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My Childhood
Some of my childhood memories are filled with odd phenomena, part truth, or maybe part imagination, that felt like magic to a child’s mind. When I look back on those days of my life in rural Pardo, Cebu, during the 1970s, I find myself so immersed into a landscape of folklore and superstition.
My home was alive with such beliefs then: in witches, in creatures of the night, and in the fragile layer between this world and whatever lay just beyond it. Whether what I witnessed was real or merely the product of an overactive imagination, I cannot say for certain. Yet those memories remain with me. They shaped me in ways I still struggle to fully accept as true.
One quiet afternoon, I was alone in the living room, absorbed in a game of my own invention. I had propped a fallen chair onto its side, using it as a makeshift steering wheel, fully immersed in an imaginary journey, when something struck the back of my head: a sharp, deliberate slap.
I spun around immediately. The room was empty. Mama was in the kitchen. No one else was supposed to be home. And yet, I heard it clearly, the distinct sound of someone running through the three adjoining rooms, one after another, all the way to the last.
I searched every corner. I opened cabinets. I waited, convinced that whoever or whatever it was would, eventually reveal itself. Nothing did. When my siblings came in from outside some time later, I was still standing there, quietly hoping the explanation had been human all along.
There was a brownout, one of many, and the whole family had gathered on the porch, as was customary when the lights failed. We were deep into ghost stories when the grilled front door began to rattle. We assumed someone was outside.
I peered through the gaps and froze. There was a shadow on the other side, unmistakably human in shape. It moved briefly before vanishing into thin air. I gasped and told everyone what I had seen.
Was it a figment of my imagination or a creation of my overactive mind?
As a child, that question never occurred to me. The elders believed, and so did I. The shadow was real, and that was enough.
There was a woman who lived nearby about whom the neighbours spoke only in whispers. I always saw her passed by our house. Her eyes were red and so her son's. We children would call out "Balen Ongo!", which means Balen, the witch. And she would quicken her pace, eyes cast downward, never stopping to acknowledge us.
Looking back, I understand how cruel that must have been. But cruelty born of fear follows its own logic, especially in children.
The ongo, in local belief, was a figure of genuine dread. She was said to possess the power of transformation, most often taking the form of a pig, but not an ordinary one. This creature wore wooden sandals, "anay nga nagbakya" as we call it in our vernacular. The hollow clop of those clogs in the darkness of night is enough to send shivers to the bones.
According to local folklore, the “ongo” was never said to be alone. She was believed to keep company with the “Sigbin,” a strange nocturnal creature described as resembling a kangaroo but moving with an unnatural, unsettling gait.
Alongside it was the “Kikik,” a black bird named after the eerie sound it was said to produce at night, a scratchy “kikik… kikik… kikik” that echoed through the darkness. Many of the elders claimed to have seen or heard it. They also believed that when its sound seemed distant, the Kikik was actually near; but when it sounded close, it was, paradoxically, far away.
In those days, especially during brownouts, it was common for children and elders to gather outside especially when the moon was big. The older ones would hold court, spinning tales of witches, enchanted encounters, and the supernatural creatures that said to roam the dark. Those stories were never mere entertainment. It's the elders' way of introducing the folk beliefs we had then.
I was perhaps five or six years old when my father returned from the market in a fury. He accused me of disappearing from my aunt's house, he was certain he had left me there before heading out. My aunt had searched for me, frantic with worry. As punishment, he made me kneel on a heap of salt for hours.
But I had never left the house. I had been home the entire time, just as he had told me to be.
Even then, I knew there was a word for what may have happened. A double, a phantom wearing my face, wandering through the afternoon while I sat perfectly still at home. The thought unsettled me more than any ghost story ever could.
My mother used to tell relatives that I was a lucky child. Whenever she had visitors, she would repeat the story with quiet pride: how my older brother and sister had once won a small fortune at a fiesta carnival, handfuls of coins, and credited it all to my presence beside them.
The only problem was, I was never there. As a much younger sibling, I was rarely taken along anywhere. They considered me too small and fragile. I would stand to the side whenever Mama told the story, silent and puzzled, unsure how to correct something she believed so completely.
