Horror Stories for the Secretly Curious

Horror Stories for the Secretly Curious

When you’re frightened but still really curious.

Stories Oculus Ouijia: Origin of Evil The Autopsy of Jane Doe A Tale of Two Sisters Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs The Others The Maid

Oculus

The film takes place in two different times: the present and 11 years earlier. The two plot lines are told in parallel through flashbacks with many cuts occurring between corresponding actions in each time frame. In 2002, software engineer Alan Russell moves into a new house with his wife Marie, 10-year-old son Tim, and 12-yearold daughter Kaylie. Alan purchases an antique mirror to decorate his office. Unbeknownst to them, the mirror is malevolent and supernaturally induces hallucinations in both adults; Marie is haunted by visions of her own body decaying, while Alan is seduced by a ghostly woman named Marisol, who has mirrors in place of eyes.

Over time, the parents become psychotic; Alan increasingly isolates himself in his office, and Marie becomes withdrawn and paranoid.

During the same period, all of the plants in the house die, and the family dog disappears after being shut in the office with the mirror.

After Kaylie sees Alan interact with Marisol, she tells her mother.

Marie and her husband fight, and one night while he’s away, she sees herself bleeding from an old scar in the mirror. She goes insane and attempts to kill her children but Alan overpowers her and later says the children are not to visit their mother who is unwell. When the family runs out of food, the children try to get help from their father. They figure their father is under the influence of the mirror

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and gives the same responses to all Kaylie’s questions, so Kaylie goes to seek help from their mother, despite her father’s warning to not visit her ‘sick’ mother. When she sees how her father has chained her mother to the wall and how her mother acts like an animal, she and Tim attempt to seek help from their neighbors, who disbelieve their stories. Attempting to contact doctors or the authorities, Kaylie discovers that all of her phone calls are answered by the same man, who admonishes her to speak with her father.

One night, Alan unchains Marie, and both parents attack the children.

Marie briefly comes to her senses only to be shot dead by Alan.

The children try to destroy the mirror with golf clubs but fail in the attempt, believing they are hitting the mirror but only hitting the wall.

Alan corners the children in his office but also experiences a moment of lucidity during which he kills himself by using his thumb to force Tim’s finger against the trigger of the gun Tim is pointing at Alan.

Ignoring their father’s last advice to “run” the children see Marisol and various previous victims of the mirror appear as horrific ghosts.

The police arrive and take Tim into custody. Before the siblings are separated, they promise to reunite as adults and destroy the mirror.

As Tim is taken away in the back of a squad car he sees the ghosts of his parents watching him from the house.

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Oculus

Eleven years later, Tim is discharged from a psychiatric hospital, having come to believe that there were no supernatural events involved in his parents’ deaths. Kaylie, meanwhile, has spent most of her young adulthood researching the history of the mirror. Using her position as an employee of an auction house, Kaylie obtains access to the mirror and has it transported to the family home where she places it in a room filled with surveillance cameras and a “kill switch”—an anchor weighted to the ceiling and set to a timer. Kaylie intends to destroy the mirror but first wants to document its powers, prove its supernatural nature, and thus vindicate her family.

Tim joins Kaylie at the house, and after Kaylie presents much of her research about deaths associated with the mirror’s owners, he attempts to convince her that she’s mistaking correlation with causation in an attempt to rationalize their parents’ deaths as being caused by an external force. The siblings argue, and while perceiving no gaps in their conversation, they notice the houseplants begin to wilt, and upon reviewing camera footage they see themselves having performed complex actions they have no recollection of. Tim finally accepts that the mirror has some diabolical power and attempts to escape the house with Kaylie, only for the pair to be repeatedly

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Oculus

drawn back by the mirror’s influence. They try to call the police, but are only able to reach the same voice who spoke to them on the phone as children. Seeing a hallucination of her deceased mother Kaylie stabs it in the neck with a plate shard only for her to see her fiancé stabbed in the same place and quickly die. Kaylie is convinced it can’t be her, because when she looked at the floor through her phone’s video camera there were no plate shards visible: no plate implies no stabbing. However, when she looks at the corpse through her phone camera she sees his corpse and is then convinced she has killed him. The pair begin to hallucinate and experience visions of everyone killed by the mirror. Apparently fed up, Tim activates the kill switch, which causes the anchor to descend and fatally impale a mirror-obscured adult Kaylie whom Tim then sees. The police arrive and arrest a hysterical Tim, just as they had arrested him when he was younger. As both a boy and adult, Tim claims the mirror is responsible. As he is taken away, the older Tim sees Kaylie’s ghost in the house with his parents and remembers their promise that they will destroy the mirror no matter what.

