MY 1989 HORROR STORY
When I was about four or five years old—specifically back when I was in Prep A—I had a midnight encounter that I carried with me for decades.
It was late at night, and my parents were already fast asleep. Even though I had my own bedroom, the lure of the air conditioning always drew me to sleep on the floor of my parents' room instead.
That night, I crawled under my dad’s desk, which served as his mini home office in the corner of the bedroom. As I sat there in the dark, an old lady wearing a heavy black dress, a matching black lace overlay, and a solemn black lace veil calmly joined me.
Without a hint of malice, she picked up one of my own storybooks—one of the volumes my mom usually read to help me fall asleep, though this specific one hadn't been touched yet. She opened it and began reading me the story of Rapunzel.
She told me how a witch who acted like a cruel stepmother locked the girl away in a high tower, how a prince climbed up but fell into a hedge of sharp roses that left him completely blind, and how years later, Rapunzel found him wandering as a blind beggar and saved him.
AI GENERATED IMAGE OF AN OLD CHILDHOOD MEMORY
The next morning, the magic dissolved into absolute panic. My mom woke me up, deeply confused about why I had fallen asleep under the desk. When I casually explained that I went under there to play because an old lady in a black veil had joined me to read a story, she was utterly spooked. She immediately called a mang ta-tawas to cleanse the house.
I remember watching the ritual intently: he let the melting candle wax drip slowly into a small enamel bowl filled with water to form a figure, and then held a piece of paper coated in a distinct, coconut-scented oil called lana directly over the flame until dark, smoky blots appeared.
Looking back, the smoky image on the paper looked like a completely normal, generic soot blot. The hardened wax figure in the enamel bowl simply looked like a random puddle of candle grease that happened to have one spot cooling slightly higher than the rest. In my young eyes, there was absolutely nothing there.
But the older people in the room "saw" things with absolute certainty, effortlessly interpreting the weird blots and jagged wax formations. It was an elaborate exercise in the power of suggestion—the exact same psychological trick that makes us find faces in the clouds or draw mythological creatures out of a random constellation of stars.
AI GENERATED IMAGE OF AN OLD CHILDHOOD MEMORY
The mang ta-tawas spun a terrifyingly vivid tale. He claimed that the backyard spot where we kept our trash was actually the throne of an engkanto princess. He declared that the old lady was her nanny, and though it wasn't clear if she approached me out of pure curiosity or spite, we needed to appease the elements.
He even added a layer of grand, mystical architecture to the haunting, explaining that our house was built on a "sapa"—a natural creek or highway for elemental spirits to pass through. It was an elaborate, mystical description that completely enchanted my young imagination. My parents, who were only in their mid-20s at the time, fully agreed and were thoroughly spooked.
To appease these passing spirits, we were tasked with butchering a live chicken and pouring the blood directly onto the trash pile throne—though to this day, I have absolutely no memory of how we handled the meat afterward. To make things creepier, that exact night, my mom dreamt that the angry old lady in black attacked her with a cane. She woke up with a sharp, lingering pain in her leg.
AI GENERATED IMAGE OF AN OLD CHILDHOOD MEMORY
For years, I looked back on this as a genuine paranormal event, even discussing it with my therapist later in life as a hyper-vivid imaginary friend. But when you look at it analytically, the real-world logic is far more frustrating. My mom's terrifying dream and sudden leg pain were almost certainly just a routine midnight muscle cramp.
The mang ta-tawas didn't possess mystical insight; he simply looked around the room, spotted the Read It Yourself Ladybird book lying on the table, and mirrored the visual structure of the trailing dark cape drawn inside. My young mind merely filled in the visual gaps, translating Kathie Layfield's illustration of a fairytale witch hat into a culturally familiar black church veil.
Even the legendary, mystical "spirit highway" fell apart with time. When I asked my mom about last weekend, the grand illusion vanished completely. She laughed and told me the actual truth: our old neighbors simply didn't have functional drainage lines back then, so all of their wastewater flowed out of their property and straight into ours.
Yet, one lingering mystery remains: how was a four-year-old child able to accurately recite a dark, traditional Grimm plot from beginning to end before her mother had ever read it to her?
The supernatural explanation is that a veiled backyard spirit really did sit under the desk to read me a bedtime story. But the paperwork points to something else.
Looking back , the most likely truth is that I probably read the book myself. It was, afterall, designed for children my age then.
r maybe, everything was just as I saw it - something that should not have been there
