As a child, Mally only encountered death through tales shared by her family and friends; yarns of tragic people meeting their untimely demise only to return as vengeful spectres. Perhaps these ghost stories were what sparked her interest in all things macabre and spooky. Halloween was a wonderful and cherished time of year, not just because of the free candy, but also the abundance of dark and dazzling imagery of witches and monsters. Mally enjoyed movies and TV shows about ghastly ghouls and zombies. But the stories still drew in her most of all.

Her friends and classmates would sometimes go a step further and speak of their own brushes with the paranormal. They recounted experiences with ghosts, sometimes with glee and excitement, other times with a stoic sombreness. Mally had fun listening to these stories but they made her too scared to sleep in the dark. She preferred to keep these spooky things as an impersonal force in her life. But then a gruesome event happened in her community.

• Tags: fiction, Issue 38, Jennifer Luangphonh, Laos