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Oculus

Kaylie Russell:

Hello again.

You must be hungry.

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Oculus

Kaylie’s hallucination that she bit into a lightbulb instead of her apple.

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Ouija: Origin of Evil Widow named Alice Zander works out of her suburban home as a spiritual medium, accompanied by her daughters, 15-year-old Paulina “Lina” and 9-year old Doris.

Although they stage the acts, Alice’s real intent is to help people move on. The family is still reeling over the recent death of Roger, Alice’s husband and the kids’ father. After Lina suggests that Alice incorporate a Ouija board into her readings, Alice does so, and unknowingly contacts a spirit named Marcus that begins to possess Doris. This is breaking one of the three rules: never play alone, never play in a graveyard, and always say goodbye.

Alice receives a foreclosure note, meaning they may lose their house.

Doris contacts the board for help, believing she is communicating with her dead father, and the spirit leads her to a secret compartment behind the basement wall containing a pouch of cash. Doris, breaking another of the three rules, forgets to say goodbye to the spirits.

When she gives the money to her mother, the family has a Ouija session, believing they can contact Roger. When the board answers a question only Roger would know the answer to, a thrilled Alice begins believing that they are in contact with her dead husband.

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Soon, Doris becomes possessed by a shadowy spirit. Lina, who is becoming disturbed by the changes in her sister, finds papers written

by Doris in fluent Polish, a language she does not know, and brings them to Father Tom to translate. Troubled, Father Tom visits them for a Ouija session under the pretense of contacting his dead wife Gloria.

Although the session appears to be successful, Father Tom later explains to Alice and Lina that Doris did not contact Gloria. Instead, for every question he asked, she read his thoughts and repeated the answers he was thinking in his mind. He reveals that the pages are entries written by a Polish immigrant named Marcus, who was taken captive during World War II by a sadistic doctor who conducted experiments on him and other captives inside the house’s basement.

These spirits knew answers that only Roger would know because they have been watching the family since the day they moved in.

Meanwhile, Doris kills Lina’s boyfriend Mikey and she hangs his body. Upon seeing this, Father Tom, Alice, and Lina burn the Ouija board downstairs. When Father Tom discovers skeletal remains in the basement wall, they realize that they have been using the Ouija board in a graveyard all this time. Father Tom finds the secret room where the experiments were conducted, and is possessed by the spirits.

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Doris:

Who are you?

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He attacks Alice and Lina, but momentarily seizes clarity, only to be killed by Doris. Alice is captured, while Roger’s spirit carries an unconscious Lina to her bed. Lina wakes up and recalls an earlier moment where her doll’s mouth was stitched by her father’s spirit “to shut out the voices”, realizing that she must sew Doris’ mouth shut to quiet the spirits’ voices and stop the evil. During the struggle, she successfully sews Doris’ mouth shut and Doris dies, reuniting with her father. After this, Lina is temporarily possessed and stabs Alice.

While dying, Alice sees Roger and Doris together, and happily joins them, leaving behind a sobbing Lina.

Two months later, Lina remains committed in a mental hospital for the suspected murder of her mother. She is interviewed by a doctor and is unable to say what happened to Doris’ body, but states that she, Lina, will never be alone again. She tries summoning her sister inside her cell and the doctor watches, unbeknownst that the possessed Doris skitters across the ceiling towards him.

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Doris being possessed by the evil entity.

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Lina having a nightmare that her mouth is sewn shut.

Doris in a “channel� state.

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe An unidentified corpse of a woman is found half-buried in the basement of a house where a bloody and bizarre homicide has occurred. One of the police officers concludes that there are no signs of forced entry and the victims seemed to be trying to escape the house instead.

Small-town coroner Tommy Tilden and his son Austin, a medical technician who assists him, have just finished the autopsy of a burned corpse when Austin’s girlfriend, Emma, arrives and gets curious about the bodies in the morgue. When she notices a bell tied to the ankle of a dead body, Tommy explains to her that, in the past, the bells were used to signal if someone was actually just in a comatose state instead of really dead. The sheriff arrives with the mysterious body and tells Tommy that he needs the cause of death (COD) by morning.

Austin decides to help his dad instead of going to the theater with Emma, but asks her to come back later. It’s also revealed that Austin plans to leave to another city with his girlfriend, as he dislikes the job and he only does it to help his dad.

