Tag Archives: spirits

Filipino Folklore: The Maligno

Nationality: Filipino American
Age: 29
Residence: California
Performance Date: 5/1/2019
Primary Language: English

Context:

The informant is a Filipino American woman in her late twenties. I asked her if she knew any stories or folklore from either friends or possibly any folklore from her family and her culture. She mentioned her mother knew many stories about spirits and creatures in the Philippines. The main piece is told in her own words:

The Main Piece:

So, my cousin’s friend decided to set up an apartment for drafting for their upcoming architecture firm. Her friend apparently had a sixth sense, looked out the window, saw a tree in the neighbor’s yard, and suddenly left and didn’t want to return. Apparently, she said there was a tree full of Maligno. My mom said it was a bad area.

Background:

The informant knows this piece from her family and folklore from her own culture. She is Filipino and her mother shared these stories with her and her siblings. She states, “My mom told us about this story while we were in the Philippines. We were visiting some of the old houses where my mom and relatives grew up, which were supposedly haunted. One of the houses had some crazy scratches on the wood floors and little footprint markings. The she started talking about folklore and how they could have been made.” She says it’s interesting because the stories explain what happens when certain areas create bad feelings or if someone has a certain ailment, certain creatures in the Philippines are responsible for them.

Notes:

Namaligno is a term used by Filipinos for someone being affected by something magical or supernatural. Maligno are spirits that haunt places or people. They can also disguise themselves as regular people. If the Maligno takes a liking to a certain individual, it can cause harm to them. For example, in the Philippines, when someone comes down with a sickness or ailment, it is because the Maligno is attached to that individual. Filipinos believe that certain diseases can be caused by the intervention of a magical or supernatural entity. This is usually due to a disease, sickness or ailment that cannot be explained or has no apparent cause. An example of this is Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome, a common occurrence in the Philippines. Due to the lack of explanation as to how people die from this, Filipinos will connect the cause to Malignos. It is an interesting concept because we, as humans, always need and explanation for things. The unknown is an unsatisfactory answer for why certain things happen, so to cope with the unexplained, we search for reasons why. This would explain how in many different cultures, there are creatures or spirits that are to blame for unexplained phenomena.

 

 

For another version/story of Maligno, check out: http://phspirits.com/maligno/

The Lady in White at La Quinta Resort

Nationality: Mexican American
Age: 45
Residence: California
Performance Date: 5/1/2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Context:

The informant is a 45-year-old man and of Mexican ethnicity. The informant is my uncle on my mother’s side. On a trip to Palm Springs, my parents, uncle and aunt, who is referred to as YV in this piece, stayed at the La Quinta Resort for a weekend. On arrival, my uncle experienced something unusual.

Main Piece:

Okay, so we arrived at La Quinta resort at night. We parked curbside about 30 feet from our cottage. Your mum and dad were already inside. YV and I were unloading our bags from the car and I grabbed my things and was walking slowly towards the cottage looking down to the walkway. When I looked forward, I noticed an image of a woman standing near a tree about 40 ft away. She was wearing all white and she had long, black hair. I looked back to see if YV was looking in the same direction, but she was still getting her things from the car.  I quickly turned to where I had seen this woman, but she had disappeared. A shiver ran down my spine. I didn’t immediately tell YV of what I had just seen because I had a feeling she’d freak out.  Unbeknownst to me, YV later showed me a coffee mug she bought from hotel as a souvenir.  The woman on the mug is the woman I saw that night. Again, I felt that same shiver run down my back.

Background:

This is a personal experience that my uncle witnessed firsthand. Prior to this experience, he had no knowledge of hauntings or stories surrounding the Resort.

Notes:

There are similar stories told by other guests who have stayed at the resort regarding ghosts and hearing ghostly voices. A security guard working one night claimed to have seen a ghostly woman walking across the tennis courts at the hotel. Many stories describe experiences within the hotel rooms and bungalows. My aunt YV, experienced something in her room the same night my uncle saw the ghost woman. YV’s description matches the descriptions that other guests have had as well.

