Some of my childhood memories are woven with strange and unexplainable experiences, part reality, perhaps part imagination, that through the eyes of a child, felt nothing short of magical.
When I look back on my early years in rural Pardo, Cebu, during the 1970s, I remember a world shaped as much by folklore and superstition as by the rhythms of everyday life.
It was a place where stories of witches, wandering spirits, and mysterious creatures were not merely tales told after dark but beliefs quietly woven into the fabric of the community.
My home, like many others of that time, was steeped in these traditions. We lived with the quiet conviction that unseen forces shared our world, separated from us only by a boundary so thin it seemed it could disappear at any moment.
Whether the things I witnessed were real or simply the vivid creations of a child's imagination, I cannot say with certainty. Memory has a way of blending fact with feeling, leaving behind impressions that are often more enduring than proof.
Yet those experiences have never faded. They remain with me, quietly shaping not only how I understood the world as a child but also how I continue to approach its mysteries today, with curiosity, humility, and an openness to the possibility that not everything can be easily explained.
A brownout, one of many, had plunged the house into darkness, and as was our custom whenever the power failed, the entire family gathered on the porch.
We were in the middle of telling ghost stories when the grilled front door suddenly began to rattle.
At first, we assumed someone was outside. I moved closer and peered through the narrow gaps, then froze. A shadow stood on the other side, clearly human in form.
It lingered for a moment, then seemed to dissolve into the darkness.
Startled, I hurriedly told the others what I had seen.
Was it only a trick of light, or something shaped by a child’s imagination heightened by fear and suggestion?
As a child, I did not ask such questions. The stories we heard, and the beliefs we grew up with, left little room for doubt. To me then, the shadow was real.
And yet, what I could never fully explain was not only what I saw, but what we all heard, the sudden, unexplained rattling of the wooden grill door in the silence of the night.
One quiet afternoon, I was alone in the living room, absorbed in a game of my own invention. I had turned a fallen chair on its side and used it as a makeshift steering wheel, completely immersed in an imaginary journey.
Then, suddenly, something struck the back of my head, a sharp, deliberate slap.
I spun around at once. The room was empty. My mother was in the kitchen. No one else was supposed to be home.
And yet I heard it clearly: the sound of movement, as though someone had run through the three adjoining rooms in quick succession, from one end of the house to the other.
I searched every corner. I opened cabinets. I stood still, listening, waiting for some explanation to reveal itself. But there was nothing, only silence settling back into the house.
When my siblings returned home later that afternoon, I was still there, confused, quietly hoping that whatever I had experienced could still be explained by something ordinary.
There was a woman who lived nearby whom the neighbors spoke of only in whispers.
I often saw her pass by our house. Her eyes were noticeably red, as were her son’s.
Whenever we children saw her coming, we would call out, “Balen Ongo!”, a local expression referring to a witch. She would immediately quicken her pace, eyes lowered, never stopping to acknowledge us.
Looking back, I understand how cruel that must have been.
But cruelty shaped by fear follows its own logic, especially in children who inherit beliefs without yet understanding their weight.
In local folklore, the ongo was a figure of genuine dread. She was said to possess the ability to transform, most often into a pig, but not an ordinary one. This creature was described as wearing wooden sandals, “anay nga nagbakya,” the hollow clopping sound of which was said to echo through the night and send shivers through anyone who heard it.
According to the same stories, the ongo was never alone. She was believed to be accompanied by the sigbin, a strange nocturnal creature described as resembling a kangaroo, yet moving with an unnatural and unsettling gait.
There was also the kikik, a black bird named after the eerie sound it was said to make at night, a screetching sound of “kikik… kikik… kikik”. Elders claimed that its sound behaved strangely: when it seemed distant, the creature was actually near; when it sounded close, it was already far away.
In those days, especially during brownouts, it was common for neighbors to gather outside under the moonlight. Darkness felt heavier then, and company made it less so.
The elders would take turns telling stories of witches, enchanted encounters, and creatures said to roam the night. These were not merely tales for amusement. They were, in their own way, a form of passing down belief, a quiet education in how the unseen world was understood.
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, certain that he had left me there before he went out. My aunt had searched for me in distress, unable to find me anywhere.
But I had never left. I had been at home the entire time, just as I was told to stay.
As punishment, I was made to kneel on a heap of salt for hours.
Even then, I remember a deeper unease lingering beneath the pain and confusion. I had already heard stories, half-understood at the time, of a “double,” a phantom self that could appear in one place while the real person remained in another.
The idea left me petrified more than any ghost story ever told. The thought that something could wear my face, move in my place, and create confusion in the lives of those around me stayed with me long after the punishment ended.
It was not the discipline I remembered most clearly, but the fear that I could be seen somewhere I had never been.
My mother used to tell relatives that I was a lucky child.
Whenever visitors came, she would repeat the story with quiet pride: how my older brother and sister once went to a fiesta carnival, won a small fortune in coins, and credited their winnings to my presence beside them.
The only problem was, I was never there. As the youngest child, I was rarely brought along on outings. They thought I was too small, too fragile to keep up.
I would stand nearby whenever my mother told the story, silent and slightly puzzled, unsure how to correct something she believed so completely.