Since no one knows the body’s identity and its fingerprints are not on police records, they refer to her as Jane Doe. Austin and Tommy start

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the autopsy with an external examination of the corpse, which has no visible signs of trauma and no scars or marks. They discover that her eyes are cloudy, which is something that usually only happens to bodies that have been dead for a few days, yet the corpse looks fresh. They find that her wrist and ankle bones are shattered without any outward signs of injury. They extract from her nails and hair a kind of peat that is only naturally found in the northern U.S. They also discover that her tongue has been non-surgically removed and one of her teeth is missing. Tommy proceeds to examine her vagina and concludes that it was mutilated.

They begin the internal examination as the radio they listen to starts to randomly switch channels by itself. When Tommy cuts her chest open, the corpse bleeds profusely, something that usually only happens to fresh corpses. Tommy attributes her abnormally small waist to the use of a corset, which were commonly worn by women in the past. Austin discovers that the blood he stored in the freezer strangely started to leak. Examination of her lungs reveals that they are severely blackened, which is consistent with someone who has suffered third-degree burns. Her internal organs reveal numerous cuts and scar tissue, likely from repeated stabbing. Tommy is accidentally

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

hurt by the corpse while he tries to separate its skin.

Austin hears a sound outside the examination room and sees a standing figure in a mirror, but finds nothing once he turns around.

He then discovers that the sound is coming from an airshaft; where he finds their cat, Stanley, badly hurt and bleeding in the vent.

Tommy kills Stanley out of mercy and burns his body in the cremation furnace. Back in the examination room, they find Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium) in Jane Doe’s stomach, a paralyzing agent that, again, is only found in the north of the country. Austin hears over the radio about a strong storm coming and wants to leave. Tommy states that he will finish what he started, and Austin concurs.

Later, Tommy finds her missing tooth wrapped in a piece of cloth in her stomach. They find Roman numerals, letters, and a drawing on the cloth. When Tommy finally separates the skin on her chest from the body, they find similar symbols on the inside of her skin. All the lights in the room suddenly explode. During the confusion, they see that the storage chambers are empty, and that the three corpses inside them are missing. They decide to leave, but the elevator does not work and something is blocking the exit door. Tommy tries to call the sheriff using a landline, but the connection is disrupted.

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

They hear a bell in the hallway, presumably from the movement of now living corpses, and the office door violently starts to bang, only to suddenly stop.

Austin says that everything is caused by the mysterious body. Tommy is attacked in the bathroom by an unseen figure. He has bruises on his body but only saw the attacker’s grey eyes. They decide to burn Jane Doe’s body in the cremation furnace, but the door to the autopsy room locks on its own, trapping them inside. Austin breaks a hole in it with an axe and, through the hole, sees one of the living corpses. They then choose to burn her in the examination room, but the fire spreads wildly and burns the camera that was recording the autopsy. They manage to put out the fire using a fire extinguisher, but the body is not burned at all. The elevator turns back on and they rush to get in; however, the door does not close completely. In the ensuing chaos, Tommy uses an axe to attack the living corpse that appeared to be chasing them, but it turns out to be Emma.

Emma’s death from the injury devastates Austin and leaves Tommy ridden with guilt.

Austin says that the corpse has been stopping them finding out the truth, and as they decide to go back into the examination room the

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

cremation furnace produces smoke which makes them unable to see.

Tommy is violently attacked in the smoke. However, they eventually make it into the examination room, and Austin opens her skull. The brain tissue cells turn out to still be active, to the surprise of both of them. Tommy deduces that some mysterious force is keeping her alive. Austin folds the piece of cloth and discovers the name of a passage from the Bible and that the Roman numerals read 1693.

Tommy finds the corresponding passage in the Bible, Leviticus 20:27, that condemns witches. Austin concludes that she must be a witch who died during the Salem trials, since all of the evidence adds up. Tommy rebuts this by stating that those women were not actually witches, it was only a case of mass hysteria, and that her injuries are not similar to the methods used during the trials. He then says that probably the very things that were done to her made her a witch instead and that now she wants revenge. Tommy then sacrifices himself to the witch, in the hope that she will not harm Austin. The witch’s body begins to heal as Tommy suffers the same horrific injuries she suffered. Austin is forced to kill his father in order to end his misery. The lights and radio promptly come back on. Austin hears the sheriff calling to him from outside the building, and runs up the stairs to meet him. The voice turns out to be another hallucination. Austin turns around to see his

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

dead father standing next to him. Startled, he falls backward over the railing and dies from his injuries.

