Ghost stories from Philippines

The Stairwell’s Second Tenant

In the autumn of 2011, I was living in a cramped studio apartment in a converted Victorian house in Portland, Maine. My boyfriend at the time, Marcus, was a graduate...

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The Last Bus to Hollow Creek

The summer I turned nine, my family moved to the town of Hollow Creek, a place so small the only road in was also the only road out. Our house...

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The Lantern Man

In the autumn of 2008, my parents moved us to a newly built cul-de-sac on the outskirts of a small town in the Midwest. The development was barely finished, with...

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The Backward Man

In the humid, mango-scented air of our new home in Lakambini Street, I thought we had found paradise. The house was a two-story structure with a sprawling garden, a rusty...

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The Unfinished Game

The autumn of my sophomore year, the air in the halls of Lincoln High carried more than the scent of old books and floor wax. It carried whispers, the kind...

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The Cabinet’s Breath

The afternoon sun bled through the slats of the blinds, casting long, dusty shadows across my mother’s bedroom. I’d been home alone for hours, and the silence of the house...

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The Ceiling Drummer

I never thought I’d spend a month of my life sleeping on a cramped couch under a flickering fluorescent light, but there I was, hunched over a second-hand laptop in...

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The Scent of Burnt Jasmine

I was nineteen when my family sold our house in Oregon and moved to the province of Batangas, Philippines. My parents had retired, and I was enrolled in a university...

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The Birthday Girl in the Attic

The sun beat down on the tin roof of our aunt’s house, turning the upstairs into an oven. I was tasked with dusting the crowded shelves in the living room...

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The Murmur of the Fallen Bark

In the sweltering summer of 1987, my family moved into a newly built house on a sprawling half-acre lot at the edge of a forgotten sugarcane plantation. The land was...

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The Lantern Keeper’s Debt

In the autumn of 2009, I moved into my grandmother’s old house in the outskirts of Baguio, a two-story structure that had been in the family for decades. The house...

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The Mannequin in the Attic

In the autumn of 2004, I was a senior at St. Augustine’s Academy, a boarding school housed in a converted Victorian mansion in the mountains of Vermont. The building was...

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The Unglazed Path

The week of my cousin’s wedding, I found myself in the province of Leyte, walking a trail that felt older than the town itself. My aunt’s house, a creaking wooden...

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The Door That Hung on Air

In the municipality of San Isidro, nestled between rice paddies and a winding river, our house stood—a modest structure of weathered wood and corrugated iron. The living room was the...

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The Chair That Walked to the Door

In the autumn of 2019, I was a junior at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. My on-campus apartment was a cramped studio, but it was enough...

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In the autumn of 1995, Dr. Elena Marquez was a postdoctoral researcher at the AgriGenetics Institute, a sprawling government facility nestled in the agricultural heartland of the Central Valley, about...

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The Lantern Test

The night air was thick with the smell of wet leaves and rust. Our school, St. Aldric’s, was an old converted textile mill, its red brick walls stained dark with...

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The Glass Chime

In the summer of 2004, I finally set foot in my grandmother’s abandoned boarding house in the coastal town of San Vicente, Zambales. It was a sprawling, two-story structure from...

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The Clockwork Custodian

It started in the archives of the Meridian Library, a vast, dusty repository of forgotten tomes and decaying manuscripts. I, Elias Thorne, was the night archivist, tasked with cataloging the...

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The Petal Ledger

It was the last Friday of the month, and the low clouds hung over the town like a wet blanket. The high school, a squat, two-story concrete block, sat at...

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The Blue Thread

In the sweltering August of 2014, my grandfather, Elias, was admitted to St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital for the third time that summer. He had a feeding tube inserted after weeks...

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The Mannequin Collector

The night air was thick with the smell of diesel and rain as Rosa’s father swerved their old pickup truck through the winding roads of the Sierra Nevada foothills. It...

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The Cabinet at Cromer Lane

I never believed in the supernatural. Growing up, my father was a scientist, and he taught me that everything has a rational explanation, even if we haven’t found it yet....

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The Rusted Key

In the sweltering summer of 2002, when I was only eight, my family left our cramped apartment in the city for a dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of a dying...

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