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MIDNIGHT STORIES
Spirit of the glass
It's back! Midnight Stories will be posted every evening of October to celebrate the month of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. Here's our fourth installment. Enjoy!
It was a game the kids in school played when they were bored. A bunch of them would sit on the floor and hold their version of a séance around a homemade Ouija board made with a length of cartolina bought from the corner sari-sari store, a pen and an upside-down drinking glass.
They would mark this board with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and the words “yes” or “no.” Some—like my sister, who played spirit of the coin with her friends when she was in high school—would add the words “hello” and “goodbye” to signify the start and end of a session with whoever spirit comes forward and agrees to play the game with them.
It was a popular game after lights out during camp or sleepovers. My sister said they played it during vacant periods between classes. She said they only channeled “good” spirits and always took care to create a protective circle made of salt to keep away malicious beings.
I remember her setting up a board at home, using a coin instead of a drinking glass, and bullying me into participating in the game. “Put two of your fingers on top of the coin like so”—she demonstrated this—“and then the spirit we summon will spell out the answers to the questions we put to it.”
I reluctantly did as she told me, but no matter how closely we followed the instructions on how to play the game, we couldn’t seem to make the coin move.
“I think there should be one more of us playing this,” she surmised, “and candles and incense to create the atmosphere and to draw spirits to the circle.”
“Or”—and here she shot me a dark look—“ maybe you’re blocking it!” I put on my best poker face and agreed to try it one more time, with Ate taking charge because only she knew what to do and only she knew the incantation.
Grabbing both my hands, she read from a piece of paper she placed on the floor beside her: "Spirits of the past, move among us. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us."
I felt goosebumps crawl all over my body and tried to extricate myself from her grasp, but she didn’t let go of my hands. "Beloved, we bring you gifts from life into death. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us."
The coin remained in the middle of the board. “Spirit of the Coin, are you here?” she called out with growing impatience. I quailed in fear, willing that coin to stay put which it thankfully did.
Snorting in derision, she picked herself up from the floor and flounced off to bed, leaving me with her improvised version of the Ouija board and planchette on the floor.
As soon as I was sure she was asleep, I picked up the piece of cartolina by one edge and threw it out onto the middle of our terrace before jumping into bed and diving under the blanket, praying to my Angel of God for protection.
When I was a high school junior and we had a sleepover in school after the prom, some of my classmates decided to play it out of curiosity. We lost a classmate the school year before, Helen, and they tried to ask her to join their circle. The school principal had ordered the lights switched off an hour earlier, so they huddled in a corner with only a candle for illumination.
After a while they decided to give it up (to my immense relief), saying Helen was resting and did not want to be disturbed.
I’ve never been comfortable or felt the urge to delve in séances and play with Ouija boards because I’ve been told that when information is sought from supernatural sources, the only spirits contacted are evil spirits mimicking the dead person contacted.
And to actually trap such malevolent spirits in an inverted drinking glass and ask it to spell out its answers to your questions is, to my mind, a very dangerous game to play.
One of my former colleagues told us story about how a neighbor and her friends played the game one night but started feeling weird in the middle of the session. He said the room suddenly became so hot that cockroaches started crawling out of the walls and crevices in unusually large numbers.
The players fled the house and would not return until a priest had been fetched to bless it and cast out whatever entity had come through the Ouija board as portal.
Another colleague who used to play it as a child said that all the spirits they summoned over time somehow got trapped in their house. “Naipon yung lahat nang tinawag namin sa bahay namin,” is how she put it.
The ones in her room made their presence felt by a sudden rush of wind, pulling her blankets off as she tried to pray (“nagdadasal ako kaso walang nabubuong dasal”), sitting on her bed, and when she made the mistake of turning around once to see who it was, found it lying down next to her. It shouted “Hoy!” to her face.
When they decided to sell the house because of the angry ghosts that were haunting it, the buyers later told them a female entity would walk into a wall over and over again, shouting as she seeped through the wood.
Or there’d be sounds of a party in progress every night, with ghostly visitors dropping in on the house’s new occupants.
But the QC townhouse my colleague moved into came with its share of spirits as well, including a girl and a young couple.
The unit’s previous occupant had no hesitation about apprising them that in the '70s, a girl had been raped and killed on the premises, and that her body had been found on the veranda, but that the case had never been solved.
Rovie spoke to the presences in the room the next time she felt them, asking them why they would not show themselves to her.
She woke up to find a child in an empire-waist first communion white dress floating above her on the bed.
And while cleaning house on another occasion, came face to face with her doppelganger!
So be careful what you get yourselves into. Spirit of the glass is not something you want to be fooling around with because you never know what you might draw in. It might be a nasty spook, an angry ghost, or a demon pretending to be the dead relative you were channeling.