The police arrive the next morning. The radio announces the fourth sunny day in a row, indicating that the previous night’s storm and all of the incidents only happened in Tommy and Austin’s imagination, controlled by the witch. A police officer notices no signs of forced entry and is again confused by another inexplicable crime scene.

The Jane Doe body is then transported to another county. The last glimpse of her reveals a twitch of her big toe, her very first movement, accompanied by the sound of a bell.

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

The dead body of Jane Doe.

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The Autopsy of Jane Doe

“Let the sun shine in~”

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A Tale of Two Sisters A teenage girl, Su-mi, is being treated for shock and psychosis in a mental institution. The doctor questions her about the day that led her to be institutionalised but she refuses to answer. Later, Su-mi returns home to her family’s secluded estate in the countryside with her father and her younger sister Su-yeon. At a family dinner, their cold and distant stepmother, Eun-joo, who constantly requires medication after every meal, announces that their uncle and his wife will arrive tomorrow night for a dinner party. The sisters are disappointed with the announcement and leave the dinner table.

Later in the night, Eun-joo sleeps with the father but he becomes uncomfortable and sleeps in the living room downstairs. Su-yeon hears strange noises in her bedroom and goes to Su-mi for protection.

However, Su-mi experiences a terrifying nightmare where the ghost of her biological mother climbs on top of her bed with blood pouring down her legs. Afterwards, all of the women in the family discover that their periods have occurred at the same time.

The next day, Su-mi finds several family photos, which reveal that her father and Eun-joo once worked together and that her stepmother was formerly an in-home nurse for her late terminally ill biological mother.

Su-mi discovers bruises on her sister’s arms and angrily confronts

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Eun-joo about it. At night, their uncle and his wife attend the dinner party and Eun-joo tells bizarre stories, much to the bewilderment of the other guests. Suddenly, the uncle’s wife suffers a violent seizure and upon recovering, she tells her husband that she witnessed a ghost of a young girl lying beneath the kitchen sink. Eun-joo attempts to search for the ghost but a disfigured hand suddenly reaches out from below the sink and latches onto her arm.

After finding out that her pet bird has been killed, Eun-joo enters Suyeon’s room and discovers another dead bird, along with defaced family photos of herself. She cruelly locks Su-yeon in the closet and refuses to free her until she apologises. Su-mi eventually releases her sister and she tearfully apologises that she didn’t hear her pleas in time. Su-mi’s father blames her for the family’s recent trauma, but she retorts that Eun-joo is to blame for abusing Su-yeon. The father tells her that Su-yeon is dead, bewildering the distressed Su-mi.

The next morning, after the father leaves the house to arrange Sumi’s readmission to the mental institution, Eun-joo is seen dragging a bloodied sack throughout the hallways of the house and whips it.

After discovering the trail of blood, Su-mi believes that Su-yeon is inside the sack and attempts to open it with a pair of scissors. Eun-joo

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A Tale of Two Sister

catches her and attempts to scald her with boiling water but Su-mi stabs her in the hand with scissors. Su-mi’s head is later forcibly smashed onto a nearby medicine cabinet by Eun-joo, who later knocks her down unconscious. Upon recovering, Eun-joo gravely reminds her that she won’t be able to forget her recent trauma as she tries to finish her off with a garden statue. The father arrives home and takes the injured Su-mi to a different room as he provides the seemingly remorseful Eun-joo with medication.

It is ultimately revealed that Su-mi and her father were alone in the house the entire time and the characters of Su-yeon and Eun-joo were manifestations of her dissociative identity disorder. Su-mi has simultaneously switched character “modes” between herself and Eun-joo and she also hallucinates Su-yeon being there as a result of not being able to accept her death a long time ago. In her “Eun-joo mode”, Su-mi imagines scenarios where she impersonates Eun-joo “abusing Su-yeon” but in reality injures herself to “act” out these scenarios. The bloodied sack is revealed to not be bloody at all and instead contains a porcelain doll, which Su-mi whips in her “Eun-joo” mode.

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A Tale of Two Sisters

The father and the real Eun-joo arrive and send Su-mi back to the mental institution. Eun-joo attempts to reconcile her relationship with Su-mi, which was implied to have been dysfunctional in the past, but Su-mi rejects her advances. Eun-joo and the father return home and whilst being in the kitchen alone at night, she hears strange footsteps entering Su-yeon’s former bedroom. She enters the room to investigate the source of the footsteps but the lights suddenly black out and the door is closed shut by an unseen force. The closet in the room suddenly opens by itself, where Eun-joo accidentally disturbs the ghost of either the biological mother or Su-yeon. The ghost proceeds to crawl out of the closet and towards Eun-joo and her screams could be heard outside the house, indicating that she has been killed by the ghost. It is left unknown whether the events actually occurred or were part of Su-mi’s delusions.

