at the center of the room, facing us, his mouth moving, but no sound came out. Instead, we heard his voice from our own phones, whispering in our ears, every syllable synchronized with his lips.

‘Let’s have some food,’ he said, his voice echoing in the silence. He gestured to the pizza and pasta. ‘I’m not hungry,’ Marco whispered, his face pale. Liza started crying, silent tears streaming down her cheeks. I tried to move, but I was frozen, my eyes locked on a growing dark stain on Dr. Villanueva’s shirt, spreading like a flower blooming in time-lapse.

Then, the lights flickered, and when they came back, the professor was gone. The whiteboard now read, ‘Thank you for the gift.’ But the pizza and pasta were untouched. On the floor, where he had been standing, there was a wet, dark circle—like the outline of a body. And then we heard a sound from the vent: a low, guttural moan that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

We tried to run, but the door wouldn’t open. The janitor was gone. We were trapped. The room began to tilt, and the walls closed in. I remember screaming, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. The last thing I saw was Liza’s face contorted in terror, and then everything went black.

When I woke up, I was lying on the ground outside, with Marco and Liza unconscious beside me. The building was still there, but the windows were dark. We were alone. There was no sign of Dr. Villanueva, and the school never reported him missing. Instead, they said he had died that Tuesday, in the hospital, at the exact time we had seen him in that room.

I still don’t have a certificate in paranormal research, but I have proof that the afterlife is real. The proof is the gift we never gave—the pizza and pasta that were left behind, but when we checked, they were gone, replaced by a note that said, ‘See you in the next session.’ I haven’t been back to that campus since. But sometimes, late at night, I hear the sound of chalk scratching on a board, and a voice whispering, ‘Andrei, your thesis is still missing.’ I don’t know if it’s a warning or a welcome. I just know I’ll never forget the final session, and the gift I gave to a ghost.