The village folk doctors

An article in the science magazine "The Scientist" took me back to Romblon, a province in the heart of the Philippines where I grew up. The article, written by Hannah Waters and published on April 15, was about an art exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden that "highlights our modern reliance on plants and the needs to conserve them".
Waters writes: "Mention 'medicinal plants' and you're likely to conjure up images of folk doctors wielding salves and tinctures, practicing something more akin to witchcraft than science. But surveying cancer treatments alone, it's outstanding how many of the compounds we used today were initially discovered in plants."
Indeed, medicinal plants always remind me of the folk doctors known as "arbolario" upon whom the poor people in a remote village where I grew up depended so much for the treatment of almost all kinds of ailments, from fever to possession by spirits.
I was among the few youngsters in the village called Ginablan who had gone to high school in town about 12 kilometers away. With a little exposure to science, I had developed a disdain towards those arbolarios and joined the chorus of the so-called educated people, particularly those in town, that they were quack doctors.
Although herbs were the common medicine to treat illnesses then, I would prefer my kin preparing the medicinal mix grounded on mortar and then wrapped on a piece of cloth that would be placed on the forehead or any parts of the body. I just did not have faith in folk doctors, some of whom chewed the herbs and placed the chewed stuff on one's anatomy.
When I went on a vacation to Romblon from Manila where I pursued a course in journalism years later, I became aware of the arbolarios once again when a bizarre news broke out in town about several high school students being "possessed" by evil spirits. The alleged possession came one after the other with the school principal the last to be "possessed".
The parents brought the children to legitimate doctors who recommended that they be taken to a mental hospital in Manila. The parents opted to have their children treated by an arbolario, who cured the kids. One of those "possessed", a top student whom I happened to know, later became a bank executive in Manila with no apparent trace of any mental disorder at all.
The principal, who was said to be our distant relative, was healed just as well.
Tales about fairies known as engkantos and other denizens of the netherworld were part of the rich folklore in Romblon. My cousins, with whom I lived after my father's death when I was 13, told me that they once saw fairies astride beautiful horses passing by our backyard where big trees abound. Having been raised in a city before my father's death, I didn't buy the story, although I often felt goose pimples whenever I passed by eerie woods when grazing our four carabaos - farm animals used for plowing rice fields - on lonely hills.
It was about four decades ago when that possession story in Romblon happened. I haven't gone back to Romblon for more than 30 years and have no way of knowing if the arbolarios are still there practicing their trade. But looking back, I am still amazed at how an arbolario had cured the "possessed" with herbs and — I suppose - a little incantation.


Ephesians 6:12

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places

Author's note:
The Scientist magazine says the exhibition "Green Currency" opens on April 20 and runs through July 31 at The New York Botanical Garden on the Bronx River Parkway and features 43 works by artists from the American Society of Botanical Artists.

