Scaring ourselves silly

All Souls’ Day and Halloween are always timely occasions to measure your OQ (Occult Quotient). It is the one day we have to ask ourselves if there is more to us than meets the eye. Indeed, are we made up of more than physical atoms and molecules? Are we more than body and mind? I believe that we do have a soul, or a “spirit” or “presence,” if we want the label to be less religion-sensitive. Whatever we call it, the spirit is truly a part — perhaps the most essential part — of our being.

The moment you accept that we can traverse a less corporal realm, the floodgates swing wide open. To the discomfort of most religions, we gingerly step into more than the faith-based spiritual sphere, but wander to the outer limits of the supernatural and the mystical.

A friend of mine, who was a student of the occult and paranormal, once told me that everyone had a third eye that could see beyond the physical world. Then, in a laconic drawl, he said, “Yours is half-open.” Spooked but curious, I asked him to explain. He said that I was deliberately stopping myself from “seeing more” because I was scared, skeptical, or uncomfortable with my “gift.” I said, most likely, all of the above.

My friends have always joked that I am a white witch. It’s normal for me to say the name of someone, then seconds later, the phone rings or I get a text from the person I was just thinking of. My encounters of the non-corporeal kind have so far been harmless and not particularly hair-raising. In fact, some were even satisfying in the karmic sense.

Once we had a regional client based in Hong Kong who was a major a-hole. He loved to torture his ad agency’s service teams. He once told his flabbergasted account manager, Michele, “ When I say jump, you should ask, ‘How high?’” Michele had no choice but to bitch, vent and whip the agency staff in return. She called me up livid about some imagined delay from the Philippine agency. When I asked her to calm down so I could understand the problem, she broke down and cried her heart out about the abuses she had been receiving from this client. I consoled her the best I could. I promised to fix the snag and ended the conversation by saying that a horrible man like that would not last on the job.

Exactly 15 minutes later, the poor account manager was on the phone again. The first thing Michele said was, “What did you do?” She proceeded to tell me that as soon as we ended our previous conversation, she called the problematic client to explain what the Philippine agency’s solution would be to the glitch. Before she could begin, he said, “Save it for the new regional marketing manager. I was just fired.” Michele was convinced I put a hex on him. From then on, I earned the nickname “Charmed” from the famous TV series about three witch-y sisters. Word got around that people shouldn’t cross me, or they would disappear. Sometimes, I wish I really had the power. But apparently I do not, because the occupant in Malacañang is still around.

I don’t have a personal ghost story to tell, maybe because my third eye is only half-open. Or my friends and loved ones who have passed away know that I have a rather under-developed OQ and cannot possibly be a competent conduit between the two worlds. But what’s Halloween without a good scare? Here are some chilling tales from the beyond as witnessed by good friends.

‘The Case of the Missing Bathrobe’

By Jev Ramos

My father, Joe Ramos, passed away Aug. 7 after a lingering battle with heart disease. He may have been known as a former Mr. Philippines and fitness guru, but one of his most memorable traits was his wicked sense of humor: plastic dog poop placed strategically on a carpet never failed to illicit exasperation from the women of the house. Shrieks from my sisters or household help told us that the rubber snakes, spiders, centipedes, etc., that mysteriously appeared on tables and inside closets were already discovered. A vial of stink bomb would make its way under the leg of a designated chair so when a guest would sit on it, the pungent smell of what seemed to be rotten eggs would fill the air. My dad would ask the poor fellow, “Did you break wind?” which of course sounded more gross in Tagalog. There was a fake severed arm that Dad would tuck under his long-sleeved sweatshirt. Pretending to have a sprain, he’d ask an unsuspecting victim to pull his “arm” to alleviate the pain. The poor victim would let out a scream, as he or she would be left holding my dad’s “cutoff” arm!

