Hi!
Newsletter #5 is about ghosts.
Yes, I realize so far we have talked about hauntings and death. Like I said in Newsletter #1, I created this space because I needed to ruminate on an idea for longer than a week. It’s quite possible I’ll be on this topic for a minute. I did start this newsletter on the Day of the Dead so…
First, let me tell you. I am a grown woman who is afraid of the dark. I prefer to sleep with the lights on at night. There is something about the light that feels like a cozy blanket and helps me get to sleep. My partner can’t sleep like that, so I’ve trained myself to not be so afraid. And not just for his sake. I’ve learned to overcome the fear of the dark because I do recognize that carrying this fear into my adult life is a bit ridiculous. I’ve mostly been successful at this, but there are some nights were I find myself the last one awake in the house and my duty is to turn off all the lights before I go to bed. I usually do this in a methodical way where I don’t ever have to walk across a room in total darkness. But sometimes, I’m sleepy and I forget the order of things. I’ve already turned off the lights in the hallway and the kitchen, and now I’m in the laundry room--the very back of the house. If I turn off the lights in the laundry room then I’d have to traverse the kitchen and hallway and back to the bedroom in the dark. All the light switches are on the opposite side of the room and turning them on when I’ve already crossed the dark room is pointless. Though everyone in the house is sleeping, I’m assuming what might be heard is a person scrambling through the house desperately trying to escape some horrible death. This doesn’t happen that often, but I’d be really be lying to myself if I say that it doesn’t happen at all.
I’m working through a story right now that feels like a haunting. So this week I’ve been revisiting the terrors of my childhood, when my fear of the dark was crippling. I remember so many nights lying awake in bed frozen, imagining all the things that could be lurking in the dark corners of my room or under my bed. If I think back to what scared me the most as a kid there are two things that dominate these memories: the manananggal and the tiyanak.
I learned about manananggals on a trip to the snow when I was really young. My uncle had taken my cousins and me to a cabin up in Lake Tahoe. It was probably one of the first overnight trips I had taken without my mom or grandma there. Before we went to bed my older cousins were chatting. I was too young be a part of the conversation, but I listened when they talked about this creature that looked like a beautiful women in the day, but at night her body would split in half at the waist with her guts trailing behind. Her top half would sprout wings and she would fly around at night and suck the blood out of people with her long tongue while they slept. Her favorite things to eat were unborn babies. She’d suck them straight out the womb. She also liked newborn babies and small children. As I silently eavesdropped, I sunk into my blanket and tried to turn my brain off from imagining this creature hunting for me in the night. (As I write this, I realize how fucking terrifying that is for a kid. No wonder I was afraid of the dark!)
The second most horrifying ghoul of my childhood, will also bring about the second confession of this newsletter. I used be terrified of babies. Yes. Babies used to scare the shit out of me. I’m most sorry to my little cousins, Mark and Jeremy, and also my little brother, Alex, who bore the brunt of my fear that if I was left alone with them in a room they would turn into demons. (If you guys are reading this, I’m really sorry I thought you were the devil incarnate.) Most of this fear had to do with a Tagalog movie I watched in the late 80s called Tiyanak. In the Philippines, the tiyanak is thought to originate from a dead fetus, which then takes the shape of a new born baby or small child in need of help or saving. When the creature finds a victim they will shape shift into a vampire-like creature and suck their blood. The film follows the lore pretty closely as the main character, who is desperate to have a baby after many miscarriages, takes in a baby her sister found in the jungle. Guess what happens next?
Many of the ghouls and ghosts in the Philippines share some common traits. They do their work at night. They suck blood. They reside in trees, the river, or nature generally. They also commonly take on the form of a beautiful woman or a child or small person. And more interestingly, a lot of the our folklore puts focus on pregnant woman and unborn children. So much here to cull.
There is a lot of research and source material on this, but what I find more interesting are the stories that have been passed down and told in the dark since even before Spanish colonization of the Philippines. They way this lore has made its way across the islands lends itself to different versions between towns and families. I’ve been talking with my cousins this week about the ghosts and monsters of our childhoods. Some have first-hand stories and others have their parents stories. Some of them are hauntings here in the US and some are ghosts that live back in the Philippines. What I’m finding while immersing myself in my family’s collective supernatural experience is that these are not just ghost stories--they are occurrences. Though told with a healthy amount of skepticism for the existence of ghosts, there is an understanding that the things that happened were real, even if inexplicable by logic. That beneath the impulse to reject the notions that ghosts and monsters do not exist there is a casual acceptance of a spirit world. And now I realize that when I occasionally find myself running mad through the dark house it is because I still believe in ghosts.
This past week I’ve been steeping in some of my greatest childhood fears. I’m not sure these creatures will actually appear in my story, but what I am thinking about are the subtle ways in which we live with our ghosts everyday and what degree of haunting is tolerable to us. In what ways do we accept the spirit world as a part of our lives? I’m also wondering at what point does a haunting no longer become acceptable. How many flickering lights and faucets turning off and on will one tolerate before they move or call the Ghostbusters? I’ve never associated my own writing as being the cause of my fears (although the blank page is frightening), but this week I was surprised to find myself creeped out by my own words in the middle of the night when no one else was awake. I’m not only conjuring up the manananggal and the tiyanak, but I’m doing what I said I’d do, which is invite them in for tea. I can’t say I’m not scared. I just know that this writing has to get done, even if it is terrifying.
On spooky things:
This is the film that inspired such terror in me as a kid. Apparently, this is a cult classic in the PI. (Sorry, no subtitles!)
Tiyanak (dir. Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes. 1988)
Some images of manananggals and tiyanaks from the interwebs (none of them as a scary as what I imagined as a kid):
Below, A manananggal stealing away with someone’s baby.
Below, the most Beyonce-looking manananggal on the interwebs.
This manananggal, below, is depicted with a horde of tiyanak. Maybe the fetuses of those she feasted on. (This is what most of the drawings look like online.)
In the first illustration below, a man is pouring salt on the bottom half of the manananggal, which prevents the top half from reuniting with the bottom. This would cause ultimate death for the manananggal who must reunite with her bottom half before daylight breaks. The second one depicts a tiyanak caught in a net. What’s interesting here is that these images were used in a 2013 campaign by Sen. Koko Pimental to address voter fraud tactics in the Philippines. (Source: Ads of the World)
There’s a tradition of Filipino horror I never knew about starting with pioneer filmmaker, Jose Nepomuceno, who made a silent film called Ang Manananggal in 1927. There are no copies of the film in existence, but here’s a still from his first film Dalagang Bukid, 1917.
Here are some horror movie posters from the 1940-50s (Source: Video 48)
Lastly, here is a picture of my sister in a swimming hole in the Philippines. She became mysteriously ill after swimming there. By the advice of my family, she went to see an albuleryo as they believed that she carried a spirit back with her from the forest. After seeing him, she was cured of her sudden onset of stomach pain. It might be someone’s t-shirt hanging on the bushes, but in the picture on top of the rock at the base of the tree, it looks like there is a small figure there crouching and looking upward.
Been listening to creepy things too:
“The Devil” by Mary Lou Williams
This was fun! See you next week!
~j9