The Child in the Hallway
New South Wales, Australia · 2016
My daughter was two years old at the time. She started talking about 'the boy' in the hallway — describing him in detail, what he wore, that he was sad. We assumed imaginary friend. Then I saw him. Just for a second, standing outside her bedroom door at night. Same clothes she'd described. I didn't sleep that night. We had the house blessed. She stopped mentioning him after that. I've never told her I saw him too.
The Hospital Corridor
Karachi, Pakistan · 2019
Everyone on nights has a story from Ward 4. Mine is a man in a grey shalwar kameez walking the corridor at 2:40 a.m. I said salaam out of habit. He nodded and walked into the last room. That room had been closed for two weeks after a patient died in it. When I checked the CCTV the next morning, nobody had walked down that corridor at 2:40. Just me, standing there, saying salaam to no one.
The Voice on the Baby Monitor
Ontario, Canada · 2020
The monitor picked up a woman's voice singing to my son. Soft, in a language I didn't recognise. I ran to his room and he was fast asleep, smiling. The monitor was still on when I got there — no interference, no crossed signal, we checked. It happened four more times over three months, always the same voice, always around 4 a.m. My grandmother, when I described the melody, said her mother used to sing it to her in Polish.
The Figure on the Road
Scottish Highlands · 2015
Two in the morning, single-track road, nobody around for miles. A man in a dark coat stepped out into my headlights. I hit the brakes so hard the load shifted in the trailer. When I got out to check, there was nothing. No body, no blood, no marks on the road. I sat in the cab for twenty minutes shaking. A local at the petrol station told me the next morning that a hiker had died on that stretch in the eighties. He said it happens to drivers about once a year.
The Apartment That Remembered
Warsaw, Poland · 2022
My studio apartment had a routine that wasn't mine. The kitchen tap would run for exactly three seconds every evening around seven. A drawer in the bedroom would open by itself every morning. Never anything violent — just habits, like someone still lived there and I was the guest. I moved out after a neighbour mentioned the previous tenant, an elderly woman, had lived alone in that flat for forty years before she passed. Every quirk lined up with what her family said she used to do.
The Photograph
Cornwall, England · 2013
My mother's funeral. I took a photo of the empty church before people arrived, because she'd designed the flowers herself. When I looked at the picture later, there was a figure in the back pew. Not blurry, not a trick of the light — a clear woman in a dark coat, sitting in the exact seat my mother had booked for herself years earlier at a wedding, joking she'd 'sit at the back and watch.' Nobody had been in the church when I took the photo. I still have the picture. I don't show it to people anymore.
