Growing up with the ghosts of soldiers

It's back! Midnight Stories will be posted throughout October to celebrate the month of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. Here's our next installment. Enjoy!

There is a place in Guagua, Pampanga that tricycle drivers refuse to enter at night: a patch of land locals simply refer to as "Cervantes," our family name.

I always wondered if they were merely hesitant to pass through our towering blue gate because doing so would be going in blind. Once 6 p.m. hits, the light starts to seep out, and looking into the entrance is like staring into a hole. The streetlamp outside our gate is always conveniently busted. So are the lights in the pergola, and at the first house and the second.

Or maybe someone saw something, and someone believed it.

One of our visitors once told my aunt, "Ang daming nagbabantay sa lugar niyo."

The original wing of my grandfather's house. Photos: Jessica Bartolome

Lights out

From what I know, Guagua played a part in the Second World War as a battleground. My grandfather used to tell us stories about how he was born in a cemetery while his parents were fleeing from Japanese soldiers.

Years later, my grandfather built a house on a patch of land he called his. It was often plagued by floods so he built another wing on higher ground. He and his wife and their five kids moved to the new wing.

One time my mother, in a fit of daring and stubbornness, decided she would sleep in her old room in the older part of the house alone.

My aunts had chickened out of sleeping there for another night. They claimed that they heard footsteps of someone wearing heavy boots and chains outside the house.

One of the gates through which you could enter our property

My aunts had chickened out of sleeping there for another night. They claimed that they heard footsteps of someone wearing heavy boots and chains outside the house.

With pride keeping her from joining her family in the new place, my mother turned off the lights.

The moment she climbed into bed, there was the unmistakable sound of a switch.

Light flooded the room.

She crept towards the light switch, flicked it off and on again and noted how difficult it was to press, how impossible it would have been that it might have just slipped.

She never slept in the old house again.

An empty house structure within our property

An unattended pond by the property's entrance

Boot steps

I always figured it was a joke they were all in on, the stories about the ghost soldiers prowling across our property at night.

Having moved to Manila in high school, I rarely sleep in our house in Guagua anymore.

In one of my visits back in college, I slept over in my aunt's wing. Outside the window, the moon was reflected in the waist-high flood that just never left one day. It was my grandfather's old house, the original one.

What used to be a basketball and tennis court, now flooded

My cousin sleeps early. I stayed up reading beside her and fell asleep to the sounds of my uncle shuffling back and forth outside, probably making the trip from his wing to the kitchen for food.

I complained about it to my cousin next day.

She looked at me quizzically and replied, "Tito Randy's not home." — BM, GMA News