Ghost stories from Malaysia

The Lantern Game

It had been nearly seven years since the incident at Maktab Dato’ Sulaiman, a boarding school nestled among the rubber estates of northern Perak. I was in my final year,...

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The Rain-Soaked Apron

The rain had been drumming on the tin roof of our farmhouse for hours, a steady rhythm that had lulled the living room into a cozy stupor. My family and...

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The Last Match

Maya’s bedroom was a fortress of silence, the only sound the faint hum of her laptop cooling fan as the loading screen for her favorite battle royale game blinked. She’d...

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The Gatekeeper’s Pace

In our cramped university flat, we four—Mara, Jax, Nell, and I—had carved out a fragile routine. The room was a perfect square, each corner claimed by a semi-bunk: bed above,...

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The Lantern That Remembered

Tucked between the rubber estates and the winding trunk roads of Negeri Sembilan, Sekolah Kebangsaan Damai Permai was a squat complex of pale-green classrooms and a canteen that always smelled...

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The Ceiling Fan’s Hum

The night was thick and heavy, layered with the hum of the ceiling fan and the occasional chirp of a cricket somewhere in the garden. Amira, twenty-two, a final-year architecture...

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The Hollow Thud

It’s funny how a scent can anchor you to a time and place, and for me, that scent is the pungent, creamy sweetness of durian. The memory is as sharp...

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The Last Bucket

It was a Sunday, and the mist from the river had not yet burned off the fields. My father, Elias, had just finished his coffee and was heading to the...

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The Unfinished Reel

In the autumn of 2014, I was a film student with a burning need to prove myself. My friend, Marcus, and I had scraped together enough money for a short...

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The Stain That Wouldn’t Wash

The air in the dormitory wing of St. Agatha’s Convent School for Girls was thick with the smell of floor wax and the nervous static of two hundred teenagers cramming...

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The Couch and the Static

The afternoon sun beat down on the tin roof of my uncle’s house in Kuching, turning the living room into an oven. I was sprawled on the old floral-patterned sofa,...

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The Ward of the Unfinished

The air in the Sunset View Nursing Home was thick with the smell of antiseptic and the metallic tang of old machinery. My grandmother, Aunty Chen, was failing, her frail...

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The Unwrapped Gift

The row had been a bad one, the kind that left the air thick with words better left unspoken. Elara knew she couldn’t stay in the house another minute, not...

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The Locked Pantry of Jalan Dedap

The news came through a crackling phone line, the kind my mother had to hold just so to hear. The voice on the other end belonged to my aunt, and...

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The Lantern Keeper

I was twenty-two, back in the autumn of my final year at the university in the city. My grandmother had just passed, and my mother asked me to come home...

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The Lantern’s Debt

Twenty years ago, I was a sophomore at a university nestled in the mountains, far from the bustle of the city. The campus was a cluster of gray stone buildings,...

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The Hollow Cradle

The summer of ’85 was a wet one in the Rust Belt, but the house my mother took us to that July sat on a hill that never seemed to...

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The Man in the Padi

This story was told to me by my mother, years after it happened. I wasn’t born yet, and my father was off in the military, leaving my mother to raise...

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The Paper Lantern Man

My mother has her theories about the ‘sight’—that peculiar ability to perceive what others cannot. She traces it to the Thai branch of Nana’s family, but I suspect it might...

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The Loom of the Silent Thread

The old farmhouse on the edge of the Bitterroot Valley had been in Eleanor’s family for three generations, but its walls had always seemed to hold their breath. She had...

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The Cardigan

My sister, Elena, has been a nurse for over a decade. She’s seen things that would make most people’s blood run cold, but the story she told me last Christmas...

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The Cartographer’s Recess

The institute clung to the flank of a hill like a barnacle, its grey stone walls half-swallowed by a forest that seemed to breathe with a slow, patient hunger. We...

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The Weeping Wall

The hospital was a relic of a bygone era, a sprawling two-story complex that had been converted from a colonial plantation house. Its corridors were open to the elements, with...

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The Glass Door

I never thought I’d be the one to carry the story of the glass door, but after what happened at Meridian Claims, I can’t shake it. Eight years ago, I...

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