Ghost stories from Malaysia

The Locked Door

In October 1999, I was sixteen, living in a small coastal town where the fog rolled in thick and often. My cousin Elena was to be married at the end...

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The Weeping Fig and the Midnight Bazaar

When I was sixteen, my family lived in a small coastal town where the sea wind carried the smell of salt and decay. My parents were deeply involved in the...

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The Weeping Sap of the Tung Tree

My name is Mira, and I spent my childhood in a small village cradled by the foothills of the Carpathians. Our home was a two-story wooden house with a steep,...

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The Red Thread of Amman

My name is Meera, and I’m sixteen, living in a cramped flat above my father’s spice shop in Penang. The monsoon rains hammered the tin roof like a drum, and...

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The Copper Ledger

In the simmering heat of 2004, I was seventeen and restless. My cousin, Marcus, a wiry man of thirty-three with a knotted scar on his forearm, ran a scrapping operation...

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The Cleft in the Smoke

The intake room at the Meridian Outreach Center smelled of stale coffee and damp cardboard. I was three weeks into my practicum, and the fluorescent lights hummed like a trapped...

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The Monitor’s Plea

The evening had settled over the Jalil household like a damp shroud, the kind of oppressive stillness that makes even the hum of the refrigerator sound like a threat. Maya...

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The Ceramic Lullaby

In the humid small hours of a Tuesday night in Kuching, twelve-year-old Mei Ling lay on her bed, the soft whir of her desk fan doing little to cool the...

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The Cramped Corner

Maya had never liked the apartment. It was a labyrinth of discarded furniture and cardboard boxes, a monument to lives half-lived. She and her boyfriend, Leo, had moved in with...

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The Serenade of the Frangipani Tree

In the sweltering heat of a small coastal town in Kerala, my family and I moved into a weathered bungalow that had stood empty for years. The house was surrounded...

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The Weight of the Old Parlor

My name is Lena, and I’ve always considered myself a rational person. I’ve had my brushes with the inexplicable, but I always found logical explanations—drafts, plumbing, the mind playing tricks....

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The Weeping Jade

The heat was a wet blanket that clung to my skin as I stepped off the bus, the air thick with the smell of fried food and exhaust. I was...

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The Lamp by the Window

The night I turned seven, my parents moved us to a small town called Merrow, where the houses leaned into each other like tired old men. Our new home was...

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The Lantern Man

I never imagined I’d be typing this out, not even on a site like this. I’ve always been the one who laughs at horror movies and then sleeps with the...

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The Cinder Block Wall

At eighteen, I was assigned to a three-month national service stint, and my posting was to a sprawling former mining colony turned training ground in the high desert. Our barracks...

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The Lantern Keeper

I grew up in a small town in the heart of Pahang, Malaysia, where the jungle pressed close against the edges of the village, and the air was thick with...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

The Lantern Keeper’s Debt I had always thought my grandmother’s tales were just that—tales. The way she’d lower her voice when she spoke of the Seventh Month, warning never to...

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The Violet Room

It was supposed to be a simple research trip. Four of us, graduate students in folklore, had come to the remote town of Ashford to document the oral histories of...

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The Unfinished Meal

A decade has passed since the night my family first set foot in that narrow house in Shah Alam, a temporary shelter while our permanent home was being completed just...

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The Seventh Floor

In the autumn of 2011, after our final university exams, my then-boyfriend, now-fiancé, and I joined a group of friends for a weekend escapade to the remote mountain resort of...

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The Intermittent

I’ve never thought of myself as psychic, not in the way the movies show. I don’t get cold chills or hear creepy whispers. I just… see things sometimes. It’s like...

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The Last Portrait

I was seventeen, scraping together money for art school, when I took a weekend job caring for a sick child named Elara. Her father was away on a business trip,...

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The Culvert of Ninety-Nine

The summer I turned seventeen, my cousin Tomas came to stay with us before his family moved to the Netherlands. We lived in a flat above a bakery in a...

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The Quarryman’s Ledger

The year I turned twenty-two, my brother Theo dragged me to a housewarming party in the new housing development at the edge of town, built over the old quarry that...

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