Ghost stories from Philippines

The Missing Page

It was a humid Sunday afternoon when Maya and I decided to grab a quick drink at the Rusty Anchor, a dimly lit bar near the university. We had just...

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The Chalk Dust Trail

The billiard hall stood on the edge of the small town of San Isidro, a squat building of corrugated iron and faded paint, its interior a cavern of green felt...

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The Polisher’s Grin

My first unsettling encounter happened during my junior year of high school, but it was a single, isolated incident. When I entered university, I took a work-study position at the...

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The Unsettled Tenant

Eleanor had always seen them, the flickering shapes at the edge of her vision, the cold spots in warm rooms. She’d learned to ignore them, to keep her eyes straight...

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The Night Audit

Marta had worked the night audit at the Sunrise Motel for three years. The job was simple: check in late arrivals, balance the books, and keep the coffee fresh for...

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The Last Ring

In the autumn of 1974, the small farming town of Bellhaven was gripped by an unseasonable chill. My mother, Elena, was eight months pregnant with my older brother, and we...

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The Shift That Never Ended

The Cebu DataHub sat in a converted warehouse on the edge of the city, its two floors divided into open-plan cubicles and meeting rooms. The air conditioning hummed a constant,...

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The Lantern of the Fallen

My name is Elias, and I am thirty-four now, but the memory of that summer night is as sharp as a splinter of glass. It was not a traffic accident...

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The Boy Who Sat in the Front

The morning sun cast long fingers through the blinds, painting the kitchen in stripes of gold and dust. We were a small convoy of noise, cramming bags and cooler boxes...

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The Scent of Jasmine and Rot

It started three weeks after I moved into the ancestral home of my late grandmother, a crumbling Victorian relic on the edge of a dying town. The house itself was...

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The Man with the Empty Eyes

The house on Maple Street was a fixer-upper, a project that Alex had been dreaming about for years. The faded yellow paint, the cracked front steps, and the overgrown garden...

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The Midwatch Visitor

My name is Elias, and I have always been a creature of the dark. While the world slept, I thrived in the quiet hours, my sanctuary a cramped flat on...

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The Lightkeeper’s Lampless Night

In the autumn of 1999, when the country was still mired in rolling blackouts, I lived in a converted lighthouse keeper’s cottage on a jagged stretch of coast. My cousin,...

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The Screen Door Watcher

The rain had been drumming against the tin roof of the old farmhouse in Mindanao for hours, a steady, hypnotic beat that seemed to seep into the bones. My sister,...

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The Nipa Palm’s Lament

In the heart of the Visayan islands, where the sea winds whispered through the coconut groves, stood the Alvarez ancestral house. It was a grand bahay na bato, its lower...

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The Sunken Bell

I never believed in the old tales until the summer I turned fifteen. My cousin Mara and I had flown from Chicago to the Philippines to visit my grandmother’s province,...

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The Data Pit

The first time I saw the Pit, I thought it was a sewage drain. It was a concrete-lined square hole, about six feet deep, tucked behind the main building and...

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The Pale Passenger

It was a night that clung to the skin like a wet shroud. The rain had been falling for hours, turning the roads into ribbons of black glass. I was...

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The Marble Game

The night shift at Meridian Contact Solutions was always quiet after midnight. I worked on the fifth floor of a refurbished 1970s office block on the edge of Birmingham’s industrial...

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The Formalin-Stained Number

In the chill of a basement anatomy lab at Meridian University, far from the tropic heat above, our group of eight was assigned our first cadaver. It was an unclaimed...

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The Crooked Rib

The Crooked Rib Elara had always believed that the old farmhouse on the edge of Thornwood was a place of solace, a retreat from the noise of the city. It...

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The Painted Lady of the Attic

Mara’s life had settled into a manageable rhythm of sleepless nights and caffeine-fueled mornings. Her three-year-old son, Leo, was a whirlwind of energy, and their creaky Victorian house at the...

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The Mosaic Floor’s Whisper

In the autumn of 2012, I was eleven, living with my grandmother in the old farmhouse she’d inherited from her own mother. It was a place of creaking timbers and...

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The Timekeeper’s Call

I worked the night audit at the Meridian Grand, a once-grand hotel that had fallen into disrepair. The lobby’s chandelier was a web of dead bulbs, and the red velvet...

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