Love in the age of neuroscience

How do I love thee?
In the age of neuroscience, we may still count the ways, but can we still say, “I love thee from the bottom of my heart?”
Neuroscience says love is not an emotion oozing from the heart but a cranial activity caused by neural firings in the brain. A network of neurons in the brain, so it goes, is being activated when people are in love. Using brain scanners, neuroscientists can see which type of biochemical is being transmitted to which area of the brain when one is in the throes of love or any other emotion.
For example, in romantic love, one study says, the hypothalamus, a part of the brain near the base, is specifically activated and pushes out chemicals like testosterone and other sex hormones that arouse the libido. The hypothalamus is not activated in feelings of parental love.
The saying that love is blind has a biological basis. When we fall in love, the study says, a part of the neural networks associated with social judgment is deactivated. That explains why we can’t see the faults of the one we love and makes us prone to end up choosing the wrong person for a life partner.
We can see the flaws only after our initial ardor has cooled down, allowing previously suppressed brain areas to awaken to reality.
Knowing from neuroscience that our feelings are brain-based, isn’t it but logical to say, “I love thee from the recesses of my brain?” or “my brain tells me ...” instead of “my heart tells me that I love you?”
Funny?
The dawning of neuroscience has disturbed not only our traditional belief about love but also about the soul and, yes, about God.
If we were to believe neuroscience, our soul is not separate from our flesh, but a product of cerebral activity. Neuroscience has reduced the long-held concept of the soul as a separate entity from the body to an inseparable body-and-mind dualism.
This is because neuroscience is enamored with a methodology known as physicalism in probing the existence of everything: anything that can’t be proven empirically or consistently repeated in lab tests does not exist.
So aside from dismissing the existence of the soul, neuroscience also does not believe in the reality of paranormal phenomena and near-death experiences outside our cranium.
That goes true with God – and with life after death.
Neuroscience, which started as a study of the nervous system to find cures for mental illnesses or disorders, has made its foray into the turf of faith.
The challenge was loudly articulated by erstwhile unknown neuroscientist Sam Harris, whose books “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian nation,” brought for him instant fame. Along with Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the best-selling book “The God Delusion,” Harris blames religion for much of the world’s violence and considers our belief in God as another superstition.
Neuroscience disputes claims about religious visions, including reported encounters with the Supreme Being, Jesus and angels by those who have had near-death experiences, as nothing but illusions created in the brain.
Neuroscience stumbled on this hypothesis after finding out that people suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy are prone to have religious visions or paranormal experiences.
Science in general has changed much of our worldview about religion since astrophysics has proven Copernicus’s claim that the earth revolves around the sun. Though most of us still believe in God, quite a number of us have ceased to believe in the Bible’s version that He created the world in six days.
Darwin’s theory of evolution makes us believe that we share a common ancestry with the apes. Einstein’s theory of relativity has bequeathed to us our relativist values, although the great physicist couldn’t have intended his theory to create ripples that would disturb many aspects of our lives.
Nowadays, with the aid of genetics and neuroscience, neo-Darwinists are trying to shake our faith in God with claims that man’s intelligence is not a divine gift but a by-product of man’s evolution – the cells in our brains have evolved into a more complex organ as our intelligence adapts to environmental pressures in a process called natural selection.
This has become the atheists’ response to suggestions by some theist scientists that many people see religious visions in near-death experiences because a “God gene” has been hard-wired in the human brain.
Science’s awesome discoveries have given atheists a powerful fodder to relegate religion among our superstitious beliefs and spin science into a sort of a new god that could unravel the mysteries of life and the universe, although science has its own downsides.
Despite its tremendous successes, science has many shortcomings that follow in every discovery it makes.
In the field of cosmology, it has been stuck in the mystery of dark matter and dark energy, which scientists believe provide the invisible glue to keep the universe from falling apart. Science has discovered black holes but fails to explain why the black holes are there or what their role is in the whole cosmic scheme.
Neuroscience itself is bugged by the problem of qualla, people’s subjective experiences. One of the most enigmatic problems which neuroscience is trying to solve is how we perceive colors of physical objects. Is color an intangible characteristic of an object or does it exist only in the mind?
The problem is inherent in physicalism as a method of inquiry which neuroscientists could not abandon, understandably because doing so will open the doors to the field of metaphysics, which they abhor.
With this dilemma, I would rather want neuroscience to continue its search for remedies to people’s neurological disorders, instead of poking its nose into life’s mysteries such as the nature of love and a kiss.
I may acquiescence to its finding that human emotions are brain-based, but I digress if it probes the nature of a kiss and comes up with a conclusion that it is nothing but an exchange of saliva – and, yes, germs.
So, how do I love thee? I still like to hear Elizabeth Barrett Browning count the ways in her “Sonnet XLIII, From the Portuguese,” from which I borrowed the opening line of this article. Not born in the age of neuroscience, she talks about the soul, God’s grace and life after death.