We were getting the house ready a day before the memorial service on the 11th. After a busy day, my mom went on to arrange Dad’s things in their bedroom. She and our mayor doma, Manang Baby, were looking for his favorite bathrobe, which was missing though they remembered having placed it on a hanger on the wall next to the bed. She and Manang Baby searched everywhere until Mom sat down on the bed to rest. Just then she felt something between the bedcover and the sheets. She pulled back the bedcover, and there on the bed, laid flat with the hanger still intact, was Dad’s favorite bathrobe! The bedcover had been in place the whole day. So the question was, how did that bathrobe get between the sheets and the bedcover? The only conclusion we had was, Dad the practical joker had struck again. We all smiled as we talked about it and felt comforted that truly, he was having the time of his life. Dad would have turned 82 on Nov. 21. Which reminds me, I need to buy a whoopee cushion.

‘Doctor’s Orders’

By Marilyn Villapando

My father-in-law was in the hospital, having just undergone a bypass operation. By the looks of it, the operation had been a success, and the doctors had already moved him out of the ICU to a room. People had even been allowed to visit.

Then, as often happens in these cases, one morning, after a few days of supposed recovery, his heart suddenly stopped. Later on the doctors would tell us that it went into “fibrillation” (a sort of rapid, irregular, and unsynchronized contraction).

We were called to rush to the hospital, and when we arrived, his room had already become like an operating room, filled with all manner of equipment and hospital staff frantically trying to revive him. In fact, his chest had been reopened, and his surgeon literally had my father-in-law’s heart in his hand, carefully massaging it to make it beat again.

My husband squeezed into the crowded room, and I stayed outside in the hallway, found a chair right across and sat down, watching the scene, and hoping that my father-in-law would come through.

Then, as clearly as one would see a real, live person, I caught sight of my dead mother-in-law walking towards the room. It was unmistakably her, in her usual crisp white skirt and blouse and high heels (she was also a doctor, was extremely proud of being one and practically all her outfits were white). That’s when I knew her husband wasn’t going to make it. As people would say, “Sinusundo na siya.” (He’s being picked up.) True enough, after what seemed like just 10 minutes or so, the doctors gave up and declared that it was futile to revive the patient.

In death, as in life, when my mother-in-law orders you to do something, you do it!

‘She Didn’t Know She was Dead’ by Ompong Remigio

In my teens, my grandmother suddenly died while visiting some errant relatives in Bacolor, Pamapanga. Often stubborn, she escaped one morning and rode the bus all by herself. She got to Bacolor, had a fight, had a heart attack and succumbed to an arterial blast. My dad recovered the body. My mom had a purple lace terno made. The wake ensued. While she was lying in state, my lola’s cousin dropped by our house and happily declared that she was just returning a visit. Violante, my lola, had come by that morning wearing a gorgeous lavender terno as she was sweeping the yard. My lola declined the offer to stay longer since she was rushing to be someplace else.

My mom had the joyful relative seated, had a glass of water and some “tranq” on standby before revealing that my lola had been dead for two days and that her burial gown was what she wore that fateful morning. Still, death couldn’t stop my lola from attending her own funeral. We saw her in her resplendent terno in church, seemingly not so pleased with the rites. But the myopic adults were so jaded that they didn’t believe us kids. We were happy to see that in the afterlife, lola hadn’t changed at all.

‘And They Died Happily Ever After’

I’ve had countless bouts with oddities like sci-fi-sounding screeches in the middle of the night, the smell of burned flesh, the marks of footprints visible to the entire household and the lasting friendship of a dwende who must have kept me company since I had rheumatic heart. Spirits do reply if you acknowledge their presence, as I had experienced. They whisper — voices eerily breathy that leave your ear cold. In my quiet moments, there were times that I saw them and heard them. Death didn’t do much damage. They still talked about going out for lunch, what to wear to a party, etc.

When I gave birth the third time around, I fell down a deep, deep hole, found peace as the first flicker of light appeared and got pulled back again just as I gracefully accepted my fate. This made death less traumatic. As my kids concluded, when asked how they would take my dying: “ It’s okay, Mommy. It’s still you except that you’re just a bit transparent.”

I did make a promise that I’d still look nice and not maggoty when I get to spook them.

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