October Spooks

It's the spoopy month of October and what better way to anticipate Halloween by getting into the spooky mood with eerie stories!

When I was a kid, I had a cousin who always bullied me by scaring me with ghost stories. Growing up, I was terrified of these supernatural beings yet I was at the same time intrigued. I would read about them a lot, I even had this penchant in borrowing "True Philippine Ghost Stories" (the stories are not really all 'true' btw) book series from my Gradeschool friends. By the time I was in high school though, I dismissed them as nothing more but products of human imagination. People will panic under certain tense situations and things they see or experience may just be a product of fatigue and stress. Nowadays, Science can provide an answer to a lot of things.

When something unnatural happens, humans will quickly rationalise the event with something that 'works for them' so they won't freak out too much, and sometimes rationalising… won't work. Sometimes, Science just can't explain everything. The following stories were true to life encounters I had with the unseen.

Lola ("Grandmother")

My grandma passed away when I was in 4th year high school (2011). She was really ill before that and was admitted to a hospital, only to be released later on with a positive note from the doctor her health will improve. We let her stay in our house so that she can be properly taken care of. Our house is three storeys, and our bedrooms were on the second floor. Naturally, that would be too strenuous for my grandma so we made our living room (opposite to it was our dining room with no wall separations) into a makeshift "room" for her.

It was devastating when she passed away, she was really a kind and loving grandmother. It made me wish I spent more time her rather than entertaining my stupid teen hormones. My fondest memory of her was when she would make a "health" drink by adding egg yolk to Coke (it's pretty tasty to be honest). 

A few weeks after her passing, my mother resumed her monthly departure to foreign countries to supply our stocks for our boutique business. That time, I had a curfew of 9pm and before she left, she strictly reminded me not to go over that time (since my father is pretty lax with me) and I promised her. After she left, obviously, I disobeyed her because --rebellious teenager phase--

The night after she left, I went over the 9pm curfew for an hour and thirty minutes. I'm pretty much the only nocturnal person in our house because by 9pm, it's pretty much lights out for everyone there. For a big house, there are only 5 people that lived there (me, my parents, my cousin and one house help) and that time, my mom wasn't present. That time, the PC was located upstairs in the 2nd floor living room area we called "The Library" because that was our study place. 

It was about 10:30pm when I decided to sleep, but I felt a bit thirsty so I went downstairs to the kitchen for a drink. Our staircase has an overhead chandelier I would usually turn on when I went downstairs because I was still a bit scared of the dark, but that time I decided not to since the 2nd floor lights provided enough illumination. When I arrived downstairs, I immediately smelled something. It was the smell of efficascent oil, a rubbing oil we usually use for muscle pains and such, and it was also used on my grandmother.

That unnerved me slightly, but I knew that efficascent has a strong odor, and our house help often used that too. I rationalised that it must be coming from her room which was located near the dirty kitchen (where the fridge was located aka my destination). I turned on the dining room lights just in case and casually went to the kitchen. By the time I reached the dirty kitchen however, the efficascent oil smell suddenly cut off. 

I started to feel scared already, and quickly drank water. Before I went upstairs though, I approached our house help's room. The door has a screen opening so I could smell whether she did use efficascent oil or not. And she did, but the odor is not as strong as the one in the living room-- I couldn't even smell it unless I stuck my face near the screen opening. I hurriedly raced towards the stairs afterwards.

When I reached the living room, I could still smell the faint trail of the efficascent oil but this time it was accompanied by another smell: a freshly blown out candle.

That was when I finally felt goosebumps all over my body. The smell trail cuts off at the bottom of our staircase. I quickly went upstairs, saying to myself "Mamang (what we fondly called her), let me feel your presence only through smell… please, don't show yourself to me. I promise I won't go over my curfew again." I never went past my curfew the following days.

I recounted this experience to my mother when she came back from her travel, and told me my grandmother was most likely scolding me for disobeying her.

Her succeeding visits

My grandmother then would often visit us the next few weeks. Most of the time she would be at the living room. We would sometimes smell efficascent oil lingering on the staircase, or the 2nd floor hallway that leads to me and my cousin's rooms. When she was still alive, she used to roam and inspects those places making sure they were clean and whatnot. Her initial visits often frightened me and my cousin, until all of us just got used to it. Her visits became rare after her first death anniversary until it ultimately stopped. Her last visit was summer of 2013, when my cousin from Cebu visited us. She must have missed him.