Author's note:
I wrote this article as part of my assignment in an online course in creative writing I took with the Writers Bureau in London. This article was later published by the Business Mirror in Manila on September 5, 2007. Subsequently it become part of my book "The Gypsy Soul and Other Essays" which is on sale at amazon.com and Barnes and Nobles.

I decided to post this to fill the gap since my last previous post about a week ago. I was writing a blog on Susan Blackmore, a well-known psychologist who studied paranormal phenomena which she later abandoned after almost rhree decades of investigation. Unfortunately the blog, which I tried writing in between my free time, was erased while I was erasing her essays from which I based the blog.

I hope you enjoyed reading "Love in the age of neuroscience."

When God closes doors

This is a true story, my story ...


I went home from work that night with a heavy heart. I had just lost my job as a subeditor with the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah where I had worked for the past six years. I was 62.

Losing my job at the twilight years of my life with an eight-year-old daughter and a wife to look after was surreal.

I didn’t expect the axe to fall too soon. The year before, I was named one of the company’s 12 outstanding employees and, despite the Saudi government’s program to gradually replace expatriates with Saudis, my job was not among the trades lined up for the chopping block.

It was one of the most trying times in my life. How do I fend for my family? We came to Saudi Arabia to escape a harsh life in Manila and the prospect of going home unprepared was a nightmare.

I got my termination notice without a warning in January 2005, two months before my renewable yearly work contract was to expire in March. I wanted to cry to high heavens that it was unjust. A few expatriates advised me to file a labor case but knowing the odds quite well, I deemed it prudent to keep still.

At that time, we were planning to migrate to New Zealand. My wife, a nurse 14 years younger than I, had barely started to scout for a job there. When I got my termination notice, I saw that dream collapsed. We had to use the money we saved for that purpose for more immediate needs.

Though shattered, I told my wife about the tragic news as calmly as I could. “Don’t be alarmed,” I opened up as she settled next to me on our sofa in the living room to watch TV, “I got fired from my job and we have to go home by the end of the month.”

I saw shock in her eyes. Instinctively, I assured her that I could still work as a subeditor in Manila and, with our modest savings, she could open a bigger store than what we used to have back home before I worked in Saudi Arabia.

My wife, who quit her job to take care of our daughter when the child was born in 1997, wasn’t convinced and pleaded with me to look for another job, any job, as a lifeline until we could move to New Zealand or any other Western country.

I understood her fears of going home. When I left Manila in 1999, I was a newspaper subeditor. We had a small store which we sat up in front of our home when she chose to stop working. When we got married in 1989, we never dreamt of working overseas until the spiraling prices of oil in the world market kept on pushing up Manila’s cost of living beyond our reach.

Figuring out our options when we went to bed that night, I decided to stay and look for another job. Filing a labor case was out of the question. That would hasten our going home. In Saudi Arabia, an expatriate can not simply hop from one job to another. He has to get the permission of his employer to move to another company. I asked my editor-in-chief to help me get a company clearance.

As I always do in my trying times, I prayed for divine guidance and was buoyed when the company gave me a six-month grace period to look for a new job. But it marked only the beginning of a new travail.

After failing to get a job with the Arab News, the only other English newspaper in Saudi Arabia, I discovered that I could hardly find even an ordinary office work. My wife, who also started scouting for work, did not fare any better either. My problem was my age; hers was an eight-year gap in her employment records.

Since my family joined me in Jeddah in 2000, we had been attending clandestine Bible studies and prayer meetings held by a Catholic charismatic group every Friday, the rest day in Saudi Arabia, and throughout our trial my wife would occasionally feel a muted anger against God for “abandoning” us.

As a former atheist, I told her it was futile to rebel against God. When I lost God during my college days after enrolling in an anthropology class that taught Darwin’s theory of evolution, I lost my peace of mind and had sank deeper into the quagmire of alcoholism until I turned back to Him on bended knees.

