Ghost stories from Philippines

The Salt Stains

I never thought of myself as special. Just a guy with a slightly leaky brain, catching glimpses of things that shouldn’t be there. Not like the kid in that movie,...

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The Face Without a Smile

In the sweltering heat of a Rajasthani summer, the old banyan tree at the edge of our lane was our kingdom. Its sprawling branches were our jungle gym, its thick...

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The Concrete Bloom

In the autumn of 1994, Elias Marquez traded his city job for a patch of scrubland off Route 7. He had spent fifteen years as a machinist, his hands stained...

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The Pattering of Tiny Feet

The house on Maple Street had a particular smell, like old books and dust, which I found comforting at first. My name is Leo, and when I was eleven, we...

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The Twin Crossing

It was a Tuesday afternoon in October, the kind of day when the heat from the concrete seemed to blur the edges of reality. I was a third-year student at...

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The Candle’s Cast

In the winter of my ninth year, my family and I huddled together in a single room of our rented cottage in the Blackwood Forest. The house was old, with...

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The Frequency of Flesh

My grandmother used to say that our bloodline was a radio, forever tuned to stations of the dead. She claimed she could feel the sharp static of a departing soul,...

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The Floor Below

It was a Tuesday night when the first whispers crept into the house on Maple Street. Not the usual creaks of an old foundation or the rustle of leaves against...

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The Room with the Bottles

I never believed in ghosts, not really. Not until we moved into my grandmother’s house after she passed. The house was a sprawling, old Victorian on the edge of a...

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The Bone Orchard Gate

I never believed in ghosts, not really. But there are places that feel wrong, not because they are haunted, but because they are teeming with something older, hungrier. Our house...

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The Cistern Chime

The old schoolhouse had stood for over a century, its red brick stained with the grime of a thousand rainstorms. I was a senior now, and I thought I had...

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The Eleventh Floor’s Nightlight

For years, I’d harbored a secret obsession with American diner culture—the chrome, the jukeboxes, the towering stacks of pancakes. So when my cousin Victor, who’d recently emigrated to Spokane, Washington,...

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The Painted Over

I never believed in ghosts, not really. As a kid, I thought they were just stories to scare us, or tricks of the light. Growing up in a brand-new subdivision...

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The Marble Floor Recital

My name is Elena, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve been able to see things that others cannot. It’s not a gift; it’s a curse that I’ve...

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The Saltwood Line

The house at 14 Saltwood Lane had always been a stubborn survivor. Built in the late 1950s by a retired sea captain, it had weathered typhoons, termites, and the slow...

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The Constant Gardener of Maplehurst

I’ve always trusted the solidity of things—the grain of oak tables, the weight of iron keys, the predictable hum of fluorescent lights in the hospital where I worked. I was...

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The Chalk Man at the Window

The apartment on Maple Street had a peculiar layout. Our living room opened directly into the kitchen, and from the corner of my mother’s bed, I could see the large,...

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The Static Choir

I was five when I first saw the choir. Not in church, but in the grainy static of the old television set that sat at the foot of my grandparents’...

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The Porcelain Room

I live with my father in a house built in the 1950s, a split-level that my grandparents commissioned before I was born. My mother passed away two years ago, and...

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The Stairwell Lullaby

My name is Elian, and for the past three years, I’ve worked the graveyard shift as a data analyst. The upside is that I’m fully alert at 2 a.m., while...

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The Candle’s Offering

My sister Liza never paid much mind to our mother’s rituals. She considered them quaint, superstitious holdovers from a rural childhood that had no place in her modern city life....

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The Painted Room

In the coastal town of San Vicente, the old Alvarez House stood on a cliff overlooking the sea. Unlike the bustling cities, San Vicente was a quiet place where stories...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

It was the summer of 1978, and Elias was the last person to leave the old provincial high school in the heart of the rice fields. The town of San...

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The Iron Garden

The afternoon sun slanted through the dusty windows of my aunt’s farmhouse, casting long, skeletal fingers across the worn linoleum floor. I was nine, and the world was a place...

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