The Painted Over

I never believed in ghosts, not really. As a kid, I thought they were just stories to scare us, or tricks of the light. Growing up in a brand-new subdivision on the outskirts of Manila, everything was too new, too clean, for anything old or haunted. That all changed the summer I turned nine, when my cousin Dina and her lola came to stay with us.

Our house was one of the first in the neighborhood, and the street still had that raw, unfinished look—piles of sand here, a stray cement mixer there. But our house was our haven. Dina and I were the same age, and we fell into an easy rhythm of playing under the mango tree, racing our bikes down the empty road, and watching cartoons on the living room TV until our eyes burned. She was from the province, and her stories about fireflies and river swimming made my city heart ache with wonder.

One particularly sweltering evening, after a day of building forts from moving boxes and stealing mangoes from the neighbor’s overhanging branch, we decided we were too tired to climb the stairs to our rooms. We begged my parents to let us sleep in the living room. They agreed, with the condition that we keep the noise down. We laid out our mats side by side, the glow of the TV painting shifting patterns on the ceiling. The theme song of a late-night movie, something with a dramatic orchestral swell, lulled us as we drifted off.

I woke up in the dead of night, the kind of silence that makes your ears ring. The TV was off, the screen a black mirror. A sliver of moonlight cut through the curtain rod, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. I felt a chill, despite the heat, and a strange pressure in the room, like the air itself was thicker. I turned to check on Dina, but her mat was empty. A cold knot tightened in my stomach.

‘Dina?’ I whispered. No answer. I sat up, my heart thumping. The living room was still. The faint hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen. Then I saw it—a figure standing by the window. It was tall, thin, its back to me, draped in a white, old-fashioned dress. I thought it was Dina in her white nightgown, but this figure seemed too tall, too still.

‘Dina, is that you?’ My voice came out shaky. The figure slowly turned. Its face was pale, but the details were blurry, like a photograph left in the sun. It had no eyes, just dark hollows. Its mouth opened, but no sound came out. Instead, a faint wailing filled my ears, high and reedy, like wind through a cracked window. I wanted to scream, but my throat closed.

I squeezed my eyes shut and buried my head under my pillow, repeating, ‘It’s not real, it’s not real.’ When I finally dared to peek out, the figure was gone. The room was empty. Dina was still asleep on her mat, as if she’d never left. I shook her awake, and she grumbled, ‘What’s wrong?’ I tried to explain, but she just rolled over and told me I had a nightmare.

The next morning, I told my parents, but they dismissed it as a bad dream. I almost believed it myself until I noticed something odd. On our living room wall, there was a huge, ugly patch of fresh paint, right where the window was. The paint was a slightly different shade of white, like it had been hastily covered. I asked my father about it, and he looked confused. ‘We never painted that wall,’ he said.

I couldn’t let it go. I dug through old photos my mom kept in a shoebox. There, in a faded picture of our house years ago, before the subdivision was even built, I saw a girl standing in the same spot, near the window. She was wearing a white dress, her face blurry. On the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting: ‘Aling Pacing, the previous owner’s daughter, who loved to play by the window.’

A chill ran down my spine. The story was that Aling Pacing had died of a fever when she was nine. The window had been her spot. The paint patch had to have been covering something.

Dina and I never slept in the living room again. I always felt a prickling sensation when I passed that wall, as if unseen eyes were watching. Years later, when I was older, I learned that the previous owner’s house had been torn down to build our subdivision, but the living room wall had been retained, recycled into our house. The paint patch was still there, a permanent scar. I never painted over it, because I was terrified of what might be underneath.

Sometimes, late at night, I still hear that faint wailing. And once, in the faint glow of a passing car’s headlights, I saw the outline of a small handprint, appearing briefly on the wall, right next to the patch, as if trying to find a way out. I know now that some things are better left covered. Some ghosts are part of the walls, and they stay.