I told my wife that probably God was just testing our faith. We held on to faith. From my experiences, I had learned to practice the counsels in Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; never lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will show you the right path”

In June, as I grew more desperate after my applications for published job vacancies got no responses and the referrals of friends turned out fruitless, I got an unexpected call from a Filipino, a friend of our next-door neighbor, working in a construction company; He advised me to see another Filipino in a sister company, Truba Arabia.

I got interviewed and was asked to report to work as soon as I could wind up with my job at Saudi Gazette. God has endowed me with genes that made me look ten years younger than my age and I got lucky that the personnel manager who interviewed me did not bother to look into my curriculum vitae.

I was offered a clerical job that would pay a third less than my previous salary. I decided not to report to work at once on the pretext that the Gazette had asked me to stay for a while. I was hoping to find another job with a better pay. I did not find any.

By August, a month after my grace-period to look for a new job lapsed, the Gazette cut my pay by half. It was time to go. I rang up Francis, my Filipino contact at Truba Arabia but he told me that his boss had accepted a new applicant who was expected to report to work in the first week of August. My heart sunk.

What happened next was a series of strange coincidences I will never forget ever. In mid-August, I got an intuitive urge to give Francis another call, hoping for an unforeseen turn of event. The improbable happened. Francis told me his boss had a change of mind and was reconsidering hiring me if I would accept a lower pay. I bit the bullet.

I was happy but the euphoria did not last long. The day before I was to report for work, I called up Francis for a reconfirmation before I went home from the Gazette at five in the afternoon. I was dumbstruck to hear that his boss did not want to sign my contract anymore - for no reason at all.

My wife cried uncontrollably when I told her about it as soon as I got home. It turned out that she also failed to get a job she had applied for on the same day. We prayed for divine succor. I prayed to Jesus to touch the heart of Francis’ boss, whom I knew was still at the office at that time.

Like many other companies in Saudi Arabia, Truba Arabia had a long noon break and reopened at five in the afternoon up to eight at night. About 30 minutes after we said our prayers, my cell phone rang. It was Francis, telling me his boss signed my work contract at last.

My wife and I wept. We embraced and shed tears of joy. The next day, my wife called up a hospital where she applied for a job the previous week. She was told to go there to sign her contract. We got our jobs a few days apart in August.

End of our travail? No.

Seven months after I started working at Truba Arabia, I almost lost my job in a new trial that would further strengthen my faith afterwards. That was in February 2006, shortly after we moved to a new office. I had a falling out with our boss, an Egyptian with fiery mood swings.

As early as two months into my job, I started telling my wife how unhappy I was in it and that I wanted to quit owing to my boss’ temper. She pleaded with me to hang on until I could find another job. Her pay was not enough for us to live by. I took patience but it did not take long for my fuse to snap.

It happened one morning while he was ranting over what he perceived was a lapse in my work without giving me a chance to explain. “I can’t take this anymore and I don’t care if you fire me,” I told him and turned away without a by-leave. As I went back to my desk, he called out to Francis, who was our payroll officer, to close my account.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you this time. You shouldn’t have talked back,” Francis whispered when he went over to my desk. Another Filipino, Gilbert, our IT engineer, offered his sympathy. I put up a bold front. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “God will take care of me.”

Deep inside I was devastated. How will my wife take this? I prayed silently, “Lord, I don’t understand all of this, but I trust you. Please don’t leave us in the midst of this crisis.”

While I was packing my things, Francis told me our boss wanted me to stay. I learned later that our Filipino secretary, who was left at the old office to take telephone calls and monitor the fax messages while the communication lines at the new office were being set up, did not report to work that morning. I was to take his place in the meantime. He never showed up since then.

Francis made it clear to me that it was a holdover job that may last only for three months. I must start looking for a new job. When the telecommunication lines in the new office were put in place, I had to go. It was a week before March, the start of summer break for the Philippine schools in Saudi Arabia. I thanked God for the lifeline, hoping to get a teaching job in any Philippine school when classes opened in June, no matter if the pay would be smaller.

