Philippines – Manila Davao Borocay – Travel Food Entertainment

Our final destination was Baker Hall. This imposing building was used by the Japanese as a garrison for American and Filipino soldiers during World War II. A number of them were executed there.

Ironically, its most famous victim is a Japanese officer – Tomoyuki Yamashita also known as the “Tiger of Malaya” and whose name lives on through the legendary Yamashita Treasure. Yamashita was convicted by a US military court of war crimes and sentenced to die by hanging. Yamashita’s trial, however, was deemed controversial and some claim was unjust.My guide’s dislike for that building was so intense he insisted on keeping our distance from it. I wanted to come closer. “I don’t like being near that building especially when darkness starts to set in,” he said with an air of finality.

When he attended his classes inside Baker Hall he would see ghostly Filipino soldiers being garroted while ghostly Japanese soldiers watch on. A psychic video on an eternal playback loop.

How he managed to pass his courses there with all that eerie distraction is beyond me. Oh, wait, we only took PE classes there. It takes a special kind of person to flunk badminton, basketball, ballroom dancing or whatever. In fact, flunking a PE course was unheard of.

After the campus tour I invited him to scan the SEARCA Dorm, where I was residing at that time, for its ghostly residents. SEARCA Dorm is arguably the fanciest place to stay when spending a few days in UP Los Banos. It is far from being a 5-star hotel (or even a a 2-star hotel) but it has comfortable and clean air-conditioned rooms. The beddings are always fresh, it has its own generator, there’s running water up until midnight and the rates are reasonable.

For ghost lovers SEARCA Dorm will not disappoint. Stories of music (from instruments not radio) emanating from some rooms that just happened to be unoccupied had been circulating for decades. Others hear the sound of rattling chains or report seeing shadows that glide effortlessly across the hallways.

A foreign student from Myanmar who was staying there, a seer all her life who doesn’t even bat an eyelash when ghosts come a popping, reported seeing a woman in one of the balconies being strangled by a tall, dark “presence.”

One time I was walking down the hallway to my room. I saw her standing outside her room looking towards my direction although I could tell she was not looking at me. I asked her what she was looking at. “The one who is following you,” she replied matter-of-factly. I turned around but there was no one there.

No, I didn’t see the entity that was following me. Thank goodness I don’t have a third eye. But I have made his or her acquaintance on my first night there. I was in bed ready to sleep when I heard someone open the door and walk in. I thought it was my room mate whom I’ve never met before. But feeling exhausted from the move-in, I opted to pretend sleeping so I didn’t have to hold our getting-to-know you conversation that night.

I was lying on my bed facing the wall and I could hear him walk around the room lit by a single desk lamp and go through a stack of papers. I thought he was trying to keep the noise down so as not to disturb me because he was so quiet. Too quiet. Eventually my curiosity won over and I decided to get up and introduce myself. The room was empty except for me and a couple of lizards on the ceiling. Since then I slept with all the lights on whenever my flesh-and-blood roommate was out late.

A couple of friends who dropped by my room (on separate occasions) reported seeing white dwarfs – no, not little Caucasians but good or positive dwarfs. I had nothing to fear they said. They come in when I leave for work. They leave when I come home.

Anyways, back to the tour…

It was now about 6.00 pm and the sun had sunk behind the ancient volcano known as Mt. Makiling that watches over the entire campus. The devastating fire of its crater has been extinguished perhaps thousands of years ago because no one even remembers the last time Mt. Makiling threw a fiery temper tantrum. Today the crater is a popular attraction known as the mud spring.

It is about a four kilometer easy uphill hike from the forestry compound. The scenery hardly changes but I never tire of it even though I have went up and down that road so many times…often alone. Those who consider hiking an unnecessary part of the mud spring experience can actually take a vehicle up to shorten the hiking to about half a kilometer or less. The road, however, is in various stages of deterioration and depending on the vehicle’s shock absorbers the ride can range from bumpy to hard rock and roll.

