Midnight Stories: A feeling of dread  

About Midnight Stories: October is the month of spooks and things that go bump in the night, so what better than a series of scary stories to get you in the mood for Halloween? Read on.

My younger brother told me of an incident (this was in the 80s) when he, my diko and my father were getting some air outside our gates one night and three clerks who had just finished doing overtime work at the nearby budget ministry (two females and a male) ran up to them.

 

The two women clung to their necks sobbing uncontrollably and it would take my father several minutes to draw the story out of them.

 

It seems the two young ladies saw a woman standing by the side of the road as they walked past and started teasing their male companion that he was tarrying to get a better look at her.

 

Only when the young man turned to look at the woman in question did he notice that her feet were not touching the ground. He started running, with the two women bringing up the rear, as it took them some time to realize the reason.

 

Had I known about this incident sooner, I would have solved the puzzle that had been bugging me for years.

 

I used have a feeling of utter desolation descend on you while you’re in the shower—like you want to break into big, fat choking sobs. I thought it was normal, that everybody felt the same thing. 

 

It usually went away by the time I toweled myself dry, but it happened every time I used my parents’ bathroom when I was in college.

 

Also, when I dozed off while studying in my parents’ bed (it’s right beside the telephone and I often needed to call up a classmate to ask about one thing or another when I did my assignments) during the daytime—I’d experience sleep paralysis. That’s when you’re awake but can’t open your eyes or move a muscle so you lie there in a panic, struggling, until you either fall back to sleep or abruptly jerk awake. 

 

Mexicans use a phrase to describe it subirse el muerto or “a dead body climbed on top of me,” because that’s how it feels when you’re in the throes of it—like you have someone on top of you that you can’t dislodge.

 

Only when I reviewed the events of the last 30 or so years and compared notes with my siblings was I able to put two and two together: was it merely sleep paralysis I’d experienced then, or something else entirely?

 

Here’s what made me ponder that: I wasn’t manic-depressive; I was a happy soul, although I liked being alone once in a while to write my poetry and contemplate the universe.

 

It could also have been sleep deprivation because I was a working student at the time and split my waking hours between a newspaper job and a full load at school that required a lot of late-night scriptwriting.

 

But, no, taking stock of things after the first few incidents, I figured the episodes had likely more to do with the location of their occurrence.

 

My parents’ bathroom and bedroom are situated over the general area where an unused well used to be. A well where a young girl fell to her death and would remain undiscovered until the smell of decay alerted stray dogs, then passersby, to where her broken body lay. She was waylaid by three men as she walked to her church confirmation in all her white finery and had fallen into the abandoned well as she was escaping their clutches. 

 

I’d seen her phosphorescent face in our room once. Heard her soft breathing at another—the girl whose apparition haunted our house and the streets close by.

 

The backstory was that she lived in a shanty community known as Manukan whose dwellers used a shortcut that cut through our property.

 

Manukan residents who later became my younger brother’s drinking buddies   told him they often wondered why our family bought the lot we lived on, because they knew it to be haunted and no one in those parts would think of building a house there.

 

The lot’s owner—the late Justo Uro, Sr.—told my brothers he had warned my father of the stories before he sold him the land, but that my father supposedly dismissed the talk as nothing more than urban legend.

 

We sold our house in the late 80s, although on the surface, it stands unchanged to this day (except for a boutique that now stands in front of it).

 

The lot beside it, however, remains empty and overgrown with weeds and as far as I know, the phantom girl still visits her old haunts there. 

 

Postscript: In a chance conversation with parapsychologist and columnist Jaime T. Licauco in the early 1990s, I mentioned these episodes to him and he said they happened because I was a reluctant medium.

 

Could I have been channeling the spirit of the dead girl?

 

She is probably still earth-bound after all these years due to the circumstances of her death, an alma perdido. — VC, GMA News