Flashbacks eventually reveal the day that led Su-mi to be institutionalised. The father and Eun-joo, who was still the in-home of Su-mi and Su-yeon’s terminally ill biological mother, arrive home after an apparent engagement. This causes both sisters to storm off to their bedrooms with disappointment. Su-yeon discovers her

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A Tale of Two Sister

biological mother in her room, who appears to be depressed by the recent engagement. She later discovers that her biologcal mother had hung herself in the closet and attempts to revive her lifeless body, causing the closet to collapse on top of her and slowly crush her to death. Eun-joo goes upstairs and decides to help the dying Su-yeon at the last minute but encounters Su-mi, who engages in a heated confrontation with her. Eun-joo ultimately decides to leave Su-yeon for dead and gravely reminds Su-mi that she’ll “later regret this moment� as Su-mi leaves the house, unaware of the events that have recently occurred.

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A Tale of Two Sisters

Su-mi seeing her mother as a ghost.

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Whispering Corridors 3: Wishing Stairs Yun Jin-sung and Kim So-hee’s life are best friends studying ballet at an all-girls art school, the latter usually showing a lot of affection towards the former. However, their friendship soon turns sour when they find themselves competing for a single spot in a Russian ballet school. At an art exhibit within the school, Jin-sung learns from an odd, near obese student named Eom Hye-ju (Jo An), of an old legend that if a person climbs the twenty eight steps leading up to the school’s dormitory, counting each step aloud, and finds a twenty ninth, then a fox spirit will appear, and grant that person’s wish.

Curious, Jin-sung does climb the stairs and comes across the twenty ninth, happily wishing to gain the spot. To her surprise and anger later on, So-hee is selected instead. When So-hee confronts her on this, Jin-sung declares her hatred towards her best friend and accidentally sends the former down a flight of stairs during a scuffle.

So-hee is left unconsciousness and hospitalized.

Jin-sung visits So-hee in the hospital and learns indirectly that she is no longer able to study ballet during an argument with her mother due to her injuries from the fall. Jin-sung tries to apologize towards her friend for what happened, but receives no reply and leaves feeling guilty. During the next day, she learns from another student in class that So-hee had committed suicide by jumping out of her

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hospital room to her death, causing her to faint as a result. As the fight between the two was witnessed by several other girls, Jin-sung is now seen down upon by many of the student body, who believe that she intentionally pushed So-hee down the flight of stairs out of jealousy. As Jin-sung’s wish comes true in which she gets the spot for the ballet school, her fellow students throw her a surprise party for it, but still treat her coldly by throwing a cake for her into her face.

Affected greatly by So-hee’s death, as she was the only girl to treat her with kindness, Hye-ju attempts to keep So-hee’s belongings for herself, but is ridiculed by other students for it, mainly Han Yun-ji (Park Ji-yeon), a girl who enjoys bullying Hye-ju over her weight.

Later on, she climbs the steps outside the dormitory too, and is able to wish for So-hee to come back. While So-hee does indeed return, she returns as a twisted spirit who initially frightens Hye-ju, but soon gains her trust by telling her she had liked her a lot and convinces her to dye her hair black. However, So-hee soon possesses her.

As Yun-ji has finished up a sculpting project in a storage room within the school’s basement, she is soon confronted by the possessed Hye-ju and is made fun of by smelling weird. The possessed Hyeju questions as to why she must be always be bullied by her, then

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Wishing Stairs

So-hee’s bleeding foot while dancing.

So-hee jumped to her death at the hospital, in a ballerina-like pose.

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Wishing Stairs

proceeds to stab Yun-ji to death with a pair of scissors. As Jin-Sung enters the room to gather supplies, she is encountered by Hye-ju as well, who tries to convince her that she is So-hee. After coming across Yun-ji’s corpse, Jin-sung is convinced that Hye-ju is insane and tries to get away from her, knocking over a can of oil. After hearing Sohee’s voice in Hye-ju stating that their friendship will end, Jin-sung is able to leave. The spirit of So-hee then apparently makes Hye-ju light a match and toss it over the spilled oil, leaving the troubled girl to perish within the growing flames.

