Thursday, December 31, 2020
2020 Roundup
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Scary Stuff: Part 6
Haunted House for Rent in Antipolo
This is a story shared to me by a friend whose friend experienced something really creepy during one of their shoots in a rented an old house in Antipolo along Marcos Highway. I know her personally since she's my batchmate from UST. She's known to have her third eye fully opened as an ability that runs in their family.
She described the house they had to shoot in was abandoned in a way that they saw scattered things on the floor, the cabinets opened and still had clothes hanging in them. It's as if they had left in such a hurry that when they arrived with the crew the place was in chaos.
During one of their scene preparations, they were sitting on the floor, and when they stood up they saw a whole lot of hair scattered all over the floor that had come from nowhere.
Another weird thing that happened was that while they were in the living room they heard the wailing of a child, and at first they thought it was the child actor that was with them who was crying, and when they checked the room of the kid he was quietly playing. So the guy returned to the room where the rest of the crew were waiting to report that it wasn't the actor who was crying. They could hear the incessant wailing of the child throughout the night. I actually heard the sound clip from one of their recordings, that while an actor was speaking his lines, there is a faint sobbing in the background of what is distinctly a voice of a young boy. Creepy!
But what really sold her story was when her friend was in the bathroom changing her clothes, she suddenly heard the child crying and when she went to look at the shower there was a kid there sitting on the floor, his head stooped down. It scared her so much that she ran out of the bathroom before she could finish putting on clothes.
Here's the sound clip where you can hear a child crying in the background as the guy was speaking his lines. If you listen to it in audio, you'd probably miss it. It's really faint, and best if you listen using earphones:
She even did a cool livestream session with her siblings for Halloween this year!
Haunted Cabinet
This is a story I initially planned on sharing for last year's Scary Stuff as this is a good friend's personal experience revealed to me in January of 2019, but then Bali happened mid-2019 and this was pushed back as a result. I can vividly remember the tinge of uneasiness I was feeling as she was telling me the hell she went through for months. For the record, she's one of those friends I can vouch for who wouldn't lie to me or convince me to tell a good story.
It all started when she was at her lowest point. To backtrack, her third eye was partially open because she could easily see spirits when she was a child, but as she got older those encounters dwindled. That was, until a few years back when her third eye started to open again. She said that it was a time when so much was happening in her personal life, add to that a toxic workplace and a stressful job that she mentally and emotionally spiraled down into a pit. She lost her faith. Almost completely forgetting to pray, she skipped going to church week after week. With this, she started to notice unusual activities happening around her. She started seeing faceless apparitions at random. These are figures with the same other-worldly characteristics she could remember seeing as a child. She didn't flinch at first, there were too many distractions happening simultaneously.
One of the most persistent annoyances she had to endure was in her bedroom. In her room was an old wood cabinet. The cabinet was passed down to their family by her grandmother. It was an antique cabinet made of wood with a mirror attached to one of its doors on the outside. Its origin story was that before the Japanese forces came in to colonize us during World War II they hid the cabinet in their farm at Pontivedra, retrieving it only after the war. She said that it's possible that there were souls of soldiers trapped in the cabinet or victims of war trapped in the mirror. Almost every night she would hear the cabinet's door move on its own, creaking as it would open and shut as if to intentionally keep her awake. She always felt something was staring from inside the mirror. One of the scariest things she experienced was that she saw shadows, several of them, trailing to enter the cabinet one by one.
It happened for many nights that she eventually found it necessary to have the cabinet taken out of the room and have it placed in the hallway. At first, she didn't bother to tell the real reason behind it all because she was worried about scaring her family. She simply said that she felt cramped in her room and wanted more space. It took a few weeks before her mom conceded and allowed to have it moved on the hallway, but it didn't take long before her mom also got annoyed with the hallway cramping up. Just then, her mom also wanted to have the shelves of their kitchen fixed, and she ended up using the furniture for scrap wood. Her mom had it dismantled and used its hardwood as shelves while she disposed of the rest of the unnecessary parts. That decision turned my friend's life into a living horror movie. Apparently, the spirits residing in the cabinet were not pleased with their "home" being destroyed that instead of disturbing my friend with minor poltergeist activity they made full-bodied apparition to her every night, getting more aggressive as days passed.
