Midnight Stories: Visitors from beyond

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.

Zamboanga

Not everyone who lived on 21 Marble Street kept an open mind about these visitors.

Others, like my uncle Loren, did not even know he had been haunted until we told him.

Tito Loren was my mother’s elder brother and my ninong. He taught and tutored Chinese students at a local high school, and was asthmatic.

So the early hours of the morning would find him awake, hyperventilating and injecting himself with Hekkels for his bronchial asthma.

Tito Loren lived in a modest two-storey house behind our bungalow. He used to live there with my maternal grandmother Nanay Ester and her sort of caretaker Dorothy, but since Dorothy graduated college and moved away and Nanay’s death, he lived there alone.

One day he complained to my kuya that our dogs Whitey and Spot kept him up half the night fooling with the doormat on his batalan, or the back porch where he and Nanay kept their pots and pans.

Kuya had to inform him that the dogs had died while he was away in Manila – Whitey to parvovirus and Spot put to sleep by the vet shortly after.

Tito Loren would start seeing other beings there as well – notably someone seated on the porch with its knees drawn up to its chest, sobbing into its arms folded across its lap. He never knew whether it was male or female, or the reason for its misery.

But one of his two closest neighbors had deaths in the family: a flight stewardess daughter who died in a plane crash and the youngest girl – a rumored suicide.

Metro Manila

My husband and I rented an apartment in a compound on Scout Limbaga Extension in Quezon City after we were married. There, neighbors –including my husband’s married younger brother – would hear the sound of a horse galloping down the length of the compound late at night.

Right across the fence was a lot full of old fruit trees that belonged to the mother-in-law of a colleague from work. The wife of my husband’s youngest brother believed that one of the trees (an avocado tree whose branches hung over our compound) was the home of a tikbalang – a half-man, half-horse creature of Philippine folklore described as guardians of elemental communities that lived in old trees.

At the television station where I worked, I often stayed overnight to work on mini-documentaries or monitor breaking stories.

In the old newsroom one stormy night, a production assistant and I were eating our take-out dinner in the cameramen’s locker room when we heard a loud thump from one of the locked steel cabinets. Thinking it may have been a battery or a charger that had merely dislodged from its place, we continued with our meal.

The thump was followed by a succession of loud raps, as if something wanted to break out from the locker – so Eany and I ran out of there!

A Christian news manager – who cast out evil spirits as part of his ministry – said there was a portal in that room that he sealed and against which he had stacked the steel lockers. Seems something refused to be bound and was trying to break through to the other side.

One of those shadowy figures tried to manifest itself to me as black smoke forming into the shape of a man while I was desking early one morning. I hurriedly hung up on a caller and ran out of the building. On my way to the covered walk, I saw a colleague (now a news officer) running from her office as well. We compared notes later – I asked her why she ran and she said she room felt oppressive all of a sudden.

Another colleague who now also holds an executive position witnessed another ghost forming on the sofa in our news director’s office one afternoon. I quietly asked her to stand beside me at the door and describe what she saw. Our observations matched – but this one was made of white smoke, not black.

Cagayan de Oro

My kuya, who curiously never experienced any paranormal activity at 21 Moret Field while he lived there, would experience them in Cagayan de Oro City where he relocated after college.

In the apartment building where he and his wife first stayed between 1986 and 1988, neighbors would tell them of children’s musical toys being played and sometimes children’s laughter ringing out from their place.

A co-worker of his who was both a mananambal (healer) and a medium told him and his wife that a balete tree used to stand where the apartments now stood and that when it was cut down, a whole community of elementals was displaced.

Kuya said there was a time when a big black sow would come visit at night. But whenever he would open the front door to shoo it away, it would be gone and none of the neighbors ever saw it.

But my brother said the scariest story told them by the neighbors was of little brown beings who would play with the implements in their laundry area when they were not home. The people next door claimed they heard what sounded like a basin being rolled around and when they peeked through a window and made a noise while at it, one of the little brown men stopped in its tracks and looked straight at them and they said it looked like a gremlin or troll!

You can be sure they never again investigated curious noises emanating from their apartment at night, not even to satisfy their curiosity. — BM, GMA News