By Anna Valmero
INQUIRER.net

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—More than being the summer capital of the Philippines, one façade of Baguio that tourists must experience is the bursting colors of culture, history and heritage that it aims to
preserve.

During my last trip to Baguio with the INQUIRER.net VDO team, we took the road less traveled. Instead of filling our itinerary with the usual parks and places to visit, we went to discover the unknown at the historic Diplomat Hotel.

The hotel is located at the Diplomat Hill, about 20 minutes from Session Road. Long abandoned and said to be a haunted place, the hotel’s remaining structure—the cross on top of the entrance hallway,
the three-floor architecture, some parts of which are wooden floors, staircases and two fountains within the building — is a beauty in daylight and a mystery at night.

The hotel’s history begins in 1911 when the Province of the Dominican Order voted to build a vacation house on their 17-hectare property in Baguio. Construction began in 1913 and inauguration happened two years after. Afterward, it became a school but low enrollment reverted the building back to be a vacation house cum sanitarium.

During the World War II, the hotel housed refugees but was later claimed by the Japanese Army who bombed the building. According to stories passed down by word of mouth, priests and nuns were beheaded by the Japanese soldiers in the ground floor and several of the rooms on the second floor. The babies, some say, were killed in the fountain area.

After the war, reconstruction followed and it was acquired by Diplomat Hotels Inc. in 1973. Not long after, the hotel ceased operations, some say due to the death of a major stockholder while others say tourists who stayed at the hotel did not last more than a night and heard or saw beheaded ghosts.

To unravel the mystery of the unknown, our team trooped to the hotel in mid-October.

With flashlights and cameras and three spirit questors as guides, we toured the place, floor by floor and entered several rooms. We entered the second floor via a staircase near the blooming flower garden, said to be tended by the unseen beings. Up until the top of the building where the cross is located, we are guided by three spirit questors — Dion Fernandez, Me An Billones and Maria Elena Catajan, who gave us information about how they “sense” beings in each room via tarot cards.

Outside, we were told that someone who lives in the building has been following us since we stepped inside the abandoned hotel. A tarot card showing a man of royalty was drawn four times from the suite. This was the reason one of his companion felt very tired after the tour, the questors said.

As the spirit questors were brought back to the town proper, we were left outside the building. Before leaving, the questors advised us to stay outside the building. Three guards passed by us to do their
routine inspection after a few minutes.

To be productive, two people in our team recorded what they felt while inside the abandoned hotel. After some time, we heard tin roofs clattering loudly like someone was banging the metal in a nearby
distance from us. During the first sound, we looked at each other silently asking each one if we heard the noise which seemed to come from the guard house several meters away from us. By the second and third time, we recorded the sound on camera only to find out in the morning that the tin roofs are piled semi-neatly on the veranda of the hotel, after the third floor. When the guards passed by again to get back to their station, we asked them if they heard any sound of someone banging tin roofs. They said ‘No’ and left.

Back to the plan: we camped inside the abandoned building as we intended to stay overnight to record on camera observations from 12 midnight to 6 a.m. There were no spirit questors to guide us at this time.

As advised by the questors, we camped at the ground floor and set up our candles and standby cameras near one fountain — said to be the area where most of the spiritual beings congregate. We took turns sleeping on the mats while those awake recorded on camera the observations they had of the building and the surroundings each hour.

Someone in the team who stayed awake from midnight to 6 a.m. said there was a time he saw through his peripheral vision something white passed by on his right side. Others noted noises of footsteps on the wooden floor, oddly likely when all of us are either sitting or lying on the floor.

Something that remained a mystery to us until today is the recording of our interview with the questors done near the cross. Up in the tranquillity there, we saw the city lights of Baguio and heard only the soft, chilly breeze of the night air. When we played back the recording in the area, there were static noises of different songs — the sound more amplified than the voices of either the questors or the interviewer from our group. Yes, there are several radio stations in Baguio but we did not play any radio sound during the interview. Plus, the boom mic which we used to record the audio from the interview is a unidirectional microphone with no transmitter or receiver, thus the
unsolved case of how those different static sounds being recorded during the interview.