By May, Francis brought me good tidings. I was to be reassigned to the new office because the new secretary, an Indian, was not allowed by his previous employer to transfer. I moved to the new office within a week and worked as secretary to the newly hired executive manager, a Filipino who proved to be an epitome of civility.

I have been working with Truba Arabia for exactly two years last August 30. My wife has moved to one of Jeddah’s two biggest hospitals. Although we do not see any silver lining to our dream of moving to New Zealand, we try to keep still.

I have had my own share of answered prayers since I returned to the Faith after losing God when I was a journalism student in Manila and I have come to believe that when God closes doors He opens new ones. I believe in God’s mysterious ways.

September 2007

---------

This is a personal experience which I wrote for my assignment in a creative writing course that I took online with the Writers Bureau in London. This is among my many experiences that have strengthened my faith in the Almighty. It always puzzles me how prayer works at a time of our needs, the same way that it worked in the case of Bro. Albert Pecson, whose story I posted in this site with the title "A journey made in heaven" right before this blog.

A year after I wrote this story, the Saudi Gazette rehired me to help launch the Kabayan,as a Pilipino or Tagalog section of the paper, with a financial package much bigger than when I was fired in 2005. We have abandoned our plans to migrate to New Zealand after my wife's application for a visa as a caregiver in an institution for elderlies in Auckland was turned down by the visa officer in Dubai during the world recession because her job could be done by the natives who had returned home from other countries.

We have made plans to settle in Bacolod City after our daughter's graduation from high school here in Jeddah in three years time but have not closed the doors to some other possibilities, knowing from experience that God often works in His own mysterious ways. If this attitude appears like fanaticism to other people, so be it. That's what faith is all about, a firm belief and hope in the midst of uncertainties. As much as possible, I use reason as my guiding light in life but I cling to faith when reason does not seem to work anymore. As I put it in my book "The Gypsy Soul and Other Essays", in life's journey I use reason as my rudder but faith as my compass.

This article is included in my book.

Hope you enjoy reading my blogs.

Please read my other blog Fun in Life hyperlink salt-funstories.blogspot.com

A journey made in heaven

I was green with envy when Bro. Albert Pecson, one of the founders of the St. Ignatius community here in Jeddah, emailed the group that he was already in Sweden. I have dreamed of settling my family in Sweden, Norway or Switzerland but I know how difficult it is to migrate to any of these countries. So I poked my nose into their journey.
"Finally, I arrived in Sweden on April 2. It was 2 degrees and chilly cold," he said in his email to the St. Ignatius community, to which my family also belongs. "Sis. Luz and the three kids will follow in two to three months and with God's blessings this will be our last place of destination."
The family's journey to Sweden is a story of faith. Bro. Albert, Sis. Luz and their three kids stayed for quite sometime in Jeddah. The couple, known for their piety, opened their home for prayer meetings and related activities when the community, led by Bro. Ahjid Sayas, was being formed in 2003.
Bro. Albert, a civil engineer, was then working with the company Saudi ABV. In one of our prayer meetings, he surprised us with an announcement that they were moving to Riyadh because he was hired by the telecommunication company Ericsson with better pay and benefits.
The announcement was followed by words of praise and thanksgiving to the Lord for the blessings. His job at Ericsson, which had a branch office at the same building where he worked, was given to him on a silver platter, so to speak.
"I applied at Ericsson by chance. Ericsson was renting an office space at the building of Saudi ABV. When a co-worker told me that there was an opening at Ericsson, I went there at once to apply. The following day, I was asked to go to Riyadh for an interview and I was immediately hired."
In Riyadh, he joined another Catholic community but never lost contact with the St. Ignatius group and, in one or two occasions, even attended the group's foundation anniversary.
A few years later, he emailed the group that they were moving to Oman, and again never failed to mention his gratitude to the Almighty. But last year, he was retrenched from his job, at a time when their son JP had an eyelid operation. As Christians who practice their faith, the couple kept still but prayed hard for divine succor.
"What happened was that in November 2010, I was included in the redundancy program of Ericsson-Oman. On that day, JP was operated on his lower eyelid. It was really a bad day for us. But I never failed to ask our Lord for intervention. We prayed and asked for guidance," he said in an email to me.
That night after he was informed of his retrenchment, he called up his previous boss who had been transferred to the Ericsson's headquarters in Sweden. "Without much ado, he told me that he would find a way for me to move to Sweden. The rest was history," he recalled.
The family's journey to Sweden seemed to have been tailor-made in heaven because, although the couple have had plans to migrate to a Western country, Sweden was never part of the equation.
"Our plan was to settle in any country that could give us a future, but we never thought of Sweden. It was either USA, Canada or New Zealand," he said in response to one of the questions I sent right after he emailed the St. Ignatius group when he arrived in Sweden.
Bro. Albert has started to look forward to the day when the family becomes a permanent resident which he hopes would come after five years of continuous stay.