The mud spring is a pond that changes in size every now and then but it never really achieves a significant size. Of course at the mud spring size does not matter. What captures attention is the boiling mud hot enough to cook an egg. The place is frequently draped in dainty fog, actually steam, that stinks of what people describe as rotten egg. It is the pungent odor of sulfur – the stench of hell – and I often imagine descending towards the bowel of the earth through this opening.

The amazing thing about mud spring is that it is surrounded by plants and trees. There is a fig tree, as big and tall as the other forest trees, yet its base is surrounded by tiny fissures that emit steam. I don’t know how its root system survives the hot and acrid underground.

The wailing of insects can be deafening even at midday. I was there with a friend, a first-time visitor to mud spring, we were sitting under a tree resting when the sound of the insects crescendoed to a volume I never thought possible. It was so loud we had to shout out our conversation although we were not more than two feet away from each other. Finally, we gave up, shut up and waited till it died down.

When we got there we chanced upon a small group of people, not students or tourists, but towns folk engaged in some sort of folk religion. One man was playing a guitar and they were singing an unfamiliar song. In their midst was a small lit candle carefully placed in an upright position on top of a piece of a banana leaf.

When they left we came over to inspect their “altar” but all we saw was the remains of the candle. It has been transformed into a solid pool of white wax on the banana leaf. The cadaver of the wick stuck in the middle.

UPLB is at the very foot of this mountain where the legendary forest sylph Maria Makiling used to inhabit. Stories have it she got fed up with the townspeople who abused her generosity. They were constantly borrowing her things but never bothered to return them. One day she simply disappeared becoming more reclusive than Greta Garbo with occasional sightings being reported every now and then. Could Maria Makiling be Mother Nature herself? And would Mother Nature withheld her favors one day and disappear after centuries or putting up with our relentless greed for her riches?

My guide and I made our way the uphill road that leads to the SEARCA Dorm. The road separates the Men’s Dorm and the Women’s Dorm but apparently not the amorous intentions of residents staying in the buildings across each other. It was not uncommon for me to overhear flirtatious remarks being thrown from one of the windows of the Men’s Dorm and warmly welcomed (or coyly deflected) by residents in the Women’s Dorm.

But not that night. It was the middle of the sem break and both dorms were still, dark and abandoned. Totally drained of the usual reckless energy of youth those building walls can barely contain. I was talking to my guide, not about ghosts but something else, when I saw him take a quick sideways glance towards the empty Men’s Dorm Building. I saw his posture change from relaxed strolling to a stiff upright position. I thought he was going to bolt and run.

He held his head high, facing forward, his adam’s apple bobbing up and down nervously. He moved closer to me…so close that I stopped swinging my left arm to avoid hitting his right arm.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I saw something inside the dorm,” he whispered. “It was looking out the window waving at me. I feel cold.” I touched his arm and his skin felt clammy. By this time we were at the entrance of the SEARCA Dorm. He turned to me and asked “Do you want me to tell you EVERYTHING I might see inside?”

I called it off. Some things are really better left unseen.

Umali Auditorium is flanked by two bridges. A few feet on its left is the taken-for granted Palma Bridge. To many, it’s just a bridge. But I have always been fascinated by its charming pre-war old-world flavor. It is also said to be haunted by a headless priest – beheaded by the Japanese during the Second World War – that appears after midnight. The specter was not confirmed by my guide, but then again he doesn’t’ wait around for it, either.

Further behind the auditorium is the Molawin Bridge. Molawin Bridge looks sleek and ultra-modern compared to Palma Bridge. What it lacks in architecture it makes up for the view. I have a fear of heights but I could never resist taking a quick peek at the creek running below it.

During the rainy season the creek becomes a river overrun by muddy water from the mountains. In the summer it becomes a gentler version, its water clearer and the dramatic huge boulders, typical of mountain river systems, framed by lush greeneries look so beautiful.

It only takes seconds before my vertigo kicks in, forcing me to pull back and step off the pedestrian lane into the middle of the bridge. Fortunately, it doesn’t have much vehicular traffic. Because it is out of the way it doesn’t attract too much pedestrian traffic as well, which I think is a shame.

