One Saturday morning, my friends and I were out to play in our compound’s yard. We were running and playing the usual games. I vividly remember how one of my playmates told us to play hide and seek. As a kid, I looked for a well-hidden place that I believed was safe. I opted to hide under a wooden table at the back of my deceased uncle’s house. It is a few meters away from where we were playing. There were trees surrounding the house and a particular malunggay tree near where I was hiding. It was pretty sunny and windy at the same time. I was covering myself well with an old black pail.
After a while, I was becoming impatient because no one seemed to find me. I guessed it’s almost lunch. I was about to go out where I was hiding when suddenly I saw a pair of little feet standing near the malunggay tree. I thought it was my friend’s but it’s quite smaller. It’s like feet of a 5-year-old and that time I know my friends are in the 7 – 9 age bracket. I got a creepy feeling since the feet are not moving and it’s quite facing me but I battled the little fear and decided to get out. I moved the pail and when I looked at the malunggay tree, there was no one there. I ran fast to look for the kid but to no avail. I walked back to the yard where we were playing to find my playmates and my aunt and grandma looking worried sick.
I ran to them and they were surprised to see me. It’s like I was gone for days, I thought. They were murmuring something and I felt my knees weak and I lost my energy as if I was awake for a couple of nights without something to eat. When I woke up, my mom was already there folding some clothes while sitting on my bed. I asked what happened but she just smiled and told me to just rest and that I could not play in the yard for quite a while.
I continued to have a normal life after that. Maybe as a child, I was easily distracted and forgot about it until I reached high school. I was baffled so I asked my aunt what happened and she told me that I was missing for a day. They looked for me everywhere even in the place where I hid myself. When they saw me walking to them, at the same time that they think I lost the day before, my eyebags were showing and I looked like I was exhausted from running or maybe because I hadn’t eaten or slept enough.
Then came my most dreaded year when I was in high school. My mother was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. We were having extremely hard times and then came the day I lost my mom. That was the start when my younger sister started to have nightmares and other supernatural experiences in our house. Although, even before my grandparents are feeling something strange.
To give you an overview of our house, we are living with my mother’s father, mother, two brothers and their family, and my aunt. My sister and I used to share a room but a really terrifying experience made her move to our aunt’s room.
Mama’s gone for quite a while and there remained a bookshelf full with books. There’s no space for a new book. And so that baffled my sister when one evening, I was in a deep sleep, she heard something – like a book has fallen from the shelf. There’s no way a book could fall. It was organized very well. If a book falls, the rest should follow but no, only one book fell and that’s the book my mom co-authored. When my sister was about to pick up the book, a little girl and an old man, whose age is close to my grandpa, were standing side by side. The little girl asked my sister, “**How’s Anna?” My sister couldn’t speak and then suddenly the two disappeared.
The next morning, my sister told us about it. It turned out that the old man was our grandpa’s cousin and the little girl was my aunt. My sister described it so well that my grandparents suspected that the little girl was my other aunt, my mom’s older sister, who died of cancer at a young age. They showed us my aunt’s photos and no matter how spooky, my sister verified that it was her. At that day, even though my grandparents smiled, we knew that they were sad because it’s their dear little child.
