Spooked

So the story goes that when I was about a few months old, I was witness to a supernatural being on my crib side. We were still one happy family living in Malate, some guests were in the house and they suddenly remembered that the baby (me) upstairs had no company. One guest nonchalantly said, “No, I saw a woman with long hair standing by her crib.” But when they did a count everyone was downstairs including my yaya who had been sent out to do an errand. They never left me unattended from then on until I had my baptism. In the Philippines, elders have this superstition about not leaving un-baptised babies alone as it makes them prone to visits by evil spirits...

An uncle of mine who was a non-believer of anything supernatural had his dose of a hair-raising moment. He went to a business conference somewhere in a beach resort in Batangas. He was taking a nap in the double decker bed when he felt a presence standing by his side. He opened his eyes and saw a lady shrouded in black (no face, no flesh that he could see). His story becomes blurred at this point but he remembered thinking of jumping from the deck above to the bed of his roommate below. Just before did, the black lady shifted and moved to the place beside the bed he was just about to jump into. Glided was more like it, like the black lady had skates. The the usual story ensued that a girl was raped and killed in that room, then buried in the beach, and she has been haunting them ever since…

My aunts who lived in a dorm called Ilang-Ilang in UP had their own creepy stories to share. One aunt had a white lady haunting her dreams of which circumstances of the dream I now forget. But the creepy thing was not just the dream. But the fact that they discovered that the other girls who lived in the same column of all four floors in the dorm as hers shared the same dream on the same night.

Still in UP, another aunt was studying late into the night when her dressing drawer suddenly opened on its own. Inside it was the copy of The Exorcist, a thick book, which she was reading in those days…

In the 80's, my older sister, Shirley lived with my mom and our other sister in Pampanga. She woke up in the middle of the night to see a girl who looked and was dressed like my other sister (in yellow pj's no less) sitting on the edge of the bed with her side to her. She called her and asked why she was awake and the girl didn't answer, didn't even look. She looked beside her and saw my real sister sleeping soundly, with the doppelganger sitting still at the edge of the bed...

And then there are those stories that are not so spooky but you know it comes from the other side.

A week after my lola died, we were trying to get our lives back on track and trying not to think of the loss that still stung. But not without her last say. In the car on our way from work we noticed the very strong smell of flowers right in the middle of Skyway. No one talked at first until I asked my sister and our driver if they could smell it too. They did and the smell stayed with us for a few minutes until we managed to pull ourselves together. We rememebred her fondly then and we remember her fondly now.

Fresh from a traumatic moment in the morgue when I saw Papa placed in a body bag, I made the decision to ride in the van with him to keep him company on one of the last journeys of his "life". My main concern was to make sure that they treat his body with care and for it to not be loaded into the van like it was some piece of luggage (cause I've been warned that they do that to dead bodies). When it was just him and me, a certain fear creeped in, the kind you have around dead people. It lasted for seconds until I felt calm and profoundly sad all at the same time, remembering that the person in that bag wasn't just some dead body or a potential ghost, but flesh and blood and history all together. Nevermind out family's dotted history - those trivial things fall apart and lose their meaning in the face of the love and loss you feel when a person dies. I felt his presence comforting me, telling me that his meaning in my life doesn't change, it only evolves. In that moment, I felt the powerful feeling of calm, longing, sadness and complete understanding and acceptance of what happened all at the same time, it was overwhelming. In that dark van I sat still and remembered all that was when it was still happy and bright in my world.

Behind us, my uncle (his brother) was trailing us in his own car having his own thoughts when in the expressway past the toll gate, his broken e-pass suddenly sounded off letting him free to pass. The e-pass was broken for a week, and in fact on his way home from the wake that same night he tried to use it again and it didn't work. Maybe it was a mechanical glitch, maybe it was supernatural trick courtesy of the guy in the bag who meant the world to us.

In this season, and in life, we choose what we want to believe. Some believe in the total existence of ghosts, evil spirits, messages from the other side, little miracles. Some choose to be lighthearted and play dress up and get as much candy as they can. Some remember their dead in prayer. Some just wait for the next spooky adventure or story and hope that they will be able to sleep at night afterwards. Me, I try to do all of that even as i live far, far away. Be spooked everyone.

"When a person dies, one does not stop loving him, does one?" - Ayn Rand, We The Living