Midnight Stories: My lolo’s sundo

I was three years old when I had my first spooky encounter. At that age, I wasn’t aware that it would be something the adults in our house would consider a horrifying event.

This was around year 2000. In our house in Marikina, my grandfather was already very sick and on dialysis. I couldn’t talk to him anymore and he needed about two to three people to help him when he wanted to stand up.

One night my parents, my tita and my tito were all inside inside my lolo’s room, talking to him and comforting him. I went out to the gate of our house—and saw a faceless figure floating rather than walking towards the house. There were two floating candles on her palms, and her "face" was looking at me.

I did not scream, but I ran inside and into the room where my parents and relatives were. “Daddy…may tao sa labas,” I said. They went outside and saw nobody, so they asked me what the person looked like. When I described the figure's appearance, they were convinced that what I saw wasn’t a human being at all.

Two weeks after the incident, things became clearer to us.

My grandfather died, and my parents said that what I saw was my lolo’s “sundo.”

I still clearly remember what I saw; it’s very vivid to the point that remembering it taunts my third eye to open—something I closed two years ago.

That wasn’t the only incident when I saw a figure I couldn’t explain. And it wasn’t me alone—my mom told me stories as well.

The second time I saw a ghost in our compound was when I was in prep, already aware that I could see things other people couldn't see. It was the gift of the third eye, and on both sides of the family there is someone who has this ability. My uncle (dad’s older brother) has a mole inside his right eye and can see otherworldly things. My cousin (mom’s side) has ESP, although she never tried fully developing it.

One night when my father was having a drink with our neighbor, I went over to call my dad. The second floor of the neighbor's house had a statue of Mary, and as I looked at it I saw a woman passing by with her hair covered in cloth that was the same color as her clothes. I recognized it as a nun's habit. I ran as fast as I could back to our house, then told my dad what I saw after his drinking session.

My mom told me too that even before I was born my grandmother’s house already made her feel creepy things.

One time she was sleeping alone in one of the bedrooms and the lights were off because it was daytime. She awoke to see a hazy black figure hanging in the corner.

After I was born and we were still residing in that house, other things would show up to give us that hair-raising feeling.

One afternoon when I got home from school, my mom and I were having fun playing games on her Nokia. When she shut down the game we saw, reflected on the phone's screen, a pair of hairy feet behind us. What’s worse was that it was there for about thirty seconds, staying until we looked away from the screen.

Postscript by Kelly Vergel B. De Dios: Just recently on Facebook I watched a length of uploaded footage from a hospital's CCTV of what looked like cherubim floating in and out of the intensive care unit of the children's cancer ward.
 
Over this footage were the voices of the hospital's security personnel discussing what was going on and how this was quite common among the children who were the most seriously ill—that nurses and the children's kin would tell stories of angels that came to comfort them while they lay dying and escorted their souls to the next dimension at the moment of death.
 
So it was with Cheska's [the author of the story above] story about her grandfather's "sundo." — BM, GMA News