Ghost stories from Bangladesh

The Hollow Between Walls

I have always been a rational man, a man of numbers and ledgers, which is why my current predicament gnaws at me like a rat in the walls. My name...

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The Cane Field’s Bargain

I am Arif, a seventeen-year-old from Dhaka, a city of noise and light where every shadow has a mundane explanation. But my family’s roots are in the southern delta, a...

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The Keyhole Watcher

In the damp, sprawling city of Chittagong, during the monsoon season of ’94, lived an eight-year-old boy named Rahim. A stubborn infection had clouded his right eye, and every evening...

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The Lantern at the Weeping Fig

My grandmother, Amara, told me this about my grandfather, Elias, when I was a boy. He wasn’t the man I knew, the one who forgot his own name and stared...

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Smells Like Soap

This story, which I’ve come to learn from my Ma, happened to my Baba a while back. Possibly when I was still a baby. We live in the outskirts of...

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The Bucket’s Chorus

The room I rented in Rajshahi, a city of quiet heat and crumbling Mughal remnants, came with a balcony overlooking a narrow lane. The bathroom was a cramped, windowless box...

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The Drowned Cartographer’s Journal

In the summer of 2020, when the world shrank to the size of our living room, my sister Mira and I moved with our ailing grandmother to a house on...

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Apparition On Water

My first time posting on this forum. I’ve been experiencing unexplainable phenomena ever since I can remember. I want to engage with opinions from different backgrounds about my experiences. I’m...

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The Blanket’s Weight

The cold crept through the drafty farmhouse like a slow tide, and I pulled the thick quilt up to my chin, burying my nose in its worn fabric. The clock...

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The Vermilion Pattern

It was 2:47 AM, and I was walking the cracked asphalt loop behind the old mill complex that had been converted into student housing. My roommate, Derek, was beside me,...

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The Sixth Floor

It was a Tuesday, and I was stuck at home with my nose buried in a biology textbook. The rain hammered against the windows of our Brooklyn apartment, a relentless...

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The Cartographer’s Station

In the autumn of 2019, my family and I were relocating from the coastal town of Dunmore to the inland city of Voss. Our belongings were loaded into a hired...

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The Lantern Man of June

My brother and I still argue about whether it was real, but we both agree it happened. That summer, we were staying at our grandmother’s old farmhouse in the high...

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The Tin Can Chime

Two years have passed since the night the chime of a tin can on concrete nearly unmoored my mind. I had gone back to my grandparents’ village in the lowlands...

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The Wailing in the Walls

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. Even after thirty years in London, surrounded by old buildings and darker histories, I remained a man of logic. But my cousin’s village...

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The Clockwork Mannequin

It was late August 2019, in the industrial outskirts of Kolkata, India, where the heat clung to the skin like a damp cloth. I was staying at my late uncle’s...

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The Murmuring of the Drowned Forest

In the summer of 2016, I was fifteen, fresh off my exams, and my uncle, a botanist, had invited me to join him on a research trip to the Kuttanad...

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My father taught English literature at a military boarding school in the southwestern corner of Bangladesh, where the campus edges against the Sundarbans—a vast, brackish mangrove swamp that breathes salt...

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The Static in the Snow

It started with the snow. We’d returned from my aunt’s place in the city, where we’d spent the weeks after my father’s funeral. Mom had been gone for three months...

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The Man in the Fourth Floor Window

I never understood why people found my apartment unsettling. It was a modest one-bedroom on the fourth floor of an old brownstone, with peeling paint and a radiator that clanked...

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The Quilted Empty

It was the last November that the call came: Aunt Helena had passed. My wife, Lena, and I packed the car and drove through the gray drizzle to the old...

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The Half-Built Horizon

My mother always had a saying: ‘The between hours are for the other kind.’ She meant noon and midnight, when the veil thins. I grew up in Dhaka, a city...

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The Persistent Scent of Rain

It was the kind of quiet that settles into an old house like dust, muffling every sound until the only thing you can hear is the creaking of your own...

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The Pine Hollow Incident

In the autumn of 1987, the town of Pine Hollow was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone, and the woods that bordered the town were both a playground...

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