SLEEPING WITH GHOSTS

TYBS #1 (OCT 2006)
Let’s add unknown phenomena, strange events, bumps in the night, whispers under your bed, hauntings, magic, pseudo-science, superstition, conspiracy theories, dark confessions and just the general run of weirdness to the tag-line of this column.

Send me your bizarre, your freakish and uncanny. We’ll give them their due of digital space, here, on the Trust Your Black Shirt blog. Hold the special effects.

Have you ever thought about how Pinoys take most of this stuff in stride?

While people in the First World would be hiring the best specialists to find out the mysterious illness of some kid who went traipsing through the forest, we’d question him about stepping on any anthills or fairy mounds, if he’d pissed on any trees without saying “tabi tabi po” first.

While people in said countries would be questioning everyone in the immediate vicinity for their set of lost keys (“I left them right here! Right here! I was only in the bathroom for a minute!”) we’d be calling out to the room, awkwardly, apologizing to the spirits or any mischievous elementals who may have fancied a prank, asking them to return said keys. Don’t laugh. I’ve “found” lots of lost little thingamajigs this way.

Folk wisdom is still a great source of comfort when science fails, hard won and effective its medicine may be. Take for instance the time my younger sister got mysteriously sick. One minute all frolic and play outside, then a sudden high fever and total fatigue the next.

We got the neighborhood doctor to check her but all he prescribed was aspirin and bed rest. Three days of the fever unabated and my mother decided it was time for a second opinion. I don’t remember where she got the arbularyo, but this ordinary-looking, middle-aged woman in jeans and a striped shirt pointed out the kamias tree outside and said the resident dwarves had taken offense at my sister and her friends playing tag in the backyard. Someone had accidentally kicked a hole in their abode.

Amends were necessary. An offering of rice grains scattered generously with murmured apologies would suffice. My mother did all this post-haste, on her knees, as it got dark. When she went back inside sister’s fever had broken and was well into recovery.

Also consider our implicit understanding of after-death rituals to speed our dearly departed to the light. Like the time my grandfather, the clan patriarch and father of nine (including my mother) died in the early 1990s after a particularly long, harrowing and debilitating disease full of complications.

Not surprisingly, he had a strong spirit. For weeks afterwards his children, who had come home from all over the world to pay their last respects, experienced vivid dreams, saw his translucent figure descending the stairs, the stairs themselves creaking in sequence under an invisible weight, woke up with red, pinched ears and cold hands squeezing their toes.

His haunting was both scary and reassuring. But mostly it disturbed them that he was holding on with so much force. The last straw was the rocking chair he so frequently sat on, seen moving leisurely and with undeniable vigor on an overcast afternoon.

The next day we all talked about it and decided impromptu that grandfather had to move on. That maybe with his sudden, though not unexpected, death he still thought he was among the quick. Hmmm, how to send him a message? Let’s do a major house revamp.

So we moved everything around. Took down the curtains that had hung on his bed in the hour of his demise (to be burned), got out the tools and collapsed his metal bed, faced the shelf this way, the desk that way, took the wooden rocking chair outside and smashed it to smithereens, removed the antique, decades old black and white TV and readied it for sale. When we were finished with his room, we moved on to the next. There were three rooms in the second storey in all.

The precision and sense of purpose of how we went through it all defied conventional reason. But we were all in agreement. Plus, it worked. A week later Lolo’s spirit sign was much reduced from the confusion of an unfamiliar house.

There are two sets of windows on the first floor west wall. They’re divided in the middle by one of the foundations. The last of Lolo’s spirit sign was a gust of wind that blew in the left-side set of these curtains but not the right. This is extremely weird if you think about how they’re both on the same wall.

My aunt’s expatriate (and then new) husband was the one to witness this. All the hairs on the back of his neck stood up, he said. He ran up the stairs bug-eyed and clearly frightened, consequently dubbing our residence “the house of the spirits.”

You learn to live with them. There’s enough space to go around, after all.

NEXT on TYBS: The gore/bore fest – some old horror movies reviewed.