Ghost stories from Philippines

The Six-Toed Guest

Ten years have passed since we lived in that old house near the market. It was a sprawling place, with two bedrooms upstairs and a narrow staircase that creaked with...

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The Sugarcane Field

The rustling of sugarcane stalks always unsettled me. I grew up in a small town in Negros Occidental, where the fields stretched like a green ocean to the horizon. My...

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The Hollow Seat

It was the third week of October, and the sky outside the library windows was the color of old bruises. My friend Dana and I had claimed a table in...

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The Clockwork Orchard

Our home sat on the edge of the Hollow Pines Arboretum, a sprawling botanical preserve that doubled as the campus for the Meridian School of Horticulture. My father was the...

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The Porcelain Guest

In the autumn of 2012, I was a trainee at the Golden Orchid Resort, a sprawling beachfront property on the outskirts of Cebu City. My best friend, Marco, and I...

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The Tangerine Scent of Static

In the summer of 2012, I was 19, housesitting for my Aunty Cora in her sprawling, isolated farmhouse in the rural outskirts of Bulacan. The house was old, with wooden...

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The Landlord’s Ledger

The first time I saw the ledger, it was lying open on the dusty oak desk in the office of the Blue Heron Apartments. The landlord, a skeletal man named...

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The Night Shift on Cinder Hill Road

The rain had been falling for three days straight, turning the unpaved roads of Cinder Hill into a slick, muddy mess. At the top of the hill, the old 24-hour...

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The Jar of Button Eyes

My grandmother’s house stood at the edge of a dying village, where the rice fields turned to salt marsh and the creeks smelled of rotting reeds. I was eleven the...

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The Cane of Remembrance

The rain fell in sheets over the small town of San Cipriano, where the cobblestone streets glistened like oil. Elena clutched her mother’s hand as they walked from the cemetery,...

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The Pods of Inang Bayan

In the summer of 1996, when I was seven, my family lived in a cramped but cozy house on the outskirts of a small town in Laguna. Rice fields stretched...

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The Lantern Man

I had almost managed to bury that summer, to file it away in the dusty archives of memory where we keep the things we can’t explain. But last week, my...

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The White Habit

Our school stood on the edge of Bacolod, a sprawling complex of concrete and glass that had once been a leper colony before becoming a general hospital. The stories were...

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The 14th Floor Hollow

My name is Elias Vance, and I’d like to think I’ve outgrown the spectral nonsense of my teenage years. I’d buried those memories deep, under years of logic and routine,...

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The Cadence of the Red Oak

The autumn of my junior year at Saint Agatha’s Academy in the hills of Batangas was unusually still. The air hung heavy with the scent of drying grass and the...

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The Chalk Outline

The old school in San Vicente had a reputation that clung to it like mildew. Built in the shape of a hollow square, its corridors ran around a sun-baked courtyard...

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The Linen Closet’s Secret

My name is Mara, and I was a third-year nursing student when we were assigned to a crumbling coastal hospital for our clinical rotation. The place, St. Ellsmere’s, was a...

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The Empty Frame

The house on Maple Street had always been an oddity, but it wasn’t until the summer of my twelfth year that I learned why the neighbors crossed the road to...

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The Hollow Embrace

The call room at St. Agnes Memorial was a converted supply closet on the third floor, a place where the faint antiseptic smell never quite faded and the fluorescent light...

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The Floating Visitor

In the autumn of 2004, my seven-year-old son, Oliver, was playing with his toy dinosaurs on the cracked concrete of our apartment building’s courtyard. The afternoon sun cast long, distorted...

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The Porcelain Moon

The house on Acacia Lane had a face, and it was watching me. I’d spent every summer of my childhood in that sprawling Victorian relic, its gingerbread trim peeling like...

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The Paint That Never Dried

In the sweltering summer of 2008, I was fresh off my licensure exam, floating on a cloud of relief. The oath-taking was three weeks away, and for the first time...

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The Lullaby of the Tide

The field trip to Isla Verde was supposed to be the highlight of our marine biology semester. Dr. Reyes had promised us bioluminescent plankton, untouched coral gardens, and a night...

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The Lantern of the Fallen Star

The year I turned eight, my father’s engineering job relocated us to a small mountain town in northern Luzon. We moved into a sprawling ancestral house that had been in...

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