While Jin-sung is preparing to leave for the ballet school, she is again haunted by So-hee within her dorm room and throughout the school several times. Unable to endure the spirit’s presence any further, she tries to climb the stairs again in order to wish her away. Before she could reach the top, So-hee calls out to her, then holds her arms around her stomach as Jin-sung confesses that she didn’t hate her and simply wanted to be happy. Believing that Jin-sung does not love her as much as the other way around, So-hee states that she want to be with her always and proceeds to crush Jin-sung’s stomach inwards with her arms, killing her. After letting her friend’s now-lifeless body fall to the bottom of the stairs, the spirit vanishes.

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Wishing Stairs

Some time later, a new girl moves into the same dorm room that Jinsung once occupied. As she moves her stuff around, a picture with Jin-sung and So-hee on it is seen on the floor of the room. Within it, So-hee’s irises on her eyes disappear, implying that she still remains.

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Wishing Stairs

Jin-sung making a wish on the wishing stairs.

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The Others

Grace Stewart is a devout Roman Catholic mother who lives with her two young children in a remote country house in the British Crown Dependency of Jersey, The Channel Islands in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The year is 1945. The children, Anne and Nicholas, have an uncommon disease, Xeroderma Pigmentosum characterized by photosensitivity, so their lives are structured around a series of complex rules to protect them from inadvertent exposure to sunlight. The most amount of light that the children can withstand is no more than the lantern. The arrival of three servants at the house—ageing Mrs. Bertha Mills, elderly gardener Edmund Tuttle, and a mute girl named Lydia—coincides with a number of odd events, and Grace begins to fear there are unknown others in the house. The house has no electricity and Grace explains that after exiting one room, the door must be locked behind to contain the light. Grace also explains that her last servants left the house without collecting their last pay check. When the children are introduced to their new nanny, Anne mentions that after the departure of the last servants, ‘mummy went mad’. Her brother Nicholas however fails to agree and argues that ‘nothing happened’. Grace explains to Mrs Mills that she does not believe in stories such as ghosts and requests Mrs Mills not to trust everything that the children say to her. She questions why the servants have arrived when her advert

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for home help was never published as it was not picked up by the postman. Mrs Mills then divulges that she worked in this house many years ago and was simply asking by coincidence if help was needed.

Initially Grace hears a child crying which Anne mentions is Victor.

She mentions that he has a father who is a pianist and that they are viewing the house. Victor cries as he does not wish to live in this house but has to do so. He claims that the house is his. Anne asks where the boy is now and notices that the door has been opened after which she blames the servants for leaving the door open which they deny. At night, Anne claims that Victor keeps opening the curtains and begins to speak to him. Nicholas feels that his sister is trying to frighten him by putting on a fake voice and screams for his mother.

When Anne asks Victor to touch her brother to convince him, he does.

Anne is punished by Grace for the next three days. She mentions to Mrs Mills that the Pastor has not visited the house in a long while and that Lydia makes far too much noise and asks her to tell her to stop doing so. However, then Grace notices Lydia in the garden, as the noise continues in the house she asks Anne who reiterates her story that their are people in the house. Grace enters a bedroom where she can hear disembodied voices and feels someone exit the room.

Anne claims that they all brushed past her and scattered in various

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The Others

parts of the house. Anne draws pictures of four people she has seen in the house numerous times: a man, woman, a boy called Victor, and an old woman. Grace orders the house to be searched. Grace finds a 19th-century “book of the dead�, an album of mourning portrait photos of deceased family members from a previous generation, with some missing pages. Grace asks for the book to be removed from the house. Later she asks Mrs Mills about when she last worked in the house. Mrs Mills explains that her previous employers in the house moved to England. Grace also confides that she has not heard from her parents since the beginning of the war. Bertha Mills says that they were evacuated due to the tuberculosis outbreak. When asked

by Grace the reason for her muteness, Mrs Mills claims that one day she stopped talking but does not divulge the reason for her becoming mute. Grace breaks down when asked by her children why their father has not returned home.

In the middle of the night, she hears the piano playing in the house, which she does not approve of as she prizes her silence. However, when entering the piano room, it stops playing. Despite closing the piano lid and locking it the piano is opened up again. The door shuts onto her and is locked from the inside as she leaves the room. She is then convinced that the house may be haunted which Mrs Mills

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The Others

strengthens with the idea that the world of the dead does get mixed up with the world of the living. Convinced that something unholy is in the house, she runs out into the fog in search of the local priest to bless the house. Mrs Mills tries to stop her by telling her that the priest will come round himself. Before leaving anyway, Grace instructs Mr Tuttle to check the grounds for gravestones as she remembers that there was a small cemetery in the garden and to see if there was a family buried there who had a little boy named Victor.

