Ghost stories from Philippines

The Bell That Drowned

It was the tail end of a bleak February, and the salt wind off the harbor had turned the school’s brick facade clammy. I’d returned after the winter break to...

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The Light at Beacon Point

It was my first year at Meridian University when I impulsively signed up for the Outback Exploration Society. Our chosen destination was Beacon Point, a peak that locals in the...

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The Datura Bloom

The summer I turned nine, my family moved into a rambling Victorian house on the edge of a dying town called Ashford. The house had been vacant for years, and...

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The Sliding Plate

In the autumn of 2017, I found myself in the coastal town of Port Meridian, a place where the fog rolled in like a shroud and the old buildings leaned...

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The Hollow Crown

It was the summer of 1992, and I was twenty-six, working as a night clerk at a decrepit motel on the outskirts of a town that existed only for truckers...

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The Sunblind Shift

My name is Elena, and I work as a data analyst for a company that monitors grocery store inventories across the globe. Our office is a beige-walled cube farm in...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

Four years had passed since I last glimpsed Elara among the pines behind my childhood home. That summer after college, I returned to my parents’ farmhouse, seeking the quiet I’d...

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The Carrion Gift

In the sweltering summer of 1978, in the rural outskirts of a small town, the Ramos family prepared for the annual fiesta. The air was thick with the scent of...

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The Black Stork of Hollow Creek

In the sweltering summer of 2013, I was seventeen, and my sister Elena was six months pregnant. She lived with her boyfriend Marco and his family in a ramshackle farmhouse...

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The Lantern Tree

In the low, damp hamlet of Harrowfen, where the river bled rust into the reeds and the willows wept perpetual drizzle, my family kept a sprawling, crooked house at the...

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The Tenant Before Us

In the autumn of 2011, my brother and I moved into my mother’s new apartment complex, a three-story walk-up with no fire escapes, just a single set of stairs at...

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The Lantern’s Debt

The year was 2008, and I was a freshman at the university, bristling with the confidence of a former Girl Scout who had spent summers mastering knots and campfire songs....

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The Ironing Board’s Silence

The morning light filtered through the dusty blinds, painting stripes on the linoleum floor of the small kitchen. I sat at the table, my fingers tracing the condensation rings left...

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The Jogger on the Long Curve

The alarm clock screamed at 3:30 AM, a harsh mechanical shriek that sliced through the thick silence of my rented cabin in the Appalachian foothills. I groaned, slapping it silent....

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The Impressions of Violet

It was a Thursday, the last Thursday of October, and the entire university seemed to hold its breath. The semester break had emptied the halls of students, leaving only a...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

In the summer of 2001, when I was seventeen, I was sent to my grandmother’s farm in the highlands of Batangas. The doctor had prescribed mountain air for my weak...

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The Warden of the Vine

The drive up to San Telmo Monastery wound through terraced hills that had once been emerald with tobacco, now gone to seed and scrub. My destination, a writer’s retreat nestled...

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The Salt Harvest

The salt marsh had always been a place of quiet endurance, where the tide’s slow pulse dictated life. My sister, Mara, was twelve, with a laugh that could cut through...

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The Unfruitful Acacia

It was the summer before our final year in college when the construction crew arrived at the edge of our dusty barangay. Our usual meeting spot, a gnarled acacia tree...

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The Last Lantern

The rain had been falling since noon, a steady, mournful drumbeat on the tin roof of the old farmhouse. I was seventeen, and my grandmother, whom we called Lola Ising,...

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The Basement Window

My first night shift at the old Meridian Mills was supposed to be a quiet one. I’d taken the job as a night watchman to pay for my last semester...

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The Blue Stall Door

It was the autumn of my final year, and the university’s newest building, the Meridian Hall, loomed over the eastern edge of campus like a monolith of glass and steel....

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The Rain Washed Ledger

My fourth year at the Northern Luzon Institute of Technology, in the mountain city of San Vicente, was a blur of equations and caffeine. I lived in the lowland town...

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The Floor That Ate the Light

Before the call centers colonized the old textile mill, it had been a place of humming looms and dust-filled sunbeams. Now, the mill’s vast floors were carved into cubicle warrens,...

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