u/PrayTale

Ok so I told my mom I posted her story, and she told me about an incident that happened to my Lola.

My Lola (my mom's mom) died before I was born due to a riding in tandem so I never got to meet her. But this story happened when my lola was 15, she was living in a small town in Negros Occidental, it was near Pulapandan.

She would wake up every day for over a week with flowers and fruit at the foot of her bed. The fruits and flowers seemed weird as my Lola said it wasn't the ones she was familliar with or grew near by. My Lola's guardian (for personal reasons she wasn't living with blood relatives) were scared of them so she burned the fruits and flowers every morning. But they'd still keep coming.

Eventually they consulted an albularyo, and he said an engaknto took a liking to my Lola, and that engkanto was courting my Lola.

My Lola said the albularyo did a ritual involving food and a white chicken and they had to leave it outside the barrio.

After the flowers and fruits stopped.

Ok, so my mom was a Mass Communications major, and her final project was to make a short film. She and her group mates needed a forest to shoot in, which was difficult as they lived in Manila, where there's hardly any greenery at all. So they all took a trip to UP Los Banos to shoot in Mt. Makiling.

Now for none Filipinos out there, Mt. Makiling is famous for engkantos of fairies, as it is said that Mariang Makiling (a famous and powerful fairy) dwells there.

So my mom and her group mates were shooting, and everything was going well until lunch. You see, they didn't pack lunch, so they'd have to go down the mountain in order to buy some, but that would mean lugging around the heavy camera and equipment they brought. They couldn't just leave the equipment for fear of them getting stolen.

So my mom volunteers to be left behind in order to watch the things while the rest of her group mates eat lunch and bring her back some food later.

But when she was alone, she grew bored, and the strangest thing happened, a song entered her mind. It was a song she had never heard before, nor was it in a language she understood, but somehow she knew every word and melody. And, my mom had the urge to sing it, and she did. While she sang like an idiot, she saw the trees moving. At first, she thought it was the wind, but they seemed to be moving up and down. Still, she didn't think much of it or the strange song.

Eventually, her group mates returned, and they wrapped up shooting by the end of the day.

Then weird things all started to happen to them once they got back to Manila.

First, they all had weird dreams that involved eyes. One groupmates said she was a giant eye staring down at a building. Another said in her dream her hand felt itchy and when she scratched it an eye appeared. Finally, my mom's dream was the strangest of all. She was in a dark void surrounded by hundreds of eyes. However, they weren't human eyes, as they were all unnatural shapes and colors. And she could hear voices whispering around her:

"How did she know that song?"

"Psst she can see us."

"Can she understand us?"

Then my mom woke up.

Second, the possession. My mom was slaving away at her typewriter late at night to finish some assignments, when suddenly she felt something enter her body.

She described it as like being in the driver seat of the car and suddenly being shoved to the passenger seat. She could still see her body move. She just couldn't control it. What was weirder was that she could hear the thoughts of whatever possessed her.

The entity that took over her body seemed to be amazed at what it could see being in a human body, with it even saying:

"Oh, so this is what the color red looks like. It's really pretty."

My mom, being from the Philippines, a Catholic country, though not being very religious, prayed to God to expel whatever it was from her body. And suddenly, she was back in the drivers seat again.

Finally, she and her groupmates met up in an empty classroom to once again work on the project. There was a lot of chatter as they galked about their project or even mundane things such as celebrity gossip of magazines. But all at once, they just shut up, like something compelled them too. Then they all turned their heads towards the open classroom windows only to watch them slam shut one by one like dominoes.

Everybody freaked out and decided to leave immediately. My mom swears as she watched the group's shadows move out of the sync as they walk down the hallways.

***

It only ended when one of my mom's classmates who claimed to have a third eye, told my mom out of the blue (my mom did not tell her any of the strange and scary things happening to her and her groupmates), told her that she was being followed.

My mom then told her what was happening, and her classmates nodded and said she'd consult with a medium she knew.

My mom didn't really believe in that baloney, but she was willing to give it a shot.

The next day, her classmate asked her if my mom sang something (again, my mom told her of the strange incidents, but not about the inciting incident). My mom said yes and explained the strange song that popped into her head.

Her classmate told her she angred the local engkanto or fairies or nature spirits as that song is sacred to them, and she shouldn't have known it in the first place. But she assured my mom that she wouldn't be bothered anymore as long as she never sang that song ever again.

My mom agreed, and true to her classmate's word, nothing strange happened after that.

To this day, my mom says she can still sing that song. She can remember every lyric and melody. I once asked her to sing it out of curiosity, but she adamantly refused. She didn't want to test fate.