Ghost stories from Singapore

The Red Lantern Gate

My grandmother’s house stood on Jasmine Hill, a sprawling estate of manicured lawns and ancient banyan trees, crowned by a crumbling Victorian manor with peeling white paint and a slate...

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The Keeper of the Unspoken

In the small town of Ravenshade, nestled between misty hills and an ancient forest, the concept of the unexplained was treated with a quiet, unyielding silence. My grandmother, Elara, was...

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The Cesspit of July

The house on Lorong Koo Chuan was a four-room flat that had seen a century of damp and decay. My family had always been porous to the other side, but...

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The Cradle of Nails

At nineteen, I was a walking contradiction: a college dropout with a baby kicking against my ribs and a heart too stubborn to believe in anything I couldn’t see. My...

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The Long Laundry Poles

Our apartment block in the new town of Jurong East was one of the first to rise from the swampland, a lonely concrete sentinel against the sky. We lived on...

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The Glass Lantern of Lorong Tiga

When I was a boy in the late 1960s, my family lived in a narrow two-story shophouse along Lorong Tiga, a quiet lane in the older part of George Town,...

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The Unseen Shift

For three weeks, Mara had been waking up with a weight in her bones, a fatigue that clung to her like wet wool no matter how many hours she slept....

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The Salted Threshold

In the humid backwaters of Kerala, where monsoon rains hammered the tin roofs and the coconut palms swayed like penitent supplicants, I grew up with a fascination for the unseen....

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The Watcher on the Ropes Course

Two years ago, I signed up for a wilderness survival camp hidden in the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The camp was called Thornhaven, a name that felt more...

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The Cistern of Hollow Faces

After basic training, Private Elias Vance was posted to Fort Granite, a relic of the colonial era perched atop Blackpine Hill. The base, once a British artillery outpost, now housed...

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The Tannery Shift

In the humid sprawl of Kuala Lumpur, every able-bodied man knew the weight of national service, though our conscription was shorter, a mere two years. I was posted to the...

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The Static Between Stations

In the autumn of 2015, I was living with my aunt and cousin in a rented flat on the outskirts of Helsinki, a place where the city’s hum faded into...

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The Kitchen Light Flickers

The old farmhouse on Maple Hollow Road had been in my family for generations, its white paint peeling like sunburnt skin. I had never believed in the supernatural, not even...

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The Painted Closet

The bell rang, its shrill cry echoing through the empty corridors of Redwood Primary. For most kids, that meant freedom. For me, it meant the long walk to the bus...

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The Night the Cicadas Held Their Breath

The December heat in Kampung Lemal was a blanket that clung to your skin, and the air smelled of ripe rambutan and damp earth. My family had come to spend...

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The Lantern Man

The first thing I noticed was the smell—brackish, like rotting kelp and wet concrete. It clung to the predawn air of Port Blossom, a fishing town that had long since...

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The Lantern That Never Went Out

I never believed in ghosts until I moved into that apartment. It was a pre-war building in the old quarter, the kind with high ceilings and windows that faced a...

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The Uninvited Arithmetic

The humming of the fluorescent light above my desk was the only sound in the small apartment that evening. I was wrestling with a calculus problem, the scratch of my...

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The Frequency of the Moth

The first time I heard the frequency, I was twelve, lying in a nest of damp blankets in the attic room of my grandmother’s house in the foothills of the...

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The Damp Corner

We called it the damp corner long before we understood why. It was the stretch of wall in the kitchen, right where the counter met the tiles, that always felt...

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The Drag of the Slippers

It was the first night of the music retreat at Maplewood Secondary, a sprawling campus tucked into the hills of northern New Jersey. The school was nearly empty for the...

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The Lantern Loop

The summer I turned twelve, my family moved to a converted lighthouse on the coast of Maine. The place was called the Weymouth Point Light, and it had been a...

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The Kebaya Passenger

The afternoon sun bled through the slatted blinds of my client’s office, casting long, anxious stripes across the polished floor. I had finished the meeting early, a rare stroke of...

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The Parallel Corridor

After graduating in Mumbai, I returned to my homeland, Malaysia, and moved into a flat with my cousin Aisha and her boyfriend Riz. The flat was in a low-rise block...

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