The poltergeist mystery

Yahoo came up with a news a few days ago about a woman who claimed that her house was haunted by a poltergeist. The story goes that the poltergeist opened and slammed doors shut as well as moved objects.

The news story said that the woman, Liza Manning, a 34-year-old carer in Coventry, even claimed that the resident ghost had killed the family's pet dog. A veterinary post-mortem, the news story said, suggested that the dog was shoved down the stairs. The story carried a video of a plastic chair moving from one place to another.

Unless you have shared a similar experience as Ms. Manning's, your tendency is not to believe, especially at this time when science, neuroscience in particular, dismisses paranormal phenomena as mere illusions created in the brain. Many comments posted below the story believed that it was a hoax. I used to adopt such an attitude until I had a poltergeist experience in early 1980s.

I was then working as a reporter with the People's Journal tabloid in Manila when a boy was brought to the office. He came on a ship from Cebu south of Manila and was taken by a co-passenger to People's Journal at the Port Area because he had nowhere to go.

People's Journal published the boy's photograph and vital information about him so his kin in Manila could identify him. Meanwhile, my editor-in-chief, Gus Villanueva, asked me to bring the boy to my home for a temporary shelter. I was then living with a cousin and some nieces in a rented house on Constancia St., Sampaloc, Manila.

A week later, my cousin, an engineer, told us that there was something queer with the boy, named Cesar Cordova. He said that every time he sent the boy to buy cigarettes at the corner store he would come back with more cigarette sticks than the money given to him could buy.

We experimented. Hope cigarette then cost 25 centavo for two sticks. I gave the boy 25 and he came back with four sticks. The experiment was repeated several times with the same results. We confronted the boy if he was stealing and he swore that he did not.

A few days later, while I was sleeping on the sofa on the living room downstairs I felt a small stone hit me on one foot. It was a Sunday and my day off. It was also a holiday for my nieces who were either working or going to school

When the incident was repeated two more times, I called to my nieces who were upstairs to stop poking fun at me. They swore they were in the room trying to get some sleep. When two or three more pebbles hit me on the feet, I stood up and sat on the stairway leading to the second floor. Then a cascade of pebbles hit me, some on my thighs.

I called my nieces and told them about what happened. The general reaction was "Come on, don't scare us. it's not a good joke." I told them that it was true and that I was not trying to pull their legs. Nobody believed me.

In late afternoon, while almost all of us were in the living room downstairs, a small cut of marble (my cousin, who had a contract for marble tombstones with a memorial park, had cuts of marble tiles in the living room) flew and hit the wall. When another cut flew, they started to believe me.

