A neighbor told us how this lady without a head once waved at her. It was dusk, we were children. Having yet to come of age, we had the right to scream. Delight, fits, and fear. The neighbor—Ate Jean, we called her—said she was taking out the trash one night when she saw someone in a white dress behind the chain-link fence that bordered what used to be a preschool. She dumped the garbage, took a closer look at the strange thing by the yard in front of hers. She realized then, that night, that a decapitated ghost was haunting the now-unoccupied place which we had called our school for years before we became first graders. She was quite certain it was a lady. “She raised her hand,” Ate Jean said while we stared at her wide-eyed, “and waved like an old friend.” We had just huddled around her, cooling down after hours of games before the sun had set, in front of the street’s only sari-sari store. We didn’t yell out of fright. We murmured though, scared out of our wits, eyeing the untrimmed grass of the lot just a few steps away from where we sat.

A few years passed and I was in grade school. I was enrolled in a private non-sectarian school which nonetheless adhered to Catholic rituals. We had rosaries at one quarter of the year, First Friday masses every month, the Angelus and three o’clock habit every day. Twice it happened that a student collapsed on the floor, right smack in the middle of a prayer and interrupted the whole thing with screams as if she was being skewered for the rotisserie. Twice they brought her to the school clinic—I am not sure, to be frank, if it was the same student—and had to be restrained by several people. Word got around that the student was possessed by a certain malignant spirit. This spirit must have been the one responsible for the heebie-jeebies we all got one Friday afternoon when the Philippine flag was brought down the pole by CAT officers, while the rest of the school crooned to the tune of “Pilipinas Kong Mahal,” led by a student standing on the stage with a mic. After the song and after the flag was folded into a triangle by the three officers, one of the teachers stepped up on the stage and was handed the mic. “Next week,” she began and for the next few minutes, she talked about some programs we had to prepare for. Suddenly, she stopped in the middle of a sentence. Must have been a couple of seconds; curious look on her face. She looked like she was straining to hear something she missed after having interrupted someone. Then she spoke again, picking from where she left off. But everyone lined up on the ground looked uneasy. There were murmurs as the teacher went on speaking. “Did you hear that?” I heard a classmate say behind me. “It was a child, I swear,” another one said, “a child spoke into the mic with Ma’am.” There was only one microphone.

I still had misgivings on the subject of ghosts’ existence. I attended a university the campus of which served as an internment camp for POWs during the Second World War. There were rumors about the main building serving as a pad for headless priests, the large wooden staircase by one of its entrances a hotspot for ghoul sightings. I think of them as urban legends. Things to keep in your arsenal should you want to scare the hell out of a gullible friend you might be with when passing by its canopy.

What a curious thing then when one night, after having stayed out late with friends on Dapitan Street, I found myself entering the school’s gate, alone. They had turned off most of the lamplights. I was going home, it was almost midnight. I walked on a side opposite the main building; I didn’t have a choice. It was at the center of the campus. I tottered along the building where my college was, facing the eastern side of the main building. It towered in the dark night, 86-meter long, old gray stone Renaissance Revival. The glass windows turned into mirrors with the absence of light inside the classrooms. I walked, knees buckling. I didn’t fear ghosts. But I felt a prickling sensation at the back of my neck, like someone was watching from behind, or beside me, as I walked along the length of the building. There was no moon. I just wanted to walk by without incident, but I couldn’t help it. I had walked with my sight straight ahead for the first few seconds. But I couldn’t help turning my head, to the left, at the side of the main building, with its dark mirrors and unmoving trees and…

What is it about ghost stories that fascinates us? Is it the same curiosity that leads some of us to stop at the sight of a pile-up, secretly wishing to see sprawled bodies? Some level of perversion? Maybe not. Perhaps we tell, devise, or listen to ghost stories because we want to glimpse at the past, or even the present, beyond the clutch of official records, stone-cold facts, and reasoning that sit well with our current laws of physics. Ghost stories known to more than two people are a collective effort to make sense of what couldn’t be grasped by just one. We tell them to make sense of shapes we see in the dark, voices we couldn’t trace back to anyone in broad daylight.

And, in a way, the stories we tell are ghosts. While storytelling is an attempt to make sense of an experience, or an affirmation of life, what comes off it will lurk around, haunt the more discerning minds, cast a shadow not everyone could see in certain corners. To tell a story is to be at the mercy of those who receive it, the listeners or the readers. They may receive your ghosts with the willingness of an innocent child, or with a grain of salt.

I am now gullible to these ghosts. The former preschool was a few houses from ours, now occupied by a family, and at night I’d cast a furtive look in its direction, hoping that the lady without a head wouldn’t be there, waving at me. My ears were cocked for a time towards strange sounds as if any minute an evil spirit would pop in a classroom. The night I walked alone by the school’s main building I had looked around and saw nothing. I went home that night in a single piece.

But we all know that ghosts will stay, will be there, waiting in corners. Waiting to be told. And in the act of telling their stories, we are making them a part, or a justification, of our often-baffling present reality.

George Gonzaga Deoso is the author of The Horseman's Revolt and Other Horrors (USTP, 2020), a collection of dark short fiction. He is currently residing in Quezon City with his family, three dogs, and a cat named Mingming.

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