Thread by @alexisofswords

#UPVencounters, #scarystories & #urbanlegends part 9: Names Have Power, Taunting Calls.

I am back, everyone! Sorry for the long absence. I have not been well. A few things to recap while I was gone:

- these scary stories are told for fun, and to continue the legends of UPV —

- the campus really is actually very lovely and so is Miagao itself. 99% of the time, it’s the chillest, most loving town I have ever encountered. Don’t let these stories keep you from visiting or going here.
- There are, however, very real horrors caused by humans here. My —

stories are of the folklore related. Relax, read and if you are really curious, hunt.
- I have also been pointed to alot of tweets about it being related to mental health? Maybe. But with all due respect, I am not speaking as a psych major or mental health expert in these —

threads; I am only writing about spooky stories. Take shared and similar experiences as you will and if you would like to see how local lore interprets this as an effect on the being, do read my thread on Dungan and the background of human existence in Panayonon myths—

but please look at it from folklore perspectives.
- please don’t push a mental health agenda on people sharing their own encounters. The stories are supposed to be for fun… don’t call your friends crazy.
- If you think I am crazy and wanna ask about my mental health, please —

feel free to tag me! We can have a discourse about what it means and how the mind influences folk stories.
- most of all: HAVE FUN reading them, share your own if you have any and don’t forget to keep the legends alive in retelling. —

I had to post these reminders because I really don’t want my threads to be a cause for people to hate Miagao or UPV or antagonize their fellow students. It’s not my intent and no parts of these threads were meant to be unkind or offensive. Apologies for the housekeeping. —

Onto part 9!

—

When dealing with otherworldly things and beings, a few rules apply to keep you safe from them.

I am sure you have heard of them. Don’t eat their food, don’t follow them when they ask you to go somewhere, carry anting-antings, stay away from mariit places and—

Most of all, ignore them when you see them.

On that last rule, there is one particular detail that is rarely mentioned:

DO NOT, under any circumstances, give these entities names.

By doing this, you acknowledge their existence, make them more real. The name gives them power,—

gives them a reason to be real on this side of the veil, in our world.

And, because it’s you who gave them that name… they become (shall I say) attached to you in a way. They remember, and now they can be called by a name they have been given.

As most of my stories go, this —

is another bad idea we ended up doing anyway. We had accidentally given an entity a name, and this— this is the story of how she haunted us, followed us and stuck to us every time we said it.

It was not a pleasant experience and I will never say her name again.

—

This story —

Actually begins in a banwa house we had rented at the time.

The owners had been gone a long time and decided to rent the old house out.

It was… decaying, to say the least. It had 3 bedrooms (the two bedrooms making up the whole upstairs, with one on the ground floor) but —

it was cheap and fit the budget of your typical broke college students.

The caretakers had one very strict, particular rule: Don’t open the second bedroom upstairs.

This was typical of rented houses. Renters would use one spare room as a storage space and it was spacious —

enough with only 2 bedrooms anyway.

For months, we left that room alone and though some minor creepy things did happen in that house, nothing was too notable to merit mentioning.

That is, until, under the influence of boredom and alcohol and the insistence someone who loved—

chaos, one of us finally opened that room.

This was a bad idea on its own. As renters, we’re supposed to respect whatever the owners left behind. The room was dusty, unopened for years, with a lot of old stuff and furniture. Old things, however, was not the only thing inside. —

When it was opened, a strong gust of wind was said to come from inside.

“I think we let something out.” The chaotic friend mentioned, when she recounts the experience. In drunken laughter, she added “We have a new friend and we named her —“

No, I still won’t say that name. —

It was after they opened the otherwise unremarkable room that she started to make more appearances.

They would say a lady stood at the corners of a room, or would watch us while we cooked, or would be in the hallway.

At first, it was only the two of them that saw her. So, we—

thought she did not exist.

That is, until, we were getting ready for bed one night, talking in the one big bedroom occupied by 4 people, with only the glow of the outside light to illuminate us from the window.

In the middle of conversation, the girlfriend of the chaotic —

friend (okay sorry, who wasn’t chaotic in college? I just dunno what to call her) said: “Can you stop standing there?”

All four of us turned to where she was looking and there, standing by the screen door to our room, barely touched by the light, was a figure of a woman —

relatively tall, with frizzy, disheveled hair, in a light colored dress.

Now, this friend had actually referred to this figure as our other housemate, thinking they had come downstairs. The woman seemed to look normal enough, but, to describe the energy she exuded and how it—

permeated the room is indescribable.

We all fell silent. The only way I could describe her was that she was angry and VERY very malevolent. You could feel malice radiating from this figure.

There was very little light, but, by that screen door, illuminated by the hallway bulb—

we could feel her eyes almost staring at all of us — in a strange way at the same time.

