The Counting Game
In the summer of 2009, my sister Lina and her cousins were staying at our grandmother’s old farmhouse in the countryside of Wisconsin. The house had been abandoned for years,...
In the summer of 2009, my sister Lina and her cousins were staying at our grandmother’s old farmhouse in the countryside of Wisconsin. The house had been abandoned for years,...
For three months, the weight of solitude had become unbearable, so I slept curled against my younger sister, Mira, in the narrow bed in the spare room of our new...
The old manor, a relic of a bygone era, had stood empty for decades, a lonely sentinel against the perpetually bruised sky. Its last inhabitants, the wealthy Atherton family, had...
I never met my grandmother. She passed long before I was born. Every year on the date she left us, our family would meet at her old home. We would...
For three years, I’d been a ghost in the industry, drifting from one call center to the next. My third stop was at a renovated warehouse on the industrial edge...
In the autumn of 2014, the world watched as Pope Gabriel III lay in state, his body resting in the chapel of a secluded monastery in the hills of Umbria....
In my early days at Meridian Mutual, I worked the graveyard shift in the customer service wing, a cavernous space on the seventeenth floor of the Meridian Tower. The building...
I’ve never believed in ghosts. Not really. Even after everything I’ve seen—cold spots, misplaced keys, the way certain rooms make my skin prickle—I always found a logical explanation. But there’s...
My aunt’s house, a dilapidated Victorian on the edge of a dying town, had always felt like a museum of forgotten things. The attic, in particular, was a graveyard of...
It was a listless Tuesday when I stumbled upon an old blog detailing the ‘Ceremony of the Hollow Gaze.’ I was eighteen, restless, and desperate for something beyond the monotony...
The bus groaned up the winding mountain road, carrying our class and a thick, unspoken dread. Last year, our school had booked a retreat at a place called Crestwood Hollow,...
In the autumn of 2018, I was part of a community choir that rehearsed in a decommissioned schoolhouse on the outskirts of Millbrook. The building had been closed for years,...
My name is Julio, and I was born and raised in the dusty, superstitious heart of Batangas. When my job transferred me to the bustling, humid city of Davao in...
This is my second personal encounter with (in the absence of appropriate description) supposedly “aswangs”. It happened three years after my first experience in 2003. The new house I was...
My grandmother, Lola Ising, would always tell this story at family gatherings, her voice dropping to a hush as the rice cooker steamed and the children played under the table....
When Lola Ising was a small girl, she lived with her family in a sprawling ancestral house in the Visayan lowlands, a two-story wooden structure with a steep, corrugated iron...
I was eleven when my family moved from our small town in Japan to a sprawling, fog-choked city on the West Coast. The new school was a labyrinth of gray...
The old manor stood on a windswept promontory overlooking the churning, slate-grey sea. Its stones, once grand, now bore the marks of relentless salt spray and the creeping embrace of...
My friend Leo traveled to a mountain town last autumn. He said the place was known for its stunning views and cold air. Leo stayed in a grand, old lodge...
It was the tail end of a wet October when I stepped off the bus in the old mill town of Ashworth, the damp air clinging to my skin like...
The halls of St. Agatha’s Technical Institute in the highlands of Nueva Vizcaya were older than any of us. Our youth leadership conference had been granted the use of the...
In the late autumn of 1984, my family lived in a small coastal village called Saltmarsh, a place where the sea breeze carried the smell of brine and the nights...
The old house on Jalan Dahlia had always felt watchful, even during the day. I’d moved there six months ago, seeking the quiet of the highlands to finish my thesis...
I hadn’t stepped foot in my parents’ house for nearly a decade. The structure itself was new, erected in 1995, but the land beneath it was old, steeped in quiet...
Listening to the woods...
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