Flickering Lamp

Age: 19

Ghost story

After my great grandmother passed, I remember the feeling of being sad both because my grandmother died and because I couldn’t be around my family due to Covid restrictions. I sat in bed crying after my dad gave me the news and I was distraught. Because this is the first family member I had passin my life, I didn’t know what to do and so I asked for a sign that she was okay. About 20 minutes later my dad came in my room to check on me and turned on a lamp I had never turned on despite living in that house for a year already. As soon as he turned the light on, and I told my dad that I wanted a way to know that she was OK, I turned to the lamp and it started to flicker. I had never used the lightbulb in the lamp and to this day It hasn’t flickered again, but that was my sign. 

Context: This story was told to me during a topic of religion. It was me, my roommate, her, and her friend. She stated that she does not believe explicitly in god, but instead believes in spirits. She then elaborated, telling this story.

Analysis: She thinks that it was her grandma. I think it was just a coincidence. It resembles the flame motif and ancestral ghosts. One attribute that could represent why she believed more was that she was younger, and this was the first time that a relative had died for her. Her emotional state could have been less stable, making her easier to persuade.

Fallen Rose

Age: 19

I was there when my grandma passed. The room had that still, suspended feeling—like everything was holding its breath. I had brought a single rose and placed it gently beside her on the bed, not really knowing what else to do except be there and give her something soft, something beautiful.

When the doctor finally said the time of death, everything seemed to freeze. And then, right in that exact moment, the rose slipped off the bed and fell to the floor. No one touched it. There wasn’t any movement that I could see that would’ve caused it. It just… fell. It caught me off guard, but it didn’t feel random. It felt like something had shifted the second she was gone.

A year later, on her birthday, I went to visit her. She’s in a mausoleum—completely enclosed, no wind, nothing that could disturb anything placed there. I brought another rose and set it carefully on her tombstone. I stood there for a while, talking to her quietly, like I used to when she was here.

Then I said our phrase, the one we always shared: “I love you more.”

Right after I said it, the rose twitched.

I froze. I remember staring at it, trying to make sense of what I had just seen. There was no breeze, no movement around me—nothing that should’ve made it move. It was small, but it was real.

So I said it again, a little more sure this time. “I love you more.”

And that’s when the rose fell. Completely, unmistakably, off the tombstone.

I didn’t feel scared. If anything, I felt this overwhelming sense of calm, like something familiar had just reached back toward me. In that moment, it didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt like her. Like she heard me, like she answered in the only way she could.

I know I can’t prove it. I know how it sounds. But I also know what I felt standing there—that same quiet certainty, like the moment she passed. To me, that was her way of saying hi, of reminding me that the love we shared didn’t just disappear.

And ever since then, I’ve held onto that. Not as something I need to explain, but as something I experienced—something that felt real in a way that doesn’t need proof.

Context: This story was told to me during a topic of religion. It was me, my roommate, her, and her friend. She stated that she does not believe explicitly in god, but instead believes in spirits. She then elaborated, telling this story.

Analysis: She thinks that it was her grandma. I think it was just a coincidence. It resembles the flame motif and ancestral ghosts. One attribute that could represent why she believed more was that she was younger, and she was very close to her grandma. Her emotional state could have been less stable, making her easier to persuade. I also believe that in her family, ghost stories were accepted more, making her easier to sway.

Hotel Ghost

Age: 51

Context:

This story was told to me by my father, whom I’ll refer to as SS. He had arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, ahead of my mother and me, relocating for a new job posting. During those first weeks alone in the city, he stayed at the Westin Hotel, a polished 5-star hotel, definitely not where things go wrong. He told me and my mom this story when we arrived in Dhaka, and I was quite young when I first heard it so I was super scared, but now I think about it as a strange incidence that happened to my dad.

The Story:

My father is a still sleeper. He doesn’t toss and turn, and has never once sleepwalked in his life. So on the first morning in his hotel room at the Westin, when he woke up on the floor, at the foot of the bed, not in it, he assumed some mundane explanation, that he must have been more exhausted than he thought. He climbed back into bed and didn’t mention it to anyone.

The second morning, it happened again. He was on the floor, same position, and same spot: at the foot of the bed, as if he had chosen to sleep there himself. By the third morning, when he opened his eyes and found himself looking up at the ceiling from the floor once more, the mundane explanations had run out. He went down to the front desk and asked to speak with the manager. He explained, carefully and plainly, what had been happening: that he woke each morning not in his bed but on the floor, in the same spot, with no memory of moving. 

SS told me the manager’s face changed the moment he finished speaking, the color drained from it. The man looked down at the desk between them, and there was a long pause, the kind that is not about finding the right words, but about deciding how many of them to share. He did not ask clarifying questions, or suggest a medical explanation or a mattress issue. He simply said that he was very sorry, and that he would arrange another room immediately.

The new room was not just different, it was significantly larger: a suite, upgraded well beyond what my father had booked, at no additional charge. The manager was apologetic, overly warm, eager to move past the conversation. He said something vague about wanting to ensure a comfortable stay, and then he closed the matter entirely.

My father said the man looked like he clearly knew something, and had decided, perhaps out of professionalism or policy or something harder to name, not to say what it was. Thankfully, SS never woke up on the floor again.

Informant’s Thoughts (SS):

My father says he isn’t certain there’s a definitive answer to how he ended up on the floor, or at least not one he could say out loud without feeling foolish. What he keeps returning to is the manager’s face. 

He says a person can dismiss their own experience, rationalize it, file it away. But you cannot rationalize someone else’s recognition. That man knew. Whatever was in that room, whatever had been happening there, the manager already knew, and chose to move him without a word.

