27 or so encounters with the Weird

The dead don’t scare me. It’s the live ones that give me the shakes.

Serial killers, illegal recruiters, child molesters, haters or even holier-than-thou Bible-thumping drama queen center-of-the-universe hypocrites with a persecution complex and sense of entitlement (— it’s their world, really, and we are merely players.) Yes, the scariest monsters are people: Nazi scientists, the Khmer Rouge, the Inquisitors, etc. Worse than Sadako or the old woman in Insidious, I tell you.

One guilty pleasure, though: I love watching TV shows that attempt to document the paranormal. (If they wanted to document the “sub-normal,” all they need to do is visit my old Malaboners’ neighborhood — there’s the Joe Perry lookalike who sells suspicious-looking lotions, or the jueteng collector who collects body odor and has a halo of flies)

Of course, you’ll get to watch shadowy walks and infrared footages soundtracked by foreboding atmospheric keyboards, basically a lot of huffing and puffing but there’s really nothing to make you wet your pants. Scariest Places on Earth (hosted by the sublime Linda Blair), Ghost Hunters (accused of faking evidence), Destination Truth (easily my favorite in the genre, although its “exagg” level is off the charts — especially in choosing modes of transportation) and Ghost Adventures (host Zack Bagans has this brash confrontational stance but scampers away like a bunny rabbit at the first sign of paranormal activity). The equipment (comprised of EMF meters, EVP recorders, thermal imaging cameras, motion sensors, etc.) is awesome, out-busting the Ghostbusters. That Ryder girl in Destination Truth is hot. So is Jael del Pardo in Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files. Yet nothing there to make you sweat or scare the bejesus out of you. Enter someone who wants to borrow money (who has a reputation for being a black hole when it comes to financial matters), or wants to sell me a Golden Ticket to the Kingdom of God, and I’d be up and running in no time. Run, Forrest, run!

Here, though, is a list of reported borderline paranormal activities — the strange, the bizarre, the unexpected — that I have encountered personally or were told to me by friends, strangers and the undead. Boo! Nah, just yanking your chain.  And even if this list is too lame to make the Watchful Eye of Doom or Planet Terror Facebook pages, it’s quite a kick to remember past dreads.

Submitted for your approval are 27 or so encounters with the Weird. 

1. I was with my friends in a karaoke joint and one of the guest relations officers or GROs — hey, don’t slag them off! — told me they were asked to “show up” for a foreign guest a couple of nights ago. (Show up — meaning, to form a line so that a particular guest can choose which of the girls will serve him drinks, write down his song choices, and such). The man chose the woman at the back. What’s strange about it is that the girls were lined up in a single row. No one behind them.

2. I met up with a friend at the University of the Philippines for a book launch. Got down from the UP Ikot jeepney. She looked at me strangely and said, “You came back?” Huh? She claimed she already saw me at the venue a couple of minutes ago. No, I didn’t run into myself at the event. That would’ve been awkward. 

3. The old house in Malabon is a hotspot for paranormal activity — well, according to my brother Chris. I didn’t believe that for second. I would be alone there mostly (even during Good Fridays and Black Saturdays when everyone else was in Pampanga, and when, according to Catholic tradition, God is dead) and experienced nothing out of the ordinary — save for the floorboards creaking during ungodly hours, which I attributed to Shaq the huge rat who could play center for the Lakers. But, come to think of it, rats don’t make heavy, ghostly footsteps. 

4. One time, my brother came upstairs and saw my niece, who was around nine at that time, run teasingly to the bathroom, giggling and closing the door behind her. He was waiting for her to finish, but suddenly saw at the corner of his eye that same niece getting up from her bed in another room. My brother — pale, a bit shaken — could still hear someone or something else was still in there. 

5. My brother (he again) was watching TV in the living room. The door to my room was open and I was busily working on a school paper on the computer. What he saw would creep out Ozzy Osbourne: standing behind me reportedly was a figure in black with long hair and long arms. What? Big black shape with eyes of fire? Must’ve been my muse.  “Hell’s bells… what crap is he writing this time?!!!”