Meanwhile, Mr. Tuttle is covering gravestones under autumn leaves, under the orders of Mrs Mills, who comments ‘Now she thinks the house is haunted’.

Outside, Grace discovers her husband Charles (Christopher Eccleston), whom she thought had been killed in the war, and brings him back to the house. He greets his children after a long period of absence.

Charles is distant during the short time he spends there, and Mrs. Mills says, ”I do not think he knows where he is.” He does not have dinner with the family and prefers to lay in bed. At the dinner table, Anne mentions the ‘intruders’ again. She is sent away from the table when Grace tells her off. Mrs Mills tells Anne that she believes in Anne’s stories and that one day, Grace will see the intruders too and that there are going to be some ‘big surprises’ soon. She speaks to Mr

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The Others

Tuttle about how now Grace is acting as if nothing has happened and that she does not feel that her husband ‘suspects a thing’.

Grace cries as her husband does not engage with her lovingly and remains distant. During this time, Grace attacks an elderly looking woman dressed up in her daughter’s first holy communion dress. She is frightened by the face she sees underneath the veil. However, she finds that she has actually attacked her daughter when she rips off the veil. Anne brands Grace as wicked and retreats back to her father.

Mrs. Mills tells Grace to calm down and that she knows what needs to be done, to which Grace takes offence. Grace does not take the anti-migraine pills offered by Mrs Mills. Charles makes reference to what happened ‘that day’ by asking Grace outright. Grace explains that she does not know what happened that day. She says that the servants left without giving notice and that without her husband there, she says that she could not leave the house and she did not know what came over her. Anne tells Nicholas that Grace went mad, the way that she did ‘that day’, Nicholas denies recollection of that day.

Charles says he must leave for the front even though Grace claims that the war is now over. She tells Charles that she thinks that Charles wanted to leave her. Charles weeps as he hears this and they make love. The next morning Grace wakes to find him gone again.

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The Others

That same morning, Grace hears the children’s screams: all of the curtains in the house have disappeared or have been taken down by the intruders, as Anne previously had said they might. Grace moves them into a room covered with a blanket and blocks out the light with a large blackboard. Grace demands to know where the curtains are from the servants. The servants query how does Grace know that the daylight will kill her children and that the condition could have cleared up by itself. When Grace sees the servants are not alarmed by this, she accuses them of being involved and banishes them from the house after suggesting that the servants are trying to frighten her and the children out of the house so that they can occupy the house themselves.

After leaving, an annoyed Mrs Mills asks Mr Tuttle to start to uncover the gravestones. That night, as Grace searches the house for the curtains, Anne and Nicholas sneak outside to find their father. Anne discovers the graveyard, which the servants have uncovered, and realizes that these are, in fact, the servants’ graves. At the same time, Grace finds a torn out photograph from the book of the dead and is horrified to see it is of the three servants. The servants appear and try to speak to the children.

Anne recognises that they are ghosts and tells Nicholas not to speak to them and both children run away from them back to the house. The

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ghost servants follow the children back to the house. Grace has the children hide upstairs, while Mrs Mills reveals that the three servants died of tuberculosis more than 50 years ago. Grace locks herself and the children in the house and tells the children to hide upstairs in the bedroom together. Mrs Mills tells her that she has been trying to explain to her about the new situation in the house and that the living and the dead should learn to live together. Grace pleads for them to leave them in peace. Mrs Mills asks what will she do about the intruders that are in the house with them who took down the curtains and that sooner or later they will find them as they are waiting for them. Hearing the children scream upstairs as they face one of the intruders, previously described as an elderly lady, Mrs Mills tells Grace to go upstairs and talk to the intruders.

Grace walks upstairs to the bedroom with her rosary beads muttering the Lord’s prayer. There, she discovers that the old woman whom Anne had described is acting as a medium in a séance with Victor’s parents, talking to Anne. The medium asks the children to speak to her. She asks what happened to Anne and Nicholas. As the children answer, their answers are written down which is read out by another gentlemen. It is revealed that the children were killed by their mother by being smothered by a pillow (i.e. the day ‘mummy went mad’).

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Grace found the photo of her dead servants in sleeping positions.