And when the lights are low, the wind howling outside and you’re home alone, you might catch the scent of funereal flowers in the air and someone floating down the stairs.
Or, if you have the luck of the devil, a hint of fire and brimstone. — BM, GMA News
It was a game the kids in school played when they were bored. A bunch of them would sit on the floor and hold their version of a séance around a homemade Ouija board made with a length of cartolina bought from the corner sari-sari store, a pen and an upside-down drinking glass.
They would mark this board with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and the words “yes” or “no.” Some—like my sister, who played spirit of the coin with her friends when she was in high school—would add the words “hello” and “goodbye” to signify the start and end of a session with whoever spirit comes forward and agrees to play the game with them.
It was a popular game after lights out during camp or sleepovers. My sister said they played it during vacant periods between classes. She said they only channeled “good” spirits and always took care to create a protective circle made of salt to keep away malicious beings.
I remember her setting up a board at home, using a coin instead of a drinking glass, and bullying me into participating in the game. “Put two of your fingers on top of the coin like so”—she demonstrated this—“and then the spirit we summon will spell out the answers to the questions we put to it.”
I reluctantly did as she told me, but no matter how closely we followed the instructions on how to play the game, we couldn’t seem to make the coin move.
“I think there should be one more of us playing this,” she surmised, “and candles and incense to create the atmosphere and to draw spirits to the circle.”
“Or”—and here she shot me a dark look—“ maybe you’re blocking it!” I put on my best poker face and agreed to try it one more time, with Ate taking charge because only she knew what to do and only she knew the incantation.
Grabbing both my hands, she read from a piece of paper she placed on the floor beside her: "Spirits of the past, move among us. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us."
I felt goosebumps crawl all over my body and tried to extricate myself from her grasp, but she didn’t let go of my hands. "Beloved, we bring you gifts from life into death. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us."
The coin remained in the middle of the board. “Spirit of the Coin, are you here?” she called out with growing impatience. I quailed in fear, willing that coin to stay put which it thankfully did.
Snorting in derision, she picked herself up from the floor and flounced off to bed, leaving me with her improvised version of the Ouija board and planchette on the floor.
As soon as I was sure she was asleep, I picked up the piece of cartolina by one edge and threw it out onto the middle of our terrace before jumping into bed and diving under the blanket, praying to my Angel of God for protection.
After a while they decided to give it up (to my immense relief), saying Helen was resting and did not want to be disturbed.
I’ve never been comfortable or felt the urge to delve in séances and play with Ouija boards because I’ve been told that when information is sought from supernatural sources, the only spirits contacted are evil spirits mimicking the dead person contacted.
And to actually trap such malevolent spirits in an inverted drinking glass and ask it to spell out its answers to your questions is, to my mind, a very dangerous game to play.
One of my former colleagues told us story about how a neighbor and her friends played the game one night but started feeling weird in the middle of the session. He said the room suddenly became so hot that cockroaches started crawling out of the walls and crevices in unusually large numbers.
The players fled the house and would not return until a priest had been fetched to bless it and cast out whatever entity had come through the Ouija board as portal.
Another colleague who used to play it as a child said that all the spirits they summoned over time somehow got trapped in their house. “Naipon yung lahat nang tinawag namin sa bahay namin,” is how she put it.
The ones in her room made their presence felt by a sudden rush of wind, pulling her blankets off as she tried to pray (“nagdadasal ako kaso walang nabubuong dasal”), sitting on her bed, and when she made the mistake of turning around once to see who it was, found it lying down next to her. It shouted “Hoy!” to her face.
When they decided to sell the house because of the angry ghosts that were haunting it, the buyers later told them a female entity would walk into a wall over and over again, shouting as she seeped through the wood.
Or there’d be sounds of a party in progress every night, with ghostly visitors dropping in on the house’s new occupants.
But the QC townhouse my colleague moved into came with its share of spirits as well, including a girl and a young couple.
The unit’s previous occupant had no hesitation about apprising them that in the '70s, a girl had been raped and killed on the premises, and that her body had been found on the veranda, but that the case had never been solved.
Rovie spoke to the presences in the room the next time she felt them, asking them why they would not show themselves to her.
She woke up to find a child in an empire-waist first communion white dress floating above her on the bed.
And while cleaning house on another occasion, came face to face with her doppelganger!
So be careful what you get yourselves into. Spirit of the glass is not something you want to be fooling around with because you never know what you might draw in. It might be a nasty spook, an angry ghost, or a demon pretending to be the dead relative you were channeling.
And when the lights are low, the wind howling outside and you’re home alone, you might catch the scent of funereal flowers in the air and someone floating down the stairs.
Or, if you have the luck of the devil, a hint of fire and brimstone. — BM, GMA News