When dawn started, we got up and stayed a bit around the hotel. From outside, the hotel’s grandeur remains and the empty halls — which could cause imagination to run wild at night—are but empty windows to the past and eyes to the future left unknown to us.

Next time you visit Baguio or any other place, try to go the road less traveled. Discover what lies ahead in the dark and see beyond what a place usually offers.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Cavite where the lake attracts both locals and tourists, lies a dormant house that has not seen human inhabitants for quite a while. The reason: People who stay there claim to hear strange sounds at night, coming from the second-floor room. INQUIRER.net multimedia reporter Marjorie Gorospe and the VDO team of INQUIRER.net seek to find the truth behind this abandoned house which, through time, has been overrun by flora. The VDO team spends a night at this house and waits for anything outside the ordinary.

THEY say living amongst us are beings who once roamed this earth. This world is but an intertwining of two worlds—that of the living and the dead.

In July, residents in Calapan City, Oriental Mindoro were suddenly shattered when several students, said to be possessed by “evil spirits,” fell into fits of seizures. The Department of Education sent a team to investigate as the number of “possessed students” rose to 26. It was on this day that the student declared “the gates of hell will be opened and bad spirits will be let out to roam the Earth.”

Paranormal expert Jaime Licauco explains how the human body is a vessel that can be used to communicate to the “other” world. All of us have third eyes located in the middle of the brows and just below the forehead that can be used to go to spaces of higher consciousness, he said.

By Izah Morales
INQUIRER.net

R.I.P. or Rest in Peace is what we usually read on tombstones. But how will you rest in peace if until death your relatives are renting a space for your bones?

At the Manila North Cemetery, Lita Yao, secretary and interviewer of the relatives of the dead, enumerated four kinds of tombs rented out by the relatives. There is a one and a half meter deep bone crypt vault where one dead share a space with nine other dead for a fee of P1,000.

But if relatives of the dead prefer not to share a vault with others, they would need to pay P1,500 for a “VIP vault,” which has a contract that can be renewed every 5 years. On the other hand, the most common type of tomb is what they call an “apartment,” which is a niche that can be occupied for 5 years and costing P500.

Grave digger Johnjohn Sangalang said that as soon as the contract for an apartment expires, the bones of the dead are exhumed. If there are no claimants, the grave diggers would transfer the bones to a mass grave.

However, Sangalang said the bones are labeled to allow future identification. The tombstone is included with the bones, he said.

In an interview, Sangalang said he has gone beyond fearing the unknown as he buries a minimum of 10 bodies every day. At the most, he buries 60 dead especially during Saturdays and Sundays.

In the video interview I conducted with INQUIRER.net multimedia reporter Marjorie Gorospe, Sanggalang narrates his life as the person in charge of keeping track of the tombstones and bones of the many individuals whose 5-year apartment contracts have expired.

We also meet Rommel Ocampo, a tombstone carver for many years now and talk to him about his work, and Roque Rafon, the caretaker of the graves of Jose Rizal’s family and the late President Manuel Roxas.

Ironic how the responsibility for caring for the remains of our loved ones are left to strangers like Sanggalang, Ocampo and Rafon. Nevertheless, these are a few of the already little group people who take pride in their role as the gatekeepers of the lost souls and lost bones.

FILIPINO celebrities Maxene Magalona, Jay Jay Lozano, Angel Aquino and Jaycee Parker reveal what movie characters scare them in these video interviews for INQUIRER.net VDO Halloween special.

Also, watch this video story about pumpkins sold in Dangwa, which is popularly known as the place where you can buy affordable flowers. INQUIRER.net multimedia reporter Marjorie Gorospe discovers a special flower shop that not only sells flowers, but also peculiar pumpkins harvested for the Halloween season. Rene Carreon, staff at Puentespina Orchids and Tropical Plants, Inc., discusses the variety of pumpkins the store sells and how the business is surviving despite the strong competition in the area.