Ghost stories from Philippines

The Microwave’s Low Hum

The old textile mill had been converted into a shared workspace, but the industrial past clung to its bones. We called it ‘The Loom’ because of the constant, faint mechanical...

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The Night Visitor of Ward 4

The fluorescent lights of Ward 4 buzzed like a trapped fly, casting a sterile glow on the pale green walls. My daughter, Mira, was only eight months old when the...

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The Lace and the Humming

When I moved to the coastal town of Port Blossom for graduate school, I found a place that was both charming and unsettling. It was a Victorian house perched on...

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The Blueprint of the Empty Floor

Elias, a freshly credentialed architect, landed his first job at Meridian & Sons, a boutique firm of exactly nine people. The office occupied the fourteenth floor of the Meridian Tower,...

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The Trowel and the Itch

The morning air was thick with the smell of damp earth and jasmine as Lourdes, a woman of fifty-three with a wiry frame and a face etched by sun and...

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The Hollow Coop

In the sweltering summer of 1987, my family and I lived in a modest farmhouse on the outskirts of a sun-scorched town in central Texas. Behind our home, separated by...

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The Bamboo Hollow

I was six when my father and I made the long journey from Manila to the mountain province of Ifugao, where my aunt’s family lived in a village perched on...

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An Adventure in the Forest

When I was a child, my family lived in a small village. I remember one summer when I was eight, my parents took me to visit my mother’s brother, who...

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The Girl Who Walked Without a Crown

The salt spray stung Elias’s cheeks as he trudged along the tide line, the late afternoon sun a bruised orange on the horizon. He was supposed to be meeting his...

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The Girl With No Shadow

My grandmother told me this tale when I was young. She said when she was a teenager, she walked home from school every day with her two best friends, Clara...

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The Embossed Figure

The clinic’s outreach team had seen its share of strange nights, but nothing prepared them for the old Herrera house on the outskirts of Vigan. The three-story ancestral home, with...

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The Pale Rider of Kilometer 42

The weekend trip was supposed to be a simple escape, a chance to leave the endless paperwork and fluorescent lights behind. My name is Mara, and I worked at a...

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The Ceramic Lid

I was seven the winter we moved into the old farmhouse outside of town. My father had inherited it from a great-uncle he barely remembered, a man who, according to...

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The Weevil’s Arithmetic

I was twenty, renting a room in my aunt’s sprawling old farmhouse on the outskirts of a town called Harrow Creek. The house had once been a general store, and...

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The Oven’s Hungry

My name is Elias, and when I was seven, I lived with my family in a creaking, two-story farmhouse nestled at the edge of a cornfield that stretched like a...

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The Salted Glass

The rain had been thrumming against the windows of the old boarding house all evening, a steady rhythm that made the walls feel closer. Lena, a shy 17-year-old on her...

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The Waiting Hour

In the winter of 2017, I was working as a claims adjuster in bustling downtown Austin, Texas, while my family lived in a small town in the Hill Country, a...

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The Bell Tower’s Debt

The coastal town of San Ildefonso had a church that was younger than the oldest living resident, but it stood on ground that remembered older stones. The original mission had...

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The Last Pour

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked past eleven, its hands crawling toward the new year. Outside, the city of Verona was a cacophony of premature celebration, rockets bursting in fountains...

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The Breathing in the Dark

On the evening of December 14th, the silence of the old farmhouse was broken only by the wind rattling the windowpanes. My parents had left for the city the day...

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The Fernweh House

The house on Moth Lane was never meant to be anything more than a summer refuge, a place my father built with his own hands in 1995, using timber from...

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The Fourth Syringe

Mara, a 28-year-old book conservator, had never been more than a routine visitor to St. Aldhelm’s General Hospital, a sprawling Victorian structure in the rain-soaked outskirts of a city that...

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The Persistent Sap

I never believed in the stories about the old farmhouse until we moved into the one my grandmother left us. It sat on a hundred acres of overgrown orchard, mostly...

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The Cargo of the Third Lot

I was nine, and the evening had that thick, grainy quality of late autumn, when the world seems to hold its breath. My mother had sent me to the corner...

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