Ong12

COLUMN: BEYOND REALITY

BY CEZ MANDI ONG

TITLE: IS IT REAL?

I am no “Ghost Writer” nor have I a penchant for the things of the sort, maybe because I am a Psychologist by profession and have had behavioral studies as my proficiency. We have learned the connectivity between unusual circumstances and the real world. Explaining the correlation between the two apparently became a debatable issue for sometime. Many prominent researchers on the incidence of some “Paranormal Activities” have failed in their quest for the right answer as to where, why and how did they evolved. Are they for real?

When I was a student at Silliman University in Dumaguete City, I was no exception to the old town myth and tales of the unknown. I very well recalled on my first day at the Nurses Home (one of the ladies dorm in the university), the lady cleaner of the dorm who happened to attend the same church as me. The first caution she told me was never to loiter in the hallway premises or the surrounding fences at unholy hours. I asked, “why is that?”, her reply was just “basta lang! “, in Visayan vernacular, that means “just so” in English, simplified as just so you do not come across unexpected circumstances to scare you. I find that statement challenging. I come from Cotabato, Who scares who?? I find the story of voodoo tales rather tempting and curious. It was like a Nancy Drew mystery story series about to unfold before my eyes and I couldn’t help but find out and uncover the truth behind the scare fever.

Being in a dorm for the first time, I couldn’t just sleep, and the air from the ceiling fan was even more torturing because of its screeching sound. I completely forgot the story of the day. I opened the door to peep in the hallway to see if an attendant could help me out in the tightening of whatever screw was on the loose to calm down the irritating sound. And since its 2’ o’clock in the morning, what do I expect? So I started to look around the mess hall for some pliers, when all of a sudden an old man appeared and asked me what I was doing? Politely I told him my concern. In one of the drawers he pulled out a screw driver and went straight up to my room and brought a wooden ladder to reach the ceiling. I couldn’t thank him enough. After few minutes I went to bed and slept.

I woke up late that morning. The three ladies who occupied the other three beds in my room interrogated me. They were half awake when I went up to the room with the man to fix the fan. It surprised me when they ask, if I was sleep walking and talking at night? ”My answer of course was NO. The three of them blurted laughing. I narrated the whole incident and the three of them wrapped their arms around and said, I send them goose bumps. They told me, how could that be? This dorm is a ladies dorm and no way will a man be a resident utility man of the area or will be allowed to stay up late in the ladies dorm premises. That means I had a ghost encounter last night? They all 3 nodded and said, “Sorry, we were not able to warn you”. What was even surprising was, when I look around the hallway old photographs of year 1908 were photos of earlier settlers in the campus who help built the foundations of the nurses home, I saw in one of them the picture of the old man who fixed the fan that night. I would just want to think that what happened that night then was just a dream. The presence of the uncalled for helper ghost is a puzzle, but whatever that was, I know for myself that it was real.

This is my first ghost encounter. I will tell you more in the next issues. But for now, I wish to invite readers to write me their paranormal encounters and will reply to them as soon as I can. This is just the beginning of many tales about the unknown. Conclude for yourself, are these real???

Ms. Ong writes about paranormal phenomena exclusively for OpinYon