Houses of spirits

They get better with age. My favorites are red and white...No, not wine but houses. Haunted houses to be exact. My favorite haunted houses in fact. Let’s start with the red one. My first brush with the red house somewhere in the boundary of San Ildefonso and San Miguel in Bulacan was more than five years ago when a group of elderly women from Pampanga, "the Malaya Lolas," held a press conference right in the house where they were imprisoned in WWII as comfort women. It was an emotional experience for these lolas who broke down upon seeing the house as painful memories came rushing back.

The organizers toured us inside the house and it indeed felt heavy with negative energy. Not that we’re psychic but if you were sensitive enough, you could feel there was something there. It was a heavy feeling as we went through dark corridors and dust-filled rooms.

According to some accounts, many women died there and some were said to have been either buried at the back of the house or thrown into a dried up well at the side of the property. Commuters going to Nueva Ecija can’t miss it. It’s the only big, old house where the road curved going to another sleepy town. Residents who live nearby tell stories of a white lady haunting the premises and its environs, often causing road accidents. Some drivers would even report seeing a woman suddenly appearing from the direction of the house and crossing to the other side.

It looks specially creepy at dusk, the house’s reddish tint looking almost bloodlike which makes you think about all the bloodshed there.

Often referred to as the White House for its white (now dirty white due to exposure to the elements and overall wear and tear) paint, the Laperal House along Leonard Wood Road in Baguio City is believed by most people as an honest-to-goodness House of Spirits. It had its share of exposure (or over exposure?) via Magandang Gabi Bayan’s Halloween specials, the Spirit Questors and numerous print media articles telling about its haunted nature. As years went by, the real story behind the hauntings at Laperal became shrouded in mystery. Several conflicting accounts cropped up as everyone made their own interpretation of the stories they heard from the grapevine. Some accounts tell of the whole Laperal family being killed by the Japanese in WWII while some say it was only the Laperal couple who were killed and the children spared. But no matter how many versions circulate, one thing remains unchanged, the house built in the 1920s is indeed haunted.And who else can better confirm these strange occurrences than the Laperal’s caretakers themselves?

Catalina Ringor who hails from Bohol has been living in the Laperal house as yaya to the younger generation Laperals since the 1960s. She was there when Roberto Laperal, who was the one who hired her, died when he accidentally slipped and hit his head while walking at the back of the house. He went into a coma and died in Manila. When the Laperal children left Baguio she and her son, along with Primitiva Paras, were left to take care of the house. Since they lived downstairs, they could clearly hear footsteps at night when they well knew that nobody was upstairs since the rooms were cleared out when the last of the Laperal children left the ancestral house. "At first I was scared but I got used to it eventually," she says in the vernacular, adding that the dog would howl in the middle of the night, which some people take to mean a supernatural presence. Apart from footsteps, they would also hear the sound of a cane, which the owner used to have. Fortunately for them, that was all they have experienced. No sightings of spirits and no close encounters, just sounds. Purificacion is still the caretaker, even though the house has already been sold. It’s her home and she wouldn’t trade it for anything – haunted or not.

As for us haunted house hunters, who happened to pass by the house one rainy afternoon recently and who decided to satisfy our curiosity, we were quite content with just talking to these kindly caretakers. After all, whether a house is haunted or not, one still has to respect the privacy of the owners, and of course, the spirits.