The Hollow Floor

At twenty, I was about to start my on-the-job training at a steel fabrication plant in the industrial district of Calamba. The two-month program promised to immerse me and four other classmates in the daily grind of structural engineering. We’d applied to other firms, but the weekly stipend and full reimbursement of our transportation costs were the deciding factors. The company was desperate for trainees, and we were desperate for experience.

We needed a place near the plant, and one of my groupmates, Liza, mentioned her cousin who lived in the nearby worker’s village. The cousin, Aling Nena, had a two-story house with an empty second floor. She offered it to us for a nominal rent, as she lived alone with her younger brother, who was confined to a wheelchair due to a childhood accident. The house was a twenty-minute walk from the plant gate, so we agreed without hesitation.

The second floor was a single, cavernous room with a small bathroom at the far end. The owners had set up four bunk beds, their metal frames creaking under our weight. We settled in, spreading our clothes and books across the dusty floorboards. The single window looked out onto a narrow street lined with acacia trees, their branches scraping the glass on windy nights.

The first few weeks were uneventful. We’d wake at dawn, walk to the plant, and spend the day shadowing engineers, hauling blueprints, and noting weld inspections. We’d return exhausted after dinner, play cards under the flickering fluorescent light, and fall asleep to the occasional clatter of the vegetable vendor’s cart outside.

But soon, we started noticing oddities. At night, when all was quiet, a faint, rhythmic thumping would come from below—like a heavy object being dragged across a wooden floor. Aling Nena’s brother, Mang Kiko, was known to move about in his wheelchair late into the night, but the sound was too heavy, too deliberate. It was as if someone were pounding on the ceiling from underneath, but when we checked the hallway below, it was empty.

One night, I woke to find the room bathed in an eerie blue light. I sat up, disoriented, and saw a figure standing at the foot of my bunk—a woman in a long, dark dress, her face obscured by shadow. She pointed a thin finger toward the far corner, where the floorboards seemed to dip slightly. Before I could call out, she was gone. I was the only one awake. I chided myself for a night terror, but the image lingered.

A few days later, Liza stumbled upon a trapdoor in the back of the closet that we’d assumed was a plain wall. It was locked with a rusted padlock. When we asked Aling Nena about it, she tensed and said it was just storage space, and that the lock had been stuck for years. But I noticed her eyes darting to the spot, and she quickly changed the subject.

Our training began to take its toll. We were exhausted, but sleep became elusive. The thumping grew louder, more insistent, and now it was accompanied by a low, guttural whispering that seemed to come from the vents. The temperature in our room dropped at night, even in the sweltering heat, and we’d wake with deep, unexplained scratches on our arms.

One evening, we decided to confront Aling Nena. We gathered in her kitchen, the air thick with the smell of vinegar and garlic. She finally relented, her voice trembling. She told us that the second floor had once been the master bedroom, but it was sealed off after her husband died there ten years ago. He had been a heavy drinker, and one night, he fell down the stairs, breaking his neck on the landing. But his ghost, she believed, remained—angry, restless, and drawn to the room where he had spent his last nights. She had never told anyone, hoping that the presence would fade, but it only grew stronger with each passing year.

We were shaken, but we had nowhere else to go. We tried to ignore the manifestations, but they escalated. One night, I was the last to use the bathroom. As I washed my hands, the mirror fogged up, and a handprint appeared in the center. I didn’t think; I just ran back to the bunk room, where my friends were huddled together, white-faced. They had heard the thumping so violently that the light fixture swung like a pendulum.

We decided to open the trapdoor. We broke the lock with a wrench from our toolkits. The door swung open, releasing a waft of cold air and the smell of rot. We peered into the darkness, and I saw a faint glimmer at the bottom—a metal box. We pulled it up. Inside were old photographs, a tarnished wedding ring, and a diary. The diary belonged to Aling Nena’s husband, and in it, he wrote about his growing madness, his guilt over a secret he could not live with. The final entry was a single line: ‘She knows, and she will not forgive. I will never leave this floor.’

We closed the trapdoor and resealed it. We didn’t tell Aling Nena what we found. But the manifestations didn’t stop. They grew more intense, and soon we were all sleepwalking. I’d wake up at the top of the stairs, about to descend, but I’d catch myself. Then, one night, I found my hand on the trapdoor’s handle, and I felt a pull, as if someone was urging me to open it. I resisted, but I heard a voice in my ear, whispering, ‘Let me out.’

We couldn’t take it anymore. We moved out within days, leaving our deposits behind. The training continued, but we took to sleeping in shifts at a nearby boarding house. When we returned to gather our belongings, Aling Nena looked at us with knowing eyes. She said, ‘He’s attached to you now. He’ll follow.’

She was right. Years later, I still hear that rhythm in my dreams—a heavy thump, a drag, a pause. And sometimes, when I’m alone in a dark room, I see a face in the mirror, not my own, with eyes that are hollow and pleading. I can never free myself from the hollow floor.