Some of my childhood memories lie somewhere between reality and imagination.
Growing up in rural Pardo, Cebu, I was surrounded by folklore and superstitions that were woven into everyday life.
Stories of spirits, witches, and other mysterious beings filled our conversations and shaped the way I saw the world.
Whether those experiences were truly supernatural or simply the vivid imagination of a child, they left a lasting impression on me and sparked a lifelong curiosity about the mysteries of life.
The following are the most notable experiences I had in my childhood.
Voices in the Dark Kitchen
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?
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.
Whispers of the Dead
There was an elderly woman I was attached to dearly when I was young: Mama Diyang, the wife of my father's uncle. She lived about a kilometer from our home, near the public market. Whenever I passed by, she would greet me with a warm smile and gently place her hand on my forehead, offering the quiet blessing that many elders bestowed upon the young.
She never failed to pinch my cheeks with affection, and before I left, she would always slip a few coins into my palm. They were small gestures, but to a child, they were expressions of love that made every visit feel special.
Then, one morning before dawn, I awoke with a feeling I have never been able to explain. It was not a sound that disturbed my sleep, nor a dream that lingered after waking. Instead, it was a sudden and unmistakable certainty that Mama Diyang was gone.
The feeling arrived without warning and struck me with quiet conviction. I lay awake for a few moments, holding the thought in silence, before eventually drifting back to sleep. When morning came, my mother gently confirmed what I had somehow already known.
Mama Diyang had passed away at dawn.
Even now, I cannot explain how I came to know before anyone told me. Perhaps it was coincidence. Perhaps it was the mysterious way grief sometimes reaches those who are bound by a deep connection. Whatever the explanation, that dawn remains one of the most enduring memories of my childhood, a moment when certainty arrived before the news itself.
A Ghostly Shadow
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.
A Jab Behind My Back
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.
My Doppelganger
I was probably five or six years old when my father came home from the market visibly upset. He insisted that I had disappeared from my aunt's house after he had left me there before going to the market. My aunt, he said, had searched for me in panic but could not find me anywhere.
The strange part was that I had never left our house. I had stayed exactly where I had been told by him not to come with him.
Convinced that I had disobeyed, my father punished me by making me kneel on a heap of coarse salt for an hour or two. Even after the physical pain eventually faded due to the punishment, the confusion remained. I could not understand why everyone was so certain they had seen me somewhere I knew I had never been.
Growing up, I had often heard stories about a doppelganger or what some call a double, a mysterious clone believed in local folklore to appear in another place while the real person remained elsewhere. Adults spoke of such stories with surprising seriousness, and like many children, I listened without knowing where folklore ended and reality began.
The idea was more petrifying to me than any ghost story. I imagined another version of myself wandering about unnoticed, wearing my face, confusing others, and leaving me to answer for things I had never done.
Whether there was a simple misunderstanding that day or merely the imagination of frightened adults, I cannot say. What has stayed with me is not the punishment itself, but the strange feeling of being held responsible for something I sincerely believed I had never done. For a young child, that was a frightening thought, one that lingered in my imagination long after the pain in my knees had disappeared.
My Double Again?
My mother often told relatives that I was a lucky child. Whenever they would visit, she happily recounted the story of how my older brother and sister had won a remarkable amount of prizes and money at a fiesta carnival because I had supposedly been with them.
There was only one problem.
I had never gone with them.
As a younger and still fragile child, I was rarely allowed to join their outings. Whenever they went to the carnival, I begged to come along, but they usually refused. They thought I was still too young and too small to keep up with them.
So each time I heard my mother tell the story, I stood quietly nearby, puzzled by a memory that everyone else seemed to share except me. I wanted to tell her that I had never been there, yet she spoke with such certainty that I began to wonder whether correcting her would make any difference at all.
My father eventually became convinced that I carried some unusual good fortune. One day, he took me to the carnival himself and asked me to choose numbers for one of the betting games, hoping to discover whether the stories were true. He managed to win a few rounds of the popular "jumping horse" game, just enough to strengthen his belief, though certainly not enough to prove anything extraordinary.
Looking back, I suspect my siblings were simply fortunate during those carnival visits. Coincidence has a way of becoming legend within families, especially when a good story grows richer with each retelling.