6. Speaking of which… another haunted hideaway was our house in Blumentritt. My elder brother Dennis told me how he would race against our siblings in falling asleep first because at a certain time the ghost of an old woman in black would float into the room. Yes, float. And she’d shake the double-deck beds with such a fury. If there were CCTV cameras during that time, they would’ve made a found-footage movie à la Paranormal Activity or V/H/S. The House to the Left of Misericordia.

7. In that old house, dogs would howl at invisible visitors. On a specific spot in the room. Like having Gabi ng Lagim on sense-surround stereo. Awooooooo!

8. Chris, who was still a baby at that time, would throw tantrums, pointing to the attic, which everyone in the family dreaded. At whatever is in there. (My mom would put a light bulb near the stairs leading up to the attic, but the bulbs always fell. Always.) As an adult, he still sees things, hears things. Dogs get crazy around him. Recently, after watching a school play, he and his students went, er, “ghost-hunting.” They entered one room that was pitch-black. A student aimed a flashlight at the tables and chairs, while my brother took a video. They were able to make out the silhouette of a child seated in the front row (a bright ghost, apparently). Chris reviewed the video: the ghostly kid was there, although without a face. He had to erase the footage eventually because his cell phone started to malfunction.

9. Years ago, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland. I had some time off, so I bought tickets for the Edinburgh Vaults Tour. You get into these tunnels, the city’s South Bridge Vaults, for an hour with other tourists. They padlock the door behind you and you explore Edinburgh’s underbelly. Creepy shit. Bodies were reportedly stored here by serial killers Burke and Hare for those unhinged medical experiments. Our guide acted with much camp. In one part of the tunnel, someone or something brushed past my leg. I thought I was imagining things. “Ah,” our guide gesticulated. “The spirit of a child haunts this area.” When I got out of that place I drank copious amounts of Guinness.  

10. Near our old house in Pampanga was a pelota court. People swore that at night, when it was drizzling or when there was a full moon, a ball could be seen bouncing against the white wall. Back and forth. No one could be seen playing, though. I take it that even ghosts need to exercise.

11. I had an uncle, a barber, who passed away years ago. Whenever he would wear his favorite pair of white pants. It would always rain. No fail. Those were supernatural twill bell-bottoms. He allegedly saw a “white lady” on his way home. A case of matching wardrobes.

12. One time he went home to his house in Florida Blanca. It was supposed to be an uneventful late night stroll. He told us that a hulk of a pig started walking beside him. It wasn’t your ordinary bacon-to-be piece of swine. It was hairy, massive and monstrous. It made guttural human-like grunts. You should’ve seen a pair of white pants run into the night like a future Usain Bolt. He concluded: That, brother, was not a pig!

13. If you’re in Old Spain and staying in monasteries or hospitals turned into plush hotels, it could get mightily creepy. Some of the Parador hotels we stayed in have already been turned into places of contemporary cool — such as the ones in Alcala de Henares and Villafranca. Although in the latter, if you walked downwards for a couple of yards, you’d get to a village straight out of Hammer House of Horror, complete with a goth graveyard and castle with an eerie light inside, and I shit you not.

14. The other Spanish hotels boast unaltered interiors straight out of medieval times, rocking horses, mysterious chests on the lobby, antique mirrors facing the bed, chain accents (yeah, chains!), shadowy portraits and a restaurant that was formerly a morgue. Don’t ever order the lengua!

15. The girls on the Santiago de Compostela tour agreed to shack up by pairs. One night, I was roused by someone banging on the walls. I thought it strange that my colleague in the next room decided to have some DIY hammering done. A picture frame needed to be mounted, perhaps? Was she moving furniture around? At three in bleeping morning? The following day I found out she bunked up with another person in another part of the Parador. No one was in that room. No one was even staying in that wing of the hotel. Oh, hell. 

16. This is not scary. It’s just plain silly. My friends and I were drinking at the Bat Cave near the Maria de Leon bus station, UST days. Another friend, Jay, strolled in. Visibly depressed. Piso, my smart aleck friend, asked what’s wrong. Jay said his girlfriend died in car crash a couple of days ago. We were stunned. Piso dramatically told Jay that he should mourn her passing and then afterwards prepare to move on. “I know what your theme song should be,” Piso whispered. We thought he was being serious. He announced, “Zombie ng Cranberries.”