By my estimate Molawin is about three times as long as the older bridge but it has been christened as the Never Ending Bridge for a different reason. It was said that elemental spirits would sometimes play tricks on people who cross it at the stroke of midnight. They would walk for hours yet never reach the other end until they take off their clothes and wear them inside out. I often cross that bridge at night on my way home from the library. It does seem to take longer to cross it in the dark than in the light day but I never had to do the clothes thing.

At one end of the bridge, just behind the main library is an arch that bookmarkes something no one hardly remembers. A stone monument that had weathered the natural elements but had been eroded from people’s memory.

At the other end is a very steep road that leads to the Forestry Campus. Completing this first 50 meters is the hardest part of the two kilometer road if you choose to hike all the way because the road is sharply inclined before the road levels off right in front of the College Health Center.

The Center or Infirmary is infamous for its supposedly high patient death rate. It is rumored to be a ground zero for ghosts of patients who allegedly died needlessly from bungled medical practice. At night this steep road between Molawin Bridge and the Infirmary was also one of the most poorly lit.

Public jeepneys to the Forestry Campus usually stop after 10pm. One night, I lost track of time while with my friends and I had no choice but to walk home. In broad daylight walking home was one of my favorite things to do. People thought I was either too broke or too cheap to take public transportation. In reality walking is my yoga. It soothes me. My mind was most lucid during these walks. At night, however, it was an unpleasant chore and I could not wait for it to end.

As I neared the top end of the road I heard rustling sounds behind me. I turned around and I saw what appeared to be the right leg and the right arm of a child in the act of climbing a nearby tree. But being past midnight I didn’t think it was an ordinary child. I wasn’t even sure it was human. I stood there experiencing for the first time the expression “paralyzed with fear.”

And then the thing changed his position so that it is now completely behind the tree. So it knew I was watching “him”. And I knew it was watching me. I wanted to turn around and run but I was afraid it might chase after me. Being on the steepest part of the road I thought that would put me at a great disadvantage

The only thing I could do was walk backwards very slowly up the road I making it twice as hard. But as soon as I got to the level part I took off and never stopped trotting till I reached my dorm – two kilometers away. Had the track coach saw me that night I would have made the team.

The next day I was inundated by a slew of explanations. From a very human child catching roosting birds (in the dark and past midnight?). To a tyanak, an elemental that looks as nasty as Chuckie the homicidal doll (about the same size and temperament, too). To a kapre, a tobacco-smoking giant who gets the blame whenever somebody dies in his sleep (the kapre allegedly sits on his sleeping victim’s face and sticks his dick and balls inside the person’s mouth and nostrils until the victim suffocates).

To a tikbalang, a horse-man creature (if you’re guttsy enough to wrestle with one and manage to pluck a strand of hair from its mane the tikbalang becomes a loyal slave until you free it). I never saw my mystery monster again because I never passed by that road at night since.

Our next destination, the Student Union building more popularly known as the SU. I had my first dinner there. It was my first time to be away from home and I felt a bit lost. I remember eating a cube of mint-flavored gelatin partly to celebrate my independence but mainly to calm my nerves. Mint-flavored gelatin was my firs comfort food and I ended up eating a lot of gelatin there for the next few weeks.

The SU is the recreational center of the campus. Aside from the cafeteria it housed a bowling lane and a billiard hall, a bookstore and provided a lot of space for student club meetings. And according to my guide it also housed not one, not two but three ghosts.

“All of them are on the second floor,” my guide told me. “One is a child; the other is a former school paper editor who disappeared, another victim of martial law. He still haunts the editorial staff room.”

But I found the third ghost to be most intriguing. He described it is a disembodied hand that occupies the building’s Function Room. The hand, he said, likes to startle him by suddenly appearing just inches away from his face in the “Stop in the name of Love” position made famous by Diana Ross and the Supremes.

(To be continued…)