Not all visitors are friendly though.

A Malevolent Presence

They say that it's more terrifying to stay in a church than in a cemetery since only soulless bodies are buried in the latter (but there's a zombie risk I guess): the church is where the "separation of the body and soul happens" when the priest gives the funeral blessing, but sometimes the soul becomes trapped in earth due to some unfinished business.

This happened when I was in 3rd year high school. My parents and I joined a Catholic covenant community a year before and on that year we were one of the sponsoring families in the family-focused retreat (called Family Encounter) conducted annually by the community. It was held in a church retreat house (located at a compound at the back), and apart from another church within the compound, there was also a mini cemetery for the  priests who have been cremated. Incidentally, the event was held during the last week of October.

My role was to assist my parents in facilitating the program. It was a pretty busy Saturday, and I would observe the program whenever I was free from errands. That afternoon, before the talk, a short film "The Giving Tree" was to be shown. After that, I'm supposed to give out the talk handouts to each of the participating families so I sat near where the projection was to be shown in preparation.

I remembered when it was me and my family sitting there and listening to the talks. I recounted that after the Giving Tree, another short film will be shown, The Velveteen Rabbit. I was always fond of watching animations so I was glad our family was assigned in facilitating the program, I get to be inside the venue (as well as enjoy the aircon).

The Shepherding family (the family who shared experiences) gave a little introduction on that afternoon's talk then followed by the Giving Tree short. The animation was rough and the art style was MS Paint-esque unlike the ones showed to us last year, but it didn't seem to bother anyone as long as the story delivered well.

For a refresher, the Giving Tree is about a tree that provides for a boy a need or want in every major stage of his life until she's just an old stump, even offering herself to be sat on as the boy lives his last moments proving that a tree has more humanity than a human showing the essence of "giving."

The crappy short started out normal, the boy is bored so the tree lets him play on the branches, the boy is hungry and the tree lets him eat some of the apples… then it turned weird when the boy was a "teenager." The tree allowed him to make out with a girl on the branches, the tree offered her apples to the boy to be sold for drug money… and one time the boy committed a crime, and the tree let him hide among the leaves when the police were hot on his trail. I was perplexed by how the short was turning out, because it's not like that version which was showed to us last year, and that was definitely not the genuine Giving Tree story.

The last scene was the tree murdering the boy in a terribly animated fashion and it fades to black as the tree maniacally laughs. I could remember how shocked the families looked, because that certainly wasn't something a religious institution should show. Everyone seemed to have nonchalantly dismissed it anyway. The next film was The Velveteen Rabbit. It was about a fluffy toy bunny that was initially loved, but was disregarded as time passed and then an old toy horse teaches her the true meaning of value… or something like that.

The short animation is played, and the graphics is exactly the one that was shown to us last year. It played normal for the first minute, then it started getting interruptions. The audio would occasionally crack and the video would get mixed with black static. Eventually, the video played fine but the audio became totally distorted… and it started to sound like someone was mumbling. The voice was deep & demonic, like someone who was possessed-- what it was saying was inaudible but it was downright creepy. It started getting louder, and the technicals including my parents were struggling to put off the video. They managed and the talk continued normally. I admit I was a bit unnerved that time, but I remained heavily apathetic.

We usually had a team meeting after the day's events to talk about what transpired during the day and work on improvements. That day's mishap was discussed and that's when I realised that a malevolent force disrupted that afternoon's talk. I also learned that the tech team also tried to stop playing the video during the violent Giving Tree but for some reason they were unable to. They said the reason why a hateful spirit entered the venue was because we forgot to 'seal' the place, a practice done every morning with a ritual prayer and blessing the corners with Holy water. It was almost All Souls Day that time and we unwittingly invited the lost spirits that day by failing to keep them out.

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I tried to search for that violent Giving Tree version and I couldn't find it anywhere. I also don't think it was downloaded by accident because the first result in Youtube is the genuine one, or in Google for that matter. It was also reviewed by the tech team before being shown. Something was really tampering with our technicals that day. Obviously a supernatural asshole.

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I used to be skeptical about these things when I embraced how Science can almost explain every phenomena mankind used to think was unnatural, but there are really just some things that are exceptions.