That same afternoon a handful of pebbles appeared like they were strewn suddenly in the living room. We went to the door and ran along the small alley leading to the gate when a shower of pebbles followed us. We told the landlords (two elderlies who were sitting on their chairs on the roadside in front of their home) about it but they thought we were trying to pull a prank even after we showed them the pebbles.

At about 7 p.m. that night, we heard a knock on the door. I opened the door but saw nobody. It was impossible not to see anybody even if he walked away because the alley between the walls of the owner's house and the neighbor's was about 15 meters long.

A few days before that happened, Cesar told us that he was kidnapped by some kind of people when he was young and was held as a companion in a cave by a man whose hair was white on the other side and black on the other half. We dismissed his tales as just some sort of crazy talks. But after that phenomenon happened I asked him about what was happening. He said that the man had followed him and he was in our house.

My cousin, although an atheist, and I had read books on poltergeists and we understood each other that it was an actual case of a poltergeist. In the meantime, a woman called up on our home phone listed in the People's Journal story that she was a relative of the boy. But my cousin and I had decided to study the case and told her that we would keep the boy for a while.

When our nieces learned about our decision, they threatened to move out elsewhere if I did not bring the boy to his relatives. We gave in and I took the boy to her relatives in Pasig, east of Manila. At the office, I confided the case to Ester Dipasupil,the features editor of the Times Journal, a sister publication of People's Journal. She told me that the family of her aunt in Baguio City have had similar experiences.

Her aunt's family experienced not only pebble showers but furniture and dinning table moved to other places. There were times when the dinning table went missing from the dinning room and later found in a room upstairs. I can't remember if it was she who told me to see Father Bulatao of Ateneo de Manila University but I later went to the university with the boy in tow and met Father Bulatao, who told me that he was studying the phenomenon and had came up a small pamphlet in which he wrote local stories of similar occurrences.

He advised me to see Redentor Romero, whom I remember was conductor of the Manila Symphony orchestra. When I called up Mr. Romero by phone, he told me to look for a woman named Vivian Manila, who I understood was a medium, at the Saint Pope Pious Center in Manila. While I was about to look for Vivian Manila, the boy's kin called me up because they accused him of throwing stones in their home and at the neighbors' houses.

I went to Pasig and explained to the family and their neighbors that the boy was being followed by a ghost, or whatever it was, and told them about cases of poltergeist I had read in books. I also told them that I was looking for Vivian Manila who might be able to help us explain the phenomenon. At the Pope Pious, some staffers of a Catholic youth organization that held office there said they had heard of her name but did not know her personally.

A few days later, the relatives of Cesar called me up and told me that they had sent the boy on a ship back to Cebu as they could no longer stand the weird occurrences that were going on in their house. I stopped my quest for Vivian Manila because I had nothing to bring to her anymore but a tale.









Here's the Yahoo story.


By Gaby Leslie, Yahoo!
A woman who insists that her house is haunted by a poltergeist has released a video clip of eerie happenings in her family home.

The petrified Manning family from Coventry started witnessing out-of-the-ordinary events two weeks after settling into the council-rented home last year.

Lisa Manning, a 34-year-old carer, goes as far as to claim that the resident ghost killed the family's pet dog Phoenix. A vetinary post-mortem suggested it had been shoved down the stairs.

She has since had to resort to exorcism to get rid of the ghostly problem after noticing lights switching on and off, pots moving, drawers opening and doors slamming shut.

Shooting the footage herself, an empty cupboard door appears to open by itself and a pink chair gradually making its way across her 11-year-old daughter Ellie's bedroom in the 52-second home video.

Eager to prove its existence, the mother-of-two told the Coventry Telegraph: "The priest blessed the house but said himself that we shouldn't live here, we definitely shouldn't stay. He gave me a small crucifix. The problem is because we can't see it, we don't know where it's going to be or what it's going to do. This is a horror house. It's like living in a scary movie. The worst thing about it is, even I can't believe what's happening myself."