His own theory is that someone had died in that room. And that whoever it was had never quite left. That the bed, in some sense, still belonged to them. That each night, my father was simply being removed from a space that was no longer his to occupy, displaced, without violence or malice, the way you might move something that has been left in your chair. Not haunted in the dramatic sense, just claimed perhaps by someone who didn’t know, or accept, that they were gone.

My Thoughts:

To me, what makes my father’s story haunting isn’t the strangeness of waking up on the floor, it’s the repetition. Three nights, the same spot, the same position. Whatever was happening, it had a pattern. 

I’m struck by how ordinary the setting is. Not a crumbling old house or a jungle road at night, a five-star hotel room, somewhere my father was supposed to feel safe and far from home at the same time.

What convinces me this may be more than a strange coincidence is the manager’s reaction. It suggests a history, a pattern beyond just my father’s three nights, perhaps other guests, other mornings, other quiet upgrades that were never explained. In South Asian cultures, there is a long tradition of spirits tied to specific places, not wandering, but rooted, attached to a room or a threshold or a particular patch of ground. The fact that whatever happened stopped the moment my father changed rooms feels consistent with that. It wasn’t following him, but belonged there.

This story stayed with me because when I first heard the story I was really scared especially cause this was a new country, and we were going to move there soon. Also, the slience around it makes it more spooky as my father never got an explanation.

The Sound of Anklet

Age: 64

Context:

This story was told to me by my grandmother, whom I’ll refer to as PS. My grandma is quite a religious woman, and so she believes in restless souls trapped as ghosts, but not in malevolent forces. She is a witness to this story, as she was brought in to confirm the presence of ghosts. The story takes place in 1978 in Kolkata, India, but she told me this story for the first time when I called her last weekend, inquiring about ghost stories for this class.

The Story:

Some years ago, PS’s brothers were looking to buy a house in Kolkata, and they found one quickly, a large, well-located, and strangely, almost suspiciously cheap one. When they pressed the previous owners for an explanation, the answer was given hesitantly: two maids had been murdered in that house. The owners were selling because they were frightened, and they had not been able to stay. PS’s brothers were not believers in ghosts. They were practical men, and a large house at a low price was still just that so they bought it.

They moved in, and for a while, said nothing to anyone. But at night, the house was not quiet. What they heard repeatedly, consistently, always after dark was the jingling of anklets. The sound of a woman’s feet moving through the house, the small bells at her ankles marking every step. The sound would drift through the hallways, unhurried, as though whoever was making it had nowhere in particular to be and all the time in the world to get there. They set up cameras in the hallways to catch the intruder but found nothing, in fact even the sound of anklets weren’t captured. So her brothers were unsettled enough that they decided to call PS, but they told her nothing about the sounds. They invited her to stay, and they waited to see whether she heard those strange noises too. 

The next morning, PS came to them with a question she couldn’t quite frame. She had heard something in the night, a strange sound she couldn’t explain. Moving through the house was the jingling of anklets.

Her brothers looked at each other as that was as all the confirmation they needed. They called in a tantric, a practitioner well versed in the rituals for restless spirits. PS says the tantric came in the way a tradesman comes to fix something that is broken. He performed the necessary rituals to release the spirits of the two murdered maids, to acknowledge what had happened to them, and to give them somewhere else to go.

After that, the house was silent. The sound of anklets was never heard again.

Informant’s Thoughts (PS):

My grandmother says that murdered people, in Bengali tradition, often become spirits not out of evil intent but out of incompletion, that because their deaths were violent, sudden and unacknowledged, they didn’t know how to leave. She said, the tantric didn’t destroy the spirit of the ghosts, merely released them so they could move onto the next life. 

My Thoughts:

What strikes me most about this story is the way my grandma’s brothers didn’t tell her what they heard. They brought her in blind, waited, and let her come to them. I think it was almost evil of her brothers to withhold the fact that there might have been ghosts. But I still can’t reconcile how 3 separate sets of ears heard the same thing while the camera captured nothing. My theory is that someone else was coming into the house at night, and maybe they were going through a part of the house uncovered by the camera. Their noise wasn’t captured as the cameras of that time were probably not that developed. This to me makes more sense, than believing it as a ghost story.

The Vanishing Footsteps

Age: 19

Context: I interviewed my best friend who is currently attending school in Ohio. When we were catching up she told me about a strange incident that happened a month before when she was walking home at night. 

The story:

It was late at night, around 12 when I was walking back to my dorm after a long chemistry lab. I had headphones on. While walking down this street I could’ve sworn I heard someone walking behind me. I quickly took them off and checked to see if someone was there. Maybe it was my own feet I’m hearing. The footsteps I had heard immediately stopped. I was like okay cool just me. I go back to walking this time without my headphones on and I hear them again, this time sounding louder and louder. So I stop again, just to confirm to myself, really that I’m just hearing things. This time when I stop I still hear them. And they’re getting closer. I look all over the place, and I can still hear them, but I can’t see anyone. I get a bit freaked out, so I start walking faster. I still hear them walking behind me and it’s like they’re gaining on me. Eventually I stop and I wonder if I can let whatever this is pass so I stop. When I stop I can physically hear them next to me then go in front of me. I looked across the street and all over the place wondering if maybe that was an echo of some kind. I walked down the street many times before, but maybe this time for whatever reason it had just echoed strangely. But no, I didn’t see anyone anywhere near me. After that it seemed to promptly vanish. 

Informant’s view: She thinks that it might have been a ghost or some sort of spirit. All the obvious explanations didn’t explain away the footsteps she heard so she’s open to the possibility of other worldly things.  

My view: I think this might have been a case of serious sleep deprivation. I know around that time period she was going through midterms and not getting enough sleep. She’s never had an incident like this but I feel like this was her brain having a freakout after having to work so hard with no rest.