Thread by @alexisofswords

#upvencounters, #scarystories & #urbanlegends Sidenotes: Thoughts on folklore, how they are so different and yet so very similar.

It’s 2am and I am up, wanting so badly explain the rest of my creepy stories even outside of UPV so I will settle on some thoughts about folklore —

(not the Taylor Swift variety) instead.

Much of what we know of Filipino legends are what are commonly recognized across the whole country. We all know the word aswang, we all know the tikbalang, we all know the kapre, the tiyanak and the mananangal.

We forget, however, that —

just as we are separated by geography and language, folklore exists in microcosms that are unique to each region and island.

The reason why I have had to add cultural context to some of my threads come from the intent to convey them as seen from the uniquely Panayanon —

perspective. When you begin to unravel Filipino folklore as something with regional variance and histories impacted by who and where they are told, you will begin to see just how rich, how much more there is to Filipino mythology.

Take, for example, the aswang. Many versions—

call them monsters who eat flesh. In Waray where I partially also hail from, we can consider them witches instead of monsters and yet in Panay, some versions of the aswang consume the spirit, leaving the body behind.

What’s odd to me, though, and what makes Filipino folklore so—

interesting, are the commonalities in how we protect ourselves from the things that live in the dark and the way we deal with entities.

When I was younger and we would go on trips to far-off places, older generations of my family would warn me not to go with children asking—

for help to go home. They would warn, always, that I should never forget my name. Even write it on myself if necessary.

At first, I thought it was just them warning me of the stranger danger, but the name thing never made sense.

It would be years later that someone explains—

that if you go with entities to their worlds, you would begin to forget, as your soul or dungan would be slowly taken over by them.

You can also either bring the lost with you, or it can go vice versa— that you go with them.

These warnings came from the Waray side of my family—

And, oddly, years later still, a conversation with @MinhanPairaya would prove that a similar belief exists in Iloilo.

What terrors in our pasts, what experiences did we go through that people, across spaces, learn to fight against supernatural things… in almost the same ways?