Ghost stories from Philippines

The Constant Hum

In the summer of 2019, my grandmother, Lola Ising, lay in a room that used to be our laundry room, converted for her failing body. Our house in Pampanga was...

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The Violet Slip

When I was eight, we lived in a run-down farmhouse at the edge of a dying town. The house had a peculiar layout: the kitchen opened directly into the dining...

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The Ventilator’s Cadence

The two places I avoid like the plague are cramped, windowless spaces and hospitals. Not the sort of fear that makes you sweat or hyperventilate—just a deep, bone-level dread that...

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The Painted Cloth

The evening had settled over the old farmhouse like a low fog, muffling the world outside the thick, hand-hewn walls. Inside, the living room was a cocoon of warm lamplight...

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The Third Reflection

In the autumn of my seventh year, my mother bought me a gown the color of a bruised twilight—deep indigo silk with tiny crystal beads sewn into the hem, catching...

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The Lighter’s Glow

Our family had a peculiar rhythm, one dictated by the flicker of the power grid and the steady flame of my father’s trusty Zippo. There were six of us then:...

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The Pale Aisle

My grandmother called it ‘the veil,’ a thin membrane between our world and the next. I always thought it was a metaphor until I turned thirteen and started seeing faces...

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The Card Table’s Last Hand

I’ve never claimed to have any special sense for the other side. Ghosts, spirits, whatever you want to call them—they’ve never whispered in my ear or tugged at my sleeve....

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The Celluloid Gate

The flicker of the projector was a dying heartbeat. It had been that way since we’d entered the Orion Cinemas, a relic of seventies architecture tucked into a forgotten corner...

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The Tenant Above

I have always prided myself on being a rational man. Ghosts, spirits, the paranormal—these were the fantasies of the superstitious, the stuff of campfire tales and B-movies. But as I...

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The Other Side of the Hall

It was a humid autumn evening, and I had just returned from my late shift at the archives. The old apartment building we lived in had a peculiar smell—like old...

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The Interloper’s Door

It was a grey Saturday in late January, and I was holed up in my cramped basement apartment, the only light coming from the glow of my monitor as I...

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The Silver-Haired Watcher

I’ve always been a vivid dreamer, but there’s a particular kind of dream that leaves a lingering unease long after waking. It happened three years ago, in a small coastal...

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The Lantern Keeper

The summer I turned twelve, my cousin Lena and I stayed at our great-aunt Margo’s boarding house in the town of Stillwater, a place that seemed to be built entirely...

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The Salt and the Cedar

The town of Morro Blanco perched on the edge of a cliff, its houses painted in faded pastels that peeled like sunburned skin. The ocean below was not the turquoise...

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The Last Harvest

In the autumn of 1987, my family moved into a sprawling farmhouse at the edge of a town called Hollow Creek. The house had been a gift from my grandfather,...

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The Third Shift Gardener

The humming of the cleanroom’s air handlers was a lullaby I’d grown accustomed to over three years of graveyard shifts at Meridian Microsystems. We manufactured the tiny valves and springs...

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The Hollow March

Milo Reyes was seventeen, and the world was a simple place of dust, gossip, and the tinny wail of a transistor radio. That night, the barrio of San Cipriano was...

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The Weeping Wall

My name is Mara, and I’m twenty-one. I live in a town called Sorrow’s Peak, a place that seems to be permanently covered in a damp, grey mist. I’ve always...

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The Switchboard’s Last Ring

The job was supposed to be temporary, a way to pay off the debt from my mother’s hospital bills. I had moved from the crowded city to the remote town...

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The Garden of Stone Faces

The bus groaned up the winding mountain road, and I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, watching the pines blur into a dark green smear. It was 2007, and...

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The Locker’s Hollow

The year was 2010, and I had just graduated from community college. I took a seasonal job at the Pinecrest Galleria, a sprawling shopping complex on the outskirts of a...

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The Painted Door

It was the autumn of my eleventh year, and the halls of Birchwood Middle School always smelled of floor wax and old paper. The bell for morning break had just...

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The Lantern of Last Rites

In the salt-scoured village of Crows’ Nook, where the sea mist clung to the rooftops like a shroud, the Voss family had long been the keepers of the dying. For...

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