And those eyes? Those eyes were red.

No one spoke, or moved, the lady in the corner tense, like she was about to pounce on prey. Her hands were twitching. It was an eternity in a few —

minutes.

From the other side of the room, one of us said her name.

She opened her mouth, eyes wild & angry, in an almost silent scream. Was she screaming? It didn’t matter. All I could hear was the heartbeat in my ears as one of us finally moved to hit the light switch to see—

that there was no one there.

We were in hysterics, of course, waking up the whole house.

“It was her! It was —!” One of us was screaming. The other two of us in the room looked at each other, asking one another if we saw it, too.

Our other housemates came downstairs to find —

us in panic. One of them looked around the room, calmly telling us we couldn’t stay in the house for now.

Only grabbing phones and money, we left in the middle of the night and spent it at one of the only two 24hr places at the time: Sari Sari breadstore where we agreed to wait—

until morning.

We discussed what we saw, of course and when we asked the friend who told us we should leave why they said so?

He said she was still standing by the door.

He said she felt evil.

—

It was difficult to stay in that house over time. We had stresses and problems, but whenever everything seemed to be worse, we knew she was around.

She would move things or appear in our dreams. Now, all of us would catch a glimpse of her.

Fortunately, we didn’t stay there —

too long and ended up moving.

This is the very Betelgeuse-ian thing here, though. It was months after we had moved away, over a discussion of ghost stories that someone mentioned her again.

“Hey do you guys remember —?” She asked, saying the name. Only once, but you could see—

how everyone didn’t like remembering her. We still called her by her name, then, which gives me cause to believe is what led her to find us again.

We started seeing her in the new house over time. Outside, in our rooms, in corners, by the door.

We moved— again— to new places —

and after a couple of times when we would mention her and she would appear at the new places, we finally determined that it was because she had been named.

We all agreed after hard lessons were learned, never to speak her name. Not even spell it.

She seemed to hear us, no —

no matter how far away we called.

So, we never mentioned that name again. Even now, we have to stop each other from saying it aloud.

It was hard work trying to lose her, we will not risk her finding ua again.

Why, you ask? It’s because we all agree on one thing: she was what—

we could definitely call: malevolent, angry, full of malice, evil. She was there to inflict harm.

We never found out who she was. We never asked. We never knew why she was stuck in that room or why she was so angry. We just knew one thing: out of the many encounters we have—

had, she was the one we were most afraid of.

And, even now, when I pass by that old house of ours, I can still sometimes feel like eyes staring at me from the second floor window, and I hope that I have changed enough for her not to recognize me— lest she follows me again.

—

Many of us still makes jabs at the friend who named her, blaming her for giving an entity a name.

Was that what made her attached to us? Or was she angry we left her? Was she alone, all this time, and wanted company?

Or was saying her name taunting her? Were we challenging —

her power? How we invaded what peace she could have had in that room?

One should never taunt entities, friends. You hear many of these warnings.

A few, for example, would be whatever protects nature.

In Miagao’s tinagong dagat, for example, they say an enkanto guards —

the water. One popular story, is that a local decided to visit there, had beers with his friends and when told to quiet down because he was disturbing the entity, decided that the best route was to insult it.

In a drunken stupor, he was said to have yelled that the enkanto was —

not doing his job right, that Tinagong Dagat wasn’t even pretty or all that great.

In the greatest of all insults, he stepped into the water, beer bottle in hand and decided to smash the glass into the water.

The story goes, that despite being in the shallows, this man —

drowned.

He drowned at the exact spot where he smashed the bottle.

—

More stories like this exist. If you can recall my series about CAS, the black lady there also retaliates and makes her presence known every time someone wants to do a story/film of her.

Why we never advise

To hunt for the things that thrive in the dark.

—

I am never sure what these entities consider taunting, what acts of defiance draw them to you, instead of protect you.

That being said, I think there is some merit to the advice that you should ignore. There is some merit to —

the warnings not to acknowledge them when they are in your path.

If I could, however, part with some advice— don’t give them names. Some of them are evil. You really don’t want to be friends with—

Seriously, you didn’t think I was gonna say her name, did you?

Author’s note: I really did not want to write about *her*. I am not joking when I say she is bad JUJU personified. I am not joking when I say that I am afraid of her.

She legitimately brought bad energy to your surroundings. Bad energy that bled into everything you did.

She exacerbated negative feelings while bringing her own. This entity is very malevolent. She did radiate evil.

I don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen her in years. But, if you read up on how demonic possessions go, that’s how she feels. I could not stress in the thread how—

horrible it is around her. It just feels like sinking into despair, with fear, anxiety and insanity. It was really, really bad. Like really bad.