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The children, shocked by the revelation that they are now deceased, begin to scream that they are not dead. In a frenzy of denial, Grace shakes the séance table, and rips the papers on which the medium has been writing. Victor’s family sees only the table shaking and the paper being ripped. In using this supernatural incident as proof that they are not welcome in the house and should leave, Victor’s mother convinces her husband to leave this house with their son, which he agrees to do so.

Grace and the children huddle together in shock in the darkened school room, her memories return to her: stricken with grief for her missing husband, isolated by the children’s condition and the servants leaving her, Grace lost her mind and smothered her children with a pillow. Realizing what she had done, she shot herself. When she then “awoke” and heard her children’s laughter, she assumed God had granted her family a second chance at life. Grace questions where they are now if not alive. Mrs Mills explains that this is exactly what Lydia said when she realised that she and the servants had died; after which, out of shock, she never spoke in the afterlife again. Anne asks if they are in Limbo; Grace is no longer sure despite her Catholic teachings.

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Mrs. Mills tells Grace that they will learn to get along with the intruders who periodically come to the house, that sometimes they will notice them and sometimes they will not. The children find they are no longer photosensitive (as they are no longer living), and for the first time, they can enjoy playing in the sunlight. Victor’s family, unable to rid the house of its former occupants’ spirits, drive away as Grace and the children watch. Although the property is again put up for sale, Grace and the children are firm that “this house is ours,” and “no one can make us leave this house.”

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The Maid

During the Chinese Seventh Month, the gates of hell open and spiritual are set loose upon the unsuspecting world. Hailing from a small village in the Philippines, 18-year-old Rosa Dimaano arrives in Singapore on the first day of the Seventh Month to work as a domestic maid. She urgently needs money to save her younger brother who is ill back home. Her employers, the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Teo, appear kindhearted and sympathetic. Their mentally handicapped son Ah Soon also takes to Rosa immediately.

Between cleaning house and helping the Teos out at their Teochew opera workplace, things start going seriously amiss. Rosa glimpses strange apparitions at night and also has vivid nightmares. She finds out that there was a maid two years before her called Esther. She apparently has the same good relationship with Ah Soon as she does. That is when Rosa begins to suspect things are seriously wrong.

As she explores around some of the shady areas of the house, she discovers the burnt corpse of Esther, the previous maid hidden in a concealed drum and through a ghostly vision that Esther’s spirit shows her realizes that Esther was playing with Ah Soon in his room two years ago on that same day of the Ghost Festival when he suddenly, though unintentionally raped her on the bed. When the

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parents witnessed this, they prevented Esther from calling police so Mr. Teo beat her to the ground, bundled her up and poured oil all over her before setting her on fire, burning her to death.

Frightened by the vision, Rosa tries to escape but gets abducted and double-crossed when she is suddenly confronted by Ah Soon. She quickly finds out that Ah Soon is also a ghost himself when she tries to stab him only to realize that the man would not show a scar or any visible wound. In the past, Ah Soon committed suicide shortly after the death of Esther but instead of passing to the afterlife, he chose to return to the house to find the spirit of Esther, whom he was in love with. From behind her, Mr. Teo knocks Rosa unconscious and ties her up. When Rosa awakens, she is told by Mrs. Teo that the Teo family has long believed that ghosts can also marry and their whole motive for inviting her to Singapore was to sacrifice her so that she would be wed to their dead son. But when they try to hang Rosa, Ah Soon suddenly remembers the way his father brutally murdered Esther the year before and tells his parents that he does not want to see any more deaths in the house.

In a scuffle, Ah Soon accidentally pushes Mr. Teo into an altar, spilling oil on him. Esther’s spirit then ignites the oil, burning him to

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The ghost performing on the chinese opera stage.

Rosa forced to be hung.

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The Maid

death. Rosa manages to break free with the help of Esther’s spirit and tries to escape. Mrs. Teo picks up a knife and tries to finish her off once and for all. Rosa dashes out of the house and crosses the road with Mrs. Teo close behind. Rosa stumbles and falls on the other side of the road, but as Mrs. Teo approaches her menacingly with the knife in hand, an oncoming truck hits Mrs. Teo and kills her instantly. Rosa breathes a sigh of relief as the camera pans over Mrs. Teo’s dead body.

In the final sequence, Rosa is seen heading to the airport to fly back to her hometown on the last day of July when the gates of hell are closing. She takes with her the jar containing Esther’s ashes as she enters the airport while the ghosts of the Teo family watches her disappear beyond the doors.

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Typeset in Fushia Medium.

Illustrations by Vanessa Shemander Hon.