My father, convinced by her account, once brought me to the carnival himself and asked me to choose numbers for a betting game, hoping to test the luck I was said to possess.
He won a few times in the “jumping horse” game, enough to confirm his belief, but never enough to prove anything extraordinary.
Perhaps my siblings were simply lucky that day. Perhaps it was only coincidence, the kind memory tends to exaggerate over time.
And yet, even now, I sometimes wonder whether the story belonged to me at all or to some earlier version of me that existed only in the way others remembered my name.
As a young child, I enjoyed the freedom to sleep wherever I pleased. One evening, I chose the small room beside the kitchen, where my father was also sleeping.
Sometime after midnight, I awoke to the sound of voices. They were lively and overlapping, as though a group of people had gathered for a late-night conversation. The voices seemed to come directly from the kitchen.
For a few moments, I lay still, listening. Who could be visiting at such an hour? Why had no one awakened me to greet them?
Curiosity soon overcame my hesitation. Quietly, I slipped from my mat and crept toward the wall that separated the room from the kitchen. Pressing one eye against a narrow gap in the wooden boards, I peered inside.
The kitchen was dark.
There was no one there.
I stood frozen for a moment before returning to my mat. By then, the voices had vanished as suddenly as they had begun, leaving behind a silence so complete that it felt almost unreal.
At first, I tried to convince myself that I had been dreaming. But I distinctly remember rubbing my eyes, sitting upright, and listening with full awareness. I was awake. Of that, I have never had any doubt.
Even now, I cannot explain what I heard that night.
Whether it was a trick of the mind, an ordinary sound transformed by a sleepy imagination, or something I still cannot account for, I do not know.
What has endured is the memory itself, vivid in its sound, elusive in its meaning, and still capable of stirring the same quiet wonder I felt as a child.
The last room of our house had a raised wooden floor, slats laid above the ground with narrow gaps between them, about a meter high. We slept on mats beneath a mosquito net, and on still nights we could sometimes hear the wind sighing upward through the spaces below.
One stormy night, rain drummed steadily on the roof as I fell into a deep sleep. I was suddenly jolted awake by a violent thud, something had struck the side of the house just beneath the window where I lay.
It did not feel like the wind. It felt heavier, more deliberate, as if something large had collided with the wall and then fallen beneath us, moving and shifting under the floorboards.
Then I felt it.
Through the mat, something sharp and pointed pressed upward, firm, insistent, like a finger rising from the ground below.
I did not scream. I simply turned onto my side and pulled every pillow within reach between myself and the floor, building a silent barrier against whatever was underneath.
At some point, I fell back asleep.
By morning, everything was ordinary again. I never mentioned it to anyone.
There was an old woman I loved dearly, Mama Diyang, the wife of my father’s uncle. She lived about a kilometer from our house, near the public market, and every time I passed by, she would gently press her warm hand to my forehead in the way elders bless the young.
She always smiled. She always pinched my cheeks. Before I left, she would place a few coins into my palm.
One morning, I was awakened before dawn by something I could not quite explain, not a sound, not a touch, but a sudden, absolute certainty that Mama Diyang was gone.
The feeling was immediate and unshakable. I lay still for a moment, holding it in silence, before eventually drifting back to sleep.
When morning came, my mother confirmed what I had already somehow known: Mama Diyang had passed away at dawn.
More than once, I was awakened in the deep hours of the night by a sound I could never fully explain, a loud, trumpet-like blare unlike anything I had heard from an animal or an instrument. It always seemed to come from outside, near the front door, and was often preceded by the rattling of the grilled porch gate.
My mother kept a stack of chairs leaning against the inside of that door as a makeshift alarm. Anyone attempting to enter would cause them to fall. On those nights, I was certain I heard the sharp clatter of chairs collapsing.
Yet every morning, the chairs stood exactly as they had been left.
All that changed, inexplicably, was the chain on the door, which would sometimes be found shifted one notch higher.
When I later asked my younger brother about it, he said he had heard the same sound as well and described it in exactly the same way I remembered it.
Even now, I do not have a clear explanation for what those nights were.
By the time I reached Grade 6, I had grown somewhat less fearful of the world. One early afternoon after school, I went out to the nearby rice fields with a small net, looking for tiny fish for the aquarium I kept at home. The irrigation channels were full of them that season. The fields stretched wide under an open sky, bordered by kangkong plants, scattered scarecrows, and alive with birds and dragonflies.
I did not expect to see anyone.
But I noticed an old man crouched near a patch of kangkong and rice plants. He was stooped and slow, and there was something about his presence that made the hairs on my skin rise. He dipped his hands into the water repeatedly, and every so often glanced in my direction, never quite meeting my eyes, but always seeming aware of me.
Then, without warning, he began moving closer.
As he came near, I saw it clearly, a single fang protruding from his mouth. There was something unsettling about it, not because it was exaggerated, but because it looked too distinct to ignore. He fixed his gaze on me, and I felt an immediate urge to leave.
I gathered my things and ran without looking back.
Only when I had put a safe distance between us did I glance back briefly. I thought I saw him climbing a coconut tree, despite his apparent old age.
Even now, I do not know how to make sense of what I saw. What I remember most clearly is not just the figure but that single fang, sharp and unmistakable in my memory.
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