Ghost stories from Philippines

The Unfinished House on Mangga Street

I was eight when I learned that some stories are not just stories. I was staying with my Tita Rosa in a small town in the province, in a house...

Read Story →

The Floor Above

I work in the city, and during the week I stay at my grandmother’s old house, the one she left to my mother. It’s a two-story structure with four rooms,...

Read Story →

The Marble in the Mountain

It was my first major assignment with the firm, a two-week deployment to the Kastor Quarry Works in the highlands. My team was small: Delia, a systems analyst with nerves...

Read Story →

The Last Visitor

I never believed in ghosts, not really. I was the kind of person who needed proof, something I could touch or measure. My girlfriend, Lena, was different. She had stories,...

Read Story →

The Riser on the Fifth Floor

During my stint with a provincial repertory company, we were staging a grand historical drama at the old Cervantes Auditorium. The building was a relic from the 1920s, with creaky...

Read Story →

The Bracelet on the Fourth Floor

In the sterile corridors of Saint Beatrice Memorial Hospital, a sprawling complex in the heart of a bustling city, the night shift felt eternal. At 2:00 AM, after a grueling...

Read Story →

The Lace of the Unseen

In the autumn of my sixteenth year, I lived with my aunt and uncle in the dusty town of San Isidro, cradled by the Sierra Madre foothills. Our house, a...

Read Story →

The Lantern in the Salt Marsh

In the autumn of 2002, I was a senior at Grayport University, a small coastal college known for its marine biology program and its unsettling proximity to the vast, desolate...

Read Story →

The Moonlight Shuffle

In the high-altitude town of San Cristobal, perched on a ridge overlooking a mist-choked valley, the old military road known as Kilometer 14 was a local legend. It was a...

Read Story →

The Lavender Wall

In the autumn of 2012, I moved to a small coastal town in Oregon for a teaching position at the local community college. The town was quaint, with a main...

Read Story →

The Sunlit Door

I never used to mind the attic. It was just a place of creaking floorboards and forgotten boxes, where the light filtered through dusty windows and the air smelled of...

Read Story →

The Ceiling Fan’s Rhythm

Last year, in the sweltering autumn of 2012, my cousin Tomas and I found ourselves stranded in the outskirts of Baguio City. We had spent the evening at a karaoke...

Read Story →

The Mannequin’s Embrace

My grandmother’s antique shop had been a treasure trove of oddities, but the mannequin in the corner always gave me the creeps. When she passed away, I inherited the shop,...

Read Story →

The Midnight Visitor

In the sweltering summer of 2010, we lived in a sprawling ancestral house in Batangas, with my grandmother, Lola Pilar, who was bedridden and needed constant care. We had a...

Read Story →

The Perfumed Hour

The rain had stopped, but the air in San Cipriano still clung to the dampness of the evening. At ten in the evening, the village watch made their rounds, their...

Read Story →

The Gravel Path

The bus depot at the edge of town was a gray, hollowed-out shell of a building, its windows dark and its benches cold. I worked the night shift at a...

Read Story →

The Moth-Winged Hour

It was the autumn of 1998, and the old St. Agatha’s Sanatorium on the bluffs of Maine had been closed for a decade. My friend Caleb had a cousin who...

Read Story →

The Painted Ladies of the Hollow Hall

The building squatted on a dead-end street, a U-shaped brute of poured concrete that had once been a bottling plant before some developer saw cheap square footage and a tax...

Read Story →

The Migraine of the Dead

I was the night auditor at the Meridian Transit Hotel, a sprawling, outdated complex that had seen better decades. My job was to reconcile the day’s transactions, a task that...

Read Story →

The Night of the Marble Saints

My cousin Elara had a way of making everything sound like a dare. She’d spent the summer with us in the village of San Ildefonso, a place where the church...

Read Story →

The Midnight Soil

The first time I noticed the dirt, I blamed the wind. A thin, dark line of it traced the baseboards in my cousin’s room, like someone had spilled a cup...

Read Story →

The Lantern Wicks

On the last night of October, in the quiet village of Ashwick, the air was thick with the smell of damp earth and decayed leaves. Rain had fallen earlier, leaving...

Read Story →

The Quilted Morning

The summer I turned twelve, my parents bought an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, hoping the fresh air would cure my chronic cough. The house had a musty...

Read Story →

The Lantern in the Rain

The evening had settled in like a damp shroud over our subdivision in Lapu-Lapu City, not far from the old wharf where fishing boats swayed against the tide. It was...

Read Story →