My friend described the scene as a living nightmare every time she had to go to bed. The moment she closed the bedroom door and lie in her bed they'd appear. By they, I mean three or more entities. White, floating, faceless, full-bodied apparition of what can only be classified as ghosts. Every. Single. Night. She had to go through the ordeal for over two months. Imagine the toll it took to have to go through a repeating nightmare night after night, and much worse, the nightmares happen when she's either asleep or awake. My friend is the secretive type, one of those people who like keeping all the burden to herself as long as possible to keep her vivacious image whenever around people. At some point, she believed she was going crazy, if not for her experience of seeing such things as a child. The entities would circle around her bed, and she'd see them floating above her at times, with blurry faces while emitting a trail of shadows as they moved. It started with three spirits at first, but as time progressed the numbers went up to as many as five she said. As the spirits knew she could see them, more entities got attracted to her somber energy. There were times that while she was praying before bed she could hear other voices reciting with her but in our deep hiligaynon dialect. Words she could barely understand but could subconsciously interpret as if telling her that prayers were pointless because it could not save her. She could even physically feel them pushing her out of the bed at times to make her feel their anger. They wanted her out and gone.
It eventually reached a point that she could no longer tolerate and bear the situation that she asked for help from her parents. Her breaking point was when she experienced astral projection, wherein she got up and walked to the living room asking her brother for the remote control but he didn't flinch. When she turned back she saw herself sleeping. That's when she realized that her spirit has left her body.
They asked for help from the church and a psychic. They had my friend blessed by the priest and invited a psychic medium to cleanse their house. When the psychic entered the house he immediately knew it wasn't a simple ghost situation. The medium said that when he entered the house he saw a lot of floating figures walking around with their fluid legs elevated off the ground, their features warped and blurred into blank faces. The spirits weren't purely souls of those that passed away he explained. It was a mix of past and present spirits including a few elementals.
On one occasion, while the psychic was in their house and speaking to them he saw the doppelganger of my friend peeking from behind the door intently staring at him as if listening to what he was saying. To confirm this, my friend's father admitted having several encounters with the doppelganger wherein he'd see my friend go in or out of the washroom only to find her sleeping in her room. Times when the figure would go in the bathroom and not go back out, leaving it cold and empty.
After a few days of consultation with the psychic, they did the ritual for the house cleansing. They lit candles, spread out a white cloth with white ropes, and prayed together with the medium. They did a ritual on my friend, the psychic recited Latin prayers to close her third eye. That lifted the heavy energy off their house and left my friend in peace.
I recently asked her if how she was doing. She said she is better, but there were times when she'd still see things in her peripheral vision or feel them on occasion, but at least she wasn't being disturbed or attacked.
Ghost Child at Archipelago
It was this year when a group of my friends decided to open a small stall over at Makati. They decided to go with a tiny vacant space at Archipelago. Since they are on new territory and wanted to have an edge over their competitors, they made their operating hours from 4pm - 3am. This was to offer their food with a delivery service for call center agents or those on night shifts. This seemed like a good idea at first since they were the only store open in the entire complex. This move came at a price though, they'd have to deal with the spirit of a child playing around the vicinity at night.
When the lights are shut and only one or two of them are left for the night shift, a figure of a child would start to appear and they'd see it run around at lightning speed. It would at times let the lights flicker, turning it on and off to grab attention. There were nights when they'd see it just standing in one corner or surprise them in the toilet. There was a time that their employee got kicked out of his house and had no place to stay, so he slept there with his child for a few nights. But they say they could see the ghost child watching them sleep...creeping them out to not stay there any longer. Even the guard admitted to having seen the child but just accepts it as part of the job.
Note:
A friend of mine who is also into the paranormal recently explained, that since we are made up of energies, once you lower your energy into the notch of negativity you will tend to attract and live in the lower plane. Emotions like anger, sadness, anxiety, depression, these are emotions that belong to the lower spectrum and thus what you will be seeing are entities of the lower spectrum like demons, dark entities and elementals, angry spirits, lost souls and such. This is also true on the opposite side of the spectrum. If you go for joy and positive energy, you will be living and attracting the higher realm of the upper dimension. These are entities that relates to fairies and angels. So I guess this is a good time to change your energy to avoid attracting unwanted negativities.
Monday, September 28, 2020
A Child of Dragon and Virgo
One random day a friend asked if I knew the exact time I was born because he was going to do some kemerlu. That prompted me to check my birth certificate and discover that I was born at 7:35 AM on a Wednesday. The Wednesday part I found out two years ago for a ritual I needed to do in Bali. Prior to that confirmation, I always assumed and believed that I was born at 3 AM ...that's because my mom told the story that she started her labor around midnight and that a bunch of guys cornered the car she was riding in for a holdup attempt. Somehow they were able to escape unscathed as they rushed to the hospital. My parents were at our other house, 45 kilometers away from the capital when mom's water broke. Back then the road was pitch dark, thus the surprise ambush happened because they were on the road at an ungodly hour. They arrived at the hospital around 3 AM, and shortly thereafter I was born immediately I presumed. I have no sense of understanding with how labor works, just that it's painful. Long story short, I was born at 7:35 AM and not 3 AM as I initially thought.
