Ghost Stories

In honor of All Souls’ Day.

[1] One morning about two weeks ago I was in the men’s bathroom on our office floor. I had just finished washing my hands and was just giving my hair a final check when I noticed a movement on the mirror to my right. It was something white, and direction of the movement was towards the mirror. But given the angle of my sightlines, that would mean that, one, the white thing was a reflection on the shiny tiles of the walls, and two, the figure would have to be moving behind or just beside me. But there was no one else there in the bathroom. I immediately skedaddled out of there.

[2] My brother’s wife came from a broken family; when she was in college, her father left his wife, son and three daughters for a woman just a couple of years older than his eldest daughter. And he stayed estranged from his wife and children until he had a massive heart attack this year. On his deathbed, he looked only for his children and wife; he never once asked for his mistress. Just before he died he made peace with his wife, who had to fly in from the U.S. where she’s now based.

Days after, my brother and his family would smell cigarette smoke in their house. None of them smoked except for his father-in-law (he chain-smoked Marlboros). Once the maid was sleeping in the living room waiting for my brother and his wife to arrive home from watching the last full show of a movie. She woke up to hear footsteps coming down the stairs. But when she looked up there was no one there, but the sounds grew louder and nearer. That’s when she shut her eyes and started praying. A couple of days later when the whole family went out, the maid was left alone in the house again. This time she heard the screen door open and chairs being pushed around upstairs. She stayed in the garage until the family came back. Only when my brother’s mother-in-law left for the U.S. did the strange sounds and the smell of smoke stopped.

[3] The scariest thing for me is something that was just told to me. It happened to a friend of mine and this was her story: One evening she couldn’t sleep. She tried reading, counting sheep, even drinking milk, but nothing worked. So she decided to pray the Hail Mary over and over again, hoping the monotony would put her to sleep. It didn’t. In fact, the more she prayed the more she stayed awake. But she couldn’t stop praying; slowly she realized she could hear, faintly but clearly, another voice praying along with her. When she listened closer, it was a male voice saying the words just a beat or two behind her in a mocking way: Hell merry, fool of grays…. When she realized that, she got so rattled she prayed faster and louder, trying to block the voice out. Eventually she got so tired she fell asleep; she didn’t even remember nodding off.

A few years later I heard a similar story, but this involved two girls and a loony mocking them with the Hail Mary. I’m not sure now if it was her story that came first and had evolved, or if it’s the loony story that came first then she heard it and, in turn, it became the subconscious trigger that made her “imagine” this demonic voice taunting her. To this day she swears she heard a voice, though she now acknowledges the possibility that she just imagined it and believed that it was real at that time.

And what is your ghost story, mga multong bakla?