Still, I sometimes smile when I remember it. Having once been mistaken for someone who was supposedly seen in another place, I could not help wondering whether this was another case of my childhood "double" receiving credit for adventures I had never experienced. Of course, it's hard to believe. But as a child, after hearing so many stories about mysterious doubles and uncanny coincidences, it was difficult not to let my imagination wander.
Whether it was luck, coincidence, or simply the way family stories evolve over time, one thing is certain: some memories become less about what actually happened and more about what people choose to remember. Those stories, repeated often enough, probably just take on a life of their own.
A Sharp Finger Pushed Me Up
The last room of our old house had a raised wooden floor, its slats resting about a meter above the ground with narrow gaps between them. At night, we slept on woven mats beneath a mosquito net, and during quiet evenings we could sometimes hear the wind whispering up through the spaces below.
One stormy night, rain drummed steadily against the roof as I drifted into a deep sleep. Without warning, I was jolted awake by a heavy thud. Something had struck the side of the house beneath the window where I was sleeping. It didn't sound like the wind. It was louder, heavier, more deliberate, as though something solid had crashed against the wall before dropping on the ground.
Then I felt something that has remained with me ever since. Through the mat, something long, narrow, and pointed pressed upward from between the floorboards. It felt firm and purposeful, almost like a finger probing from beneath the house, though I never actually saw what it was.
I didn't scream. Instead, I quietly rolled onto my side and gathered every pillow within reach, placing them beneath me as though they could somehow shield me from whatever was below. Once I had created that small barrier, I lay perfectly still.
At some point during the night, exhaustion overcame fear, and I drifted back to sleep.
By morning, everything was as it had always been. There was no sign of what had awakened me, and I never spoke of the incident to anyone. Whether it had been a branch driven upward by the storm, a frightened animal beneath the house, a shifting floorboard, or simply the imagination of a frightened child, I cannot say.
What has remained with me is not the mystery itself, but the vivid memory of lying awake in the darkness, convinced that something unseen had reached up from beneath the floor, if only for a single moment.
A Witch in the Neighborhood
There was a woman who lived nearby whom the neighbors spoke of only in whispers. Here name was Balen. I often saw her pass by our house. Her eyes appeared unusually red, as did those of her son. Whether there was a simple medical explanation or something else never crossed my mind as a child. Like everyone around me, I accepted the stories I had heard.
Whenever we children saw her approaching, some of us would call out, "Balen Ongo!", a local language referring to the woman as witch or "Balen the witch" in English translation. Whenever we did that to her, she would just lower her head, quicken her pace, and continue walking without ever responding.
In local folklore, the ongo was a figure greatly feared. People believed she possessed supernatural powers, including the ability to transform into a pig, not an ordinary pig, but one unlike any found on a farm.
According to the stories told by our elders, this strange creature wore wooden sandals, known locally as bakya. On quiet nights, people claimed they could hear the unmistakable tok... tok... tok... of wooden footwear echoing through the darkness. They called it anay nga nagbakya or a "sow wearing wooden sandals", a sound that was, said to send shivers through anyone who heard it.
The ongo was also believed to travel with the sigbin, another creature of Visayan folklore. It was often described as having the appearance of a small kangaroo or goat, moving with an unnatural gait and emerging only after dark. Many believed it served its master, accompanying the witch on her nightly wanderings.
Then there was the kikik, a black bird named for the eerie sound it made at night, a sharp, screeching "kikik… kikik… kikik" cutting through the dark. The elders swore its call played tricks on you: when it sounded far away, that meant it was already close. When it sounded close, right on top of you, it meant the creature was actually far off. You could never trust your own ears with the kikik and that, more than anything, was what made it terrifying.
As children, we swallowed every story whole, not because we were gullible, but because we trusted the adults who told them. And the world back then was thick with mystery, the kind that felt utterly real when you were small enough to believe it. Our imaginations did the rest, filling every gap with something half-true and wholly terrifying.
Age has taught me to separate folklore from fact. But those stories still matter to me, maybe more now than ever, because they reveal just how deeply tradition ran through the veins of our community. They remind me of something I'll never forget: that childhood is the one time in life when imagination, culture, and fear tangle together so tightly, you can't tell where one ends and the other begins.
The Trumpet-like Sound in the Night
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.
The Vampire in the Rice Fields
By the time I reached my later years in grade school, 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 eerie 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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