Why is it significant? Because then my friend did this chart thing to try and figure out my person, how my soul is aligned with the universe based on my birth date and time. Astrology is something interesting as to how we seem to be predestined under the measure of the stars and alignment of the planets. And as my curiosity rose, I asked him to send me the link instead of waiting for his reading. I was able to comprehend the worded part, but to interpret the given numbers and charts is something that requires further study. It was a hit-and-miss kind of reading, but it rang true with what my spiritual friend has told me, that astrology is roughly 80% accurate...which was roughly how accurate my reading was. I admit a couple of things outright as was written in the stars, yet there were some inaccuracies on occasion as well.
I've gotten into this sort as a side interest as it delves into the realm of the divine and the paranormal. It's something that is not accredited by science and therefore has caught my attention as a deviant of what is perceived by cynics and realists as ridiculous and beyond earthly comprehension. I don't study the subject, but I enjoy relating to people and opening my mind into this world of celestial relativity. I find curiosity, leaning more onto the side of believing, in its ability to relay this pseudoscientific information that has a weight of truth in it...to a degree. As a disclaimer by those into astrology, unlike science that is considered by the majority as absolute, this one you take with a grain of salt. It has an open-ended conclusion, one that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Much like how a woman's mind works...it goes either way.
So...I checked into the website (https://astro.cafeastrology.com) where my friend took his reference from, and these are copy-pasted words from the site that rang true and reflects my current being as of writing. I'm not including everything, just fragments of the statements I found intriguingly accurate:
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Garnet 403: A Negrense's Kitchen
It was an idea floating in my head for years, a business proposition that I intended for myself. Two years ago, when I updated my profile on Instagram I made a bulleted outline of my businesses, namely, Teacup Ideas, Chicken Studio, and lastly Garnet 403 (even if it was nonexistent then). Even back then, I knew I was gonna make Garnet 403 happen, it was all a matter of time. Garnet 403 is the term used by our friends to refer to our home. Throughout the years we've hosted a myriad of guests and parties, and because of that, I've associated our unit as a brand that I knew I wanted to develop eventually. It sounded just right with two syllables for the gemstone the building was named after plus the three numbers easily rolled out anyone's tongue. It had a good ring to it. It felt right. It fitted my vision. If anything, I visualized Garnet 403 to be a label for whatever product I would come up with, and ultimately I want to build it into a cafe or Airbnb or hostel in some far future. As of the moment, it seems far-fetched considering the situation, but something my sister-in-law told me gave me the confidence to use the name now, much sooner than I had initially planned. She said, "You know, your brand and your business will be right where you are." And that statement settled well in my gut as it is true, where I am will be where my brand is, and if I plan to settle someplace else in the future, that is where Garnet 403 will be.
Saturday, July 25, 2020
The Mission (Main Theme) by Ennio Morricone
I can't remember the last time I listened to an orchestra that played a piece that moved my soul. I was on a roll, binge-watching a couple of videos for Nella Fantasia...of which my favorite rendition is Chloe Agnew's because her voice easily hit the notes that gives me goosebumps all the time. As I was clicking away in search of other versions of the song I luckily stumbled across this one. It was weird because the thumbnail was from the movie The Mission that showed tribesmen, and the views was roughly 46k when I clicked on it. The video started with a scene from the movie, and as I forwarded it on it's 3-minute mark I heard the oboe started playing and saw that the video actually has 27+ million views. It did start with a piece of Nella Fantasia, but as the orchestra slowly moved into a different tempo I found myself drawn in. I felt a stirring in my soul as I watched the orchestra play. It was flawless, and it set quite a mood that calmed me, at the same time lifted by spirit.
To be honest, I wasn't aware of Ennio Morricone until I found this video. It's unfortunate that he recently passed, but by how I started searching for his name and how his compositions had influenced the landscape of music, he'll be living on for quite a long long time.
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Sunday, May 31, 2020
From ECQ Food Challenges to Food Businesses
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Life in Quarantine: Part 1
This blog post is currently being drafted
The hardest part was having to close down the store for the ECQ. |
Sun dried beef tapa made by Karl, but he had to leave from being quarantined with us due to parking issues with the condo. Boo :( |