Ghost stories from Philippines

The Last Harvest of the Orchard

The orchard had always been a place of quiet magic for Elara. As a child, her grandmother, whom everyone called Lola Marta, would take her there every Sunday after mass....

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The Cold Corner of the Room

Before we moved to Toronto in 1997, I was four years old, living with my parents in a small, humid apartment in Cebu City. My mother, Lita, often told me...

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The Fifth Door

The night air was thick and humid as Mara, Leo, and I followed our colleague Priya through the wrought-iron gate of her ancestral home. The house loomed ahead, a relic...

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The Empty Carriage

My cousin Lena worked the night shift at a data processing hub on the outskirts of Cebu City, a sleek glass tower that hummed with the glow of a thousand...

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The Pattern in the Hallway

The old house on Amber Street had always felt like a living thing to me, with its creaking bones and damp breath. When I was a kid, my grandparents, Lolo...

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The Locked Stall of Room 114

It was a sweltering Tuesday afternoon in late September, and I was a sophomore at Meridian State, a campus that always felt a little too quiet for my liking. I...

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The Eighth Floor’s Hum

I was seven when I first heard it—a faint, melodic hum that seemed to seep through the walls of our apartment on the eighth floor. It wasn’t a whistle, exactly,...

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The Path of the Red Lanterns

It was the fourth time I’d joined a group hike, and unlike my previous solo ventures, this one was a crowd: sixteen of us, with me as the only woman....

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The Weeping in the Server Room

It was a Tuesday, and the afternoon heat of Cebu City clung to the air like a wet shroud. My class, a mix of juniors and seniors, filed into the...

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The Jar of Honey

In the summer of 2011, my mother received a letter from her cousin, Lita, who lived in a remote mountain village called San Isidro. Lita was renowned for her gentle...

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The Condensation

The duplexes on Maple Row were packed so tight that the shared firewall had become a membrane, a thin, sweating boundary between my living room and the Wallers’ kitchen. I’d...

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The Weight of the Third Step

Marcus, a middle-aged math teacher, always prided himself on being rational. Numbers made sense; ghosts did not. He stayed late after school, as was his habit, erasing the day’s equations...

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The Seventh Stair

I worked the night shift at a remote data processing firm, syncing my hours to a client on the other side of the globe. My commute from the outskirts of...

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The Lantern Festival of the Hollow

I never believed in the unseen. My grandmother, a woman who spoke to the dead as easily as she spoke to the living, used to say I was ‘born with...

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The White Pennant

It was the last month of our final year, and the air in our coastal town of Duskharbor was thick with salt and pre-graduation tension. I was in the same...

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The Weeping Oak

The old farmhouse had stood for over a century, its bones of weathered timber and fieldstone sagging under the weight of time. My family had owned it for six generations,...

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The Lantern at Moonrise

In the autumn of 2009, I agreed to accompany my friend, Marcus, on a three-day hike through the Blackwood Peaks. I had never been backpacking before, but Marcus was an...

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The Sour Tree

I was nine when I first saw the field. It wasn’t in a dream—it was in the space between blinks, a flash of green and a single crooked tree. I...

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The Basement Stains

The first month in the old farmhouse felt like a blessing. My wife, Elena, and I had moved our small family—our son, Leo, and daughter, Mia—from the crowded city to...

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The Creak of the Divider

My sister Mira and I grew up in a cramped apartment above our grandmother’s sari-sari store in the bustling heart of Manila. One humid night, when I was seven and...

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The Last Bell

I transferred to St. Aldrin’s Academy in the middle of fifth grade, a sprawling campus in the dusty outskirts of Tarlac. The school was known for its strict discipline and...

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The Cardboard Box

I remember the summer I turned nineteen, when my grandmother passed and left me her old house on the edge of the marsh. It was a ramshackle Victorian with peeling...

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The Cinder Garden

In the autumn of my twelfth year, I attended Maplewood Intermediate, a squat brick building that huddled beside a field of gray gravel. A fire had gutted the old east...

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The Dress by the Window

Our farmhouse sat at the edge of a cornfield that stretched like a golden sea to the horizon. I’d grown up with its creaking stairs and the way the attic...

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