My father, convinced by her tale, once brought me to the carnival himself and asked me to choose numbers for a bet, hoping to tap into whatever luck I supposedly carried. He won once, maybe twice, in the jumping horse game. Not quite the windfall the story promised.
Perhaps my brother and sister were simply talented at carnival games. Or perhaps they had brought someone else along that day, someone who wore my face but wasn't me.
As a young child, I had the freedom to sleep wherever I liked. One night, I chose the room next to the kitchen, sharing it with my father. Sometime past midnight, I was roused by voices, lively, overlapping, the sound of a gathering in full swing. The noise was coming from the kitchen.
I lay still for a moment, genuinely puzzled. Who could have come at this hour? Why had no one woken me? Curiosity won out over fear, and I crept to the wall, pressing my eye against a small gap to see inside.
The kitchen was dark and completely empty.
I returned to my mat and lay down, listening. The voices had gone silent. I told myself it was only a dream, but I rubbed my eyes, I was truly awake. Even now, I cannot tell what it really was.
The last room of our house had a raised wooden floor, wooden slats with narrow gaps between them, laid about a meter above the ground. We slept on mats beneath a mosquito net, and on still nights you could sometimes hear the wind sighing up through those gaps.
One stormy night, the rain drummed steadily on the roof and I had fallen into a deep sleep when a violent thud jolted me awake, something had slammed into the side of the house, just below the window where I lay. It was not the wind. It felt heavier, more deliberate, as if something large had crashed against the wall and then dropped, scrabbling beneath the floorboards.
And then, through the mat, a sharp pointed thing pressed up, firm, insistent, like a finger rising from below us. I did not scream. I turned onto my side and stacked every pillow I could reach between myself and whatever was below.
I woke up in the morning as if nothing happened. I did not tell everyone.
There was an old woman I loved dearly, Mama Diyang, the wife of my father's uncle. She lived about a kilometre from our house, near the public market, and every time I passed by, she would press her warm hand gently to my forehead in the way elders blessed the young. She always smiled. She always pinched my cheeks. Before I left, she would press a few coins into my palm.
Then, I was woken up before dawn by something I could not name, not a sound, not a touch, but a sudden, absolute certainty that Mama Diyang was gone. The feeling settled over me like a fact. I lay with it for a moment, then drifted back to sleep.
In the morning, my mother confirmed what I already somehow knew. Mama Diyang had died at dawn.
More than once, I was woken in the deep hours by a sound I could never explain, a loud, trumpet-like blare, unlike any animal or instrument I knew. It came from outside, near the front door, and was always preceded by the rattling of the grilled porch door.
My mother kept a stack of chairs leaning against the inside of that door as a makeshift alarm. Anyone trying to enter would topple them. On those nights, I was certain I heard the clatter of chairs falling. Yet every morning, they stood undisturbed, all except the chain on the door, which would be moved, inexplicably, one notch higher than where it had been left.
When I asked my younger brother if he had ever heard it, he had. He described it exactly as I remembered.
I still have no explanation of what's going on.
By the time I was in Grade 6, I had grown somewhat less frightened of the world. One early afternoon after school, I walked out to the nearby rice fields with a net in hand, looking for small fish for the aquarium I kept at home. The irrigation streams were rich with them that season, and the rice fields were beautiful, stretching endlessly under the open sky, edged with kangkong plants, and scattered with scarecrows, alive with birds and dragonflies.
I saw no one else except for an old man crouching near a patch of kangkong. He was stooped and slow, and there was something about him that made the hairs on my skin stand up. He dipped his hands into the water again and again, and every so often he glanced up at me, not quite meeting my eyes, but I knew he was watching me.
All of a sudden, he began moving closer and closer to where I was standing. As he came very near, I saw clearly, with my own eyes, a fang protruding from his mouth. Strangely, there was only one. With his eyes fixed on me in an unsettling stare, I quickly gathered my things and ran home without looking back.
When I was already a safe distance away, I turned back for a brief glimpse of him. I saw him climbing a coconut tree, despite his very old age.
It still confuses me to this day, but that fang, it looked absolutely real.
✦ to be continued in the next chapter ✦
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