Ghost stories from Philippines

The Salt and the Cicadas

In the summer of 1998, when the heat turned the air thick as syrup and the cicadas screamed from the acacia trees, we owned the nights. Our village, nestled in...

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The Clock in the Wall

I was twenty-three when I flew back to my grandparents’ village in the highlands of Luzon, a place I hadn’t seen since I was nine. The house was a relic...

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The Last Kilometer to the Overpass

I remember the night the engine coughed, a dry hack that made the steering wheel tremble. My name is Liza, and I had just left my sister’s birthday dinner in...

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The Lantern Man

In the autumn of 2005, I was twelve, living in the small town of San Isidro, where the houses hugged the highway like chicks to a hen, and the streetlights...

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The Seventh Creak

It started with the seventh creak of the gate. I knew the sound of our front gate like I knew the sound of my own heartbeat. One creak for each...

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The Night the Faucet Dripped

I remember the summer the drought hit our county. The river behind our farmhouse shrank to a muddy trickle, and the well started pulling up rust-colored water. My parents, desperate...

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The Hollow Playmate

The summer I turned eight, my parents sent me to stay with my Aunt Remedios in the dusty town of San Cipriano. The house was a relic of another century,...

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The Cinder Man

Eight months ago, I got a call from Marcus, a kid I’d known in middle school. I can’t say I’d been waiting for it, but I realized after I hung...

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The Unseen Third Desk

I’m 24, a data analyst at a small firm, and I used to pride myself on my rationality. Ghosts, spirits, things that go bump in the night—I dismissed them all...

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The Unseen Conductor

It was a cold November night when Alaric, a quiet music student, found himself walking home from the old concert hall where he rehearsed with the university orchestra. The streets...

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The Last Nail

My memories of my grandfather, Elias, are thin as November mist, but one image is burned into my mind like a hot iron. I was six, maybe seven, and he...

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The Bone Garden

In 2009, I was still seeing Lena, and we decided to take a long weekend to the coastal town of Thornwick. We found a sprawling inn called the Wicker House,...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Vigil

In the winter of 1987, my grandmother, Lola Ising, passed away in her small farmhouse in the highlands of northern Luzon. We practiced the traditional nine-day novena, but here, the...

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The Flicker in the Hall

Greta had always felt a peculiar unease in her apartment, especially in the evenings. The building was old, with creaking pipes and drafty windows, but she had grown accustomed to...

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The Floor Above the Fridge

I had lived in that apartment for three years, and in all that time, the only thing that ever woke me at 3 AM was the old refrigerator’s compressor. But...

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The Gatekeeper’s Vigil

The last week of June, my brother Emilio died. It was sudden, a collapse in the rice fields, and the doctors couldn’t pinpoint a single cause, just a cascade of...

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The Last Bus on Mariposa Avenue

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I worked the 6 PM to 3 AM shift at a 24-hour convenience store on the edge of the city, a lonely outpost...

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The Grease-Stained Ledger

My grandmother always said I had the ‘sight,’ but it wasn’t the kind that sees. It was a pressure, a static in the air, a metallic taste at the back...

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The Hum of the Hollow

In the autumn of 2012, I joined a group of five colleagues for a weekend retreat to the remote town of Ashford, nestled in the foothills of the Cascade Range....

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The Last Stitch

The night Marta died, the rain began. Not the soft drizzle that whispers on rooftops, but a hard, percussive drumming that made the windows of our small apartment shiver. I...

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The Unraveling Thread

I moved to the outskirts of Baguio six months ago, into a decaying colonial house perched on a fog-choked ridge. The previous tenant, an old Belgian priest, had died of...

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The Static in the Walls

The night air in the old marine biology station was thick with salt and the distant cry of gulls, even at 2 a.m. I was a graduate student, new to...

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The Last Bus to Marilao

I’m a second-generation Filipino-American, born and raised in the fog of San Francisco, but when I told my lolo I wanted to go to med school in the Philippines, he...

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The Game of Gaps

In the dusty attic of the old Marrow House, where the beams groaned like tired bones, my niece Lily, a five-year-old with a stutter that made her words stumble like...

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