Ghost stories from Philippines

The Weeping Lace

In the sweltering summer of 2014, my wife Elena and I secured a lease on a dilapidated but affordable flat in the bustling district of Paco, Manila. The building was...

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The White Trousers

It was a sweltering summer evening when my family and I returned from the funeral of my uncle Ezra, who had passed away in a car accident. The old cemetery...

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The Pillow’s Silent Slumber

The Rookery was a Victorian relic, bequeathed to us by a great-uncle who had made a fortune in the lumber trade. It stood at the edge of Blackwood, a town...

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The Kangkong Wail

In the summer of 2011, I took a night-shift job at a remote piggery in the dusty province of Nueva Ecija. The facility, known as ‘Hacienda Delgado’, was a sprawling...

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The Tile’s Cold Arithmetic

I never trusted the cold of that living room floor. Not the way it seeped through my shirt and pressed against my ribs like a patient hand. We moved into...

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The Mechanism of Stillness

The house on Avenida de los Suspiros had a way of keeping time. Not the time of clocks, but the time of things that waited. My brother Emil and I...

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The Tiled Chorus

The dormitory at St. Agatha’s Teachers’ College had been a convent before it became a residence hall, and the sisters who once walked its corridors left behind more than just...

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The Blue Door

The winter we moved into my grandmother’s farmhouse, the frost painted strange patterns on the windows, and the old radiators groaned like something waking from a long sleep. My daughter,...

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The Silent Theater

In 2014, I enrolled at Kalinga Institute of Health Sciences in the central highlands of Luzon, Philippines, pursuing a degree in Nursing. Our main lectures and practical sessions were held...

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The Pointing Hand

My great-aunt Marguerite had always been the rock of our family. At eighty-two, she still tended her garden before dawn, her gnarled hands coaxing tomatoes from the stubborn clay soil...

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The Ceramic Cat

The ceramic cat sat on the windowsill of the clean kitchen, its glass eyes reflecting the amber light of the dying sun. I’d named it Marmalade when I was six,...

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The Lantern Logic

The night shift at the TeleData Center had a rhythm all its own, a low hum of electronics punctuated by the occasional cricket chirp from the field beyond the parking...

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The Marble Corridor

For twelve years, I had walked the same polished marble corridors of St. Augustine’s Academy, a school that had stood since the Spanish conquest of the archipelago. The building itself...

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The Celluloid Casket

The Silvermoon Mall was a failed experiment, a concrete monument to a boom that never came. It squatted on the edge of Marilao like a beached whale, its once-bright facade...

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The Clothesline of the Hollow House

It was the summer of 2008, and I had just turned thirteen. Our house stood squeezed between two towering mansions in a quiet, forgotten corner of a city that never...

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The Thirteenth Stair

The smell of formaldehyde and old paper was the first thing that hit me when I walked through the heavy glass doors of the McAllister Institute of Health Sciences. It...

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The Cramped Bed

In the autumn of 2018, my husband Daniel and I moved into the old Farnsworth house, a rambling Victorian relic on the edge of the town of Blackwood. The house...

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The Third Copy

The first time it happened, I thought I had left my laptop open on the kitchen counter. I remember walking out of my room at 2 AM, craving water, and...

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The Last Ferry to Stillwater

I never used to believe in signs. Not the kind whispered through static or written in frost on a windowpane. I was a man of tides and timetables, a ferryman...

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The Tiled Whisper of Uncle Manuel

It was the summer before my senior year, and my family had just moved into my great-aunt’s old house in a dusty town called Veracruz, not the one in Mexico,...

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The Tuxedoed Man and the Floating Gown

In July of 2008, my father, Ricardo, was returning from a late-night poker game at his friend’s house. He had only had a few beers, so he was perfectly sober....

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The Last Bay

It started with a flicker. Not the fluorescent lights, which hummed their usual sickly tune, but something at the edge of my vision, a dark shape that melted away when...

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The Night the Nara Stood Watch

In the winter of 2019, I traveled to the remote mountain village of Alpenglow, nestled in the fog-shrouded Carpathians, to meet my partner Elena’s family for their annual harvest festival....

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The Last Ride on Calle Soledad

The sun bled orange over the gnarled acacia trees lining Calle Soledad, casting long, twisted shadows that seemed to stretch toward the house like grasping fingers. In that dusty provincial...

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