17. Whenever we’d get horribly drunk in Piso’s house in Caloocan, he would call our gullible friend “Franken-G” on the phone and his shtick would always be a conjuring-ritual-gone-wrong. “G! Pare, hindi ko ma-control ’yung spirito! Masyadong malakas!” And his only recourse? To transfer the malevolent spirit to Franken-G’s house via phone lines. The latter freaked out as designed. “Huwag! Huwag!” Piso would then promptly hang up.

18. When we were in college, Piso fronted a death metal band and was heavily into the occult. He read Aleister Crowley, Anton La Vey and the Necronomicon. Would even quote stuff. Slept with a black crystal under his pillow. One time, he was in a secondhand bookstore and got an armful of dark literature. An old woman in black (they are always in black) approached him and warned him about consorting with the devil. Not heeding the warning, Piso got another occult volume from the pile of books. He turned around and the woman had vanished.

19. The same UST group of shambolic friends once spent the day after Christmas in Tanuan, Batangas at my friend M’s house. A sprawling mansion. With old, old trees. With a well that dates back to the time of the Japanese Occupation. After a savage drinking session, we all retired to one room in the basement. Deep in the night, someone upstairs heard someone urinating just outside the window. The piss-flow was really heavy. Inordinately heavy. When we were told about this the following morning, it turned out that no one among us got out of bed to urinate in the yard. No one. Oh yeah, the person upstairs remembered: the urine-maker even — get this — brayed. After that night, we would pee in pairs. Even the toughies had to be escorted.

20. M experienced a lot of inexplicable occurrences. We had a band together and our drummer at that time, Jolly, had a condo unit in Las Piñas. We rode in Jolly’s Beetle right after school and arrived at the condominium complex late that night. Save for a few tenants, the condo was largely abandoned. Only a few units were lighted. After jamming, M and I hung out at the terrace. As we were talking and smoking, M suddenly froze up. There’s something big down there, he whispered, “looking at us.” It’s really tall, he added. I couldn’t see anything. After a few minutes he reported that the entity was no longer on the grounds below. “Nasaan na?” I asked. He quietly said, “Nasa likod natin.”  

21. The aforementioned GRO told me about her stint in Fukuoka in Japan. An elderly couple always visited the club. All the husband and wife did was buy dinner and drinks for the girls. They cut quite a pair. One night, the man visited the club in a morose mood. He was sullen, hardly talked. The girls thought the man had a fight with his wife, thus the sadness. The man left after the customary dinner and drinks. The following evening, the wife visited the club, sobbing, really inconsolable. The fight must be really serious, thought the girls. The woman told them the source of her grief. It was a startling revelation: the husband had died two nights ago.

22. This girl also narrated a story where she spotted an aswang in Doroteo Jose. Yes, in Manila. It was on the roof their house. It had be driven away by her father who, it turned out, had a lot of encounters with the aswang in his hometown in Visayas. A Visayan Van Helsing armed with an unused walis-tingting. All they heard was the beating of big heavy wings. This girl has a caboodle of ghost and ghoul stories. She could be a resource person on Destination Truth.  

23. I was part of a group of journalists who spent a night in an old hotel in Banawe. The following morning, the guy from another newspaper told us he saw somebody walk across his window, thinking it was a burglar. He was quite alarmed. He had to be told: we are on the side of a mountain and when you look out the window, all you see are the cliffs below. He became doubly alarmed.

24. When an aunt heard that her friend passed away, she took out her rosary and began praying. She got the shock of her life when her cell phone rang and her dead friend was calling! She answered, nervously, “Hello, sis?” It turned out the caller was her friend’s son who wanted to inform my aunt about the funeral arrangements.

25. My sister Pura’s house in Bulacan is allegedly haunted by a benevolent spirit. It could sometimes be playful, though. One night, my sister and brother in law were in bed together and they both heard someone or something whispering. Between them! Brrr…

26. At around 3 in the morning, they could hear the water dispenser turn. As if someone was drinking from the faucet.

27. I have had personal encounters with ghosts, too. Mainly the Ghosts of Bungled Articles Past, such as this one. Ah, the worst kind. I’d half-expect Sadako to come crawling out of my TV set, gripping today’s issue of The STAR, saying, “Ghosts? Ghouls? Oh, what absolute twaddle!”