 

For more accounts of ghostly experiences at the La Quinta Resort, check this out:

La Quinta Resort and Club

La Carreta Chillona/ The Weeping Wagon

Nationality: Salvadorean
Age: 56
Residence: california
Performance Date: 2019
Primary Language: Spanish

Main Piece:

“It is a wagon that goes through the many towns during midnight. The spirits on the wagon would take all those it crossed. It is said that they would take them to hell. At midnight, you could hear the sound of the wooden wheel very loudly marking the wagon’s passage through the town. The wagon was conducted by spirits from hell in order to take humans to hell. My sister and I heard the wagon passing some nights. Maybe it was our imagination or fear, but we really thought we heard it passing. Some even say they saw it.”

Context: The informant is a middle-aged woman, born in El Salvador. Her mother told her this story, and she believes now that like many of the other stories her family told her, they were in order to prevent them from wandering the streets at night.

Thoughts:

I agree with the informant that the function of these stories is to prevent the young from wandering at night in order to avoid the many dangers that could occur at that hour.

The Cow Head Man

Nationality: American
Occupation: Retired
Residence: California
Performance Date: 2019
Primary Language: English
Language: spanish

Main Piece:

“When I was a child my mother told me that one late night, she stayed up waiting for my father to return home. It was really late…we lived up in the mountains. So it was always very dark. My mother said that she looked out the sliding back doors and she saw, what looked like a man. She ducked behind the couch quickly as the man walked closer to the sliding doors. When it got up to the doors my mother noticed that the man’s head was that of a cow. It had big black eyes and it just stood there…only moving its eyes from one side to the other. My mother was so scared, she did not know what to do. I think I remember her saying that the cow head man was there for about 10 minutes, looking around. Finally, my father arrived, and his headlights beamed toward the back. That is when my mother looked out again and the cow head man had disappeared.

“This figure, man, or whatever it is has always followed my family and I around.” (when she said this, I asked her what she meant by that, and she continued to tell the story.)

“You see, no matter where we moved to, my mother or me or one of my sisters or brothers said they saw the same man. The last time I saw him it was here (Her current home). I was in the back bedroom, asleep. I was waiting for my husband to arrive. I woke up exactly at 12 midnight. It was weird because my body just woke up on its own, anyway, when I looked over to the window there he was, with his cow head and those huge black eyes. He was just staring at me. I was so afraid. I could not move. There was a point when he looked away from me and that is when I ran right out of there and told my sister. My sister yelled at it and that was not good. You aren’t supposed to test them like that. It’s crazy because it just doesn’t leave us alone.”

 

Context:

The informant is an elderly Caucasian woman born and raised in Tennessee. She first heard about this entity from her mother when she was a child. According to her she has also witnessed the entity with her own eyes. She is not sure why it follows her family around.

 

Analysis: It seems that this story is one shared by many members of this woman’s family. They have all claimed to have encountered this entity in some way or another.

A Tame Sort of Trance

Nationality: American
Age: 61
Occupation: Salesman
Residence: Southern California
Performance Date: March 24, 2018
Primary Language: English

During high-school, my dad studied abroad in Brazil for a year. He stayed with a family of Lebanese immigrants who showed him both Brazilian and Lebanese traditions, and always included him in everything. Growing up, I heard tons of stories from his time there. The Brazilian stories were relatively tame – beaches, clubs, schools, etc. But the Lebanese culture was of particular interest.

Driving home from lunch one sunny afternoon, I ask him and my mom if they have any stories that I could use for my folklore project.

“I was just thinking about my experiences when I was a teenager in Brazil with a family of Lebanese immigrants who were Druze, and had the belief of many paths to the mountaintop. But they also had a uh.. a spiritualist element. And after I’d been there several months, they let me go to a family ceremony which was on a Sunday. One of the uncles would go into a trance and kind of channel spirits and try to get insight into some of the issues facing the family. So he would stand there and close his eyes, and appear to be communing with the spirits. And everybody would be quiet and sitting around, um, and then he would speak to them. But that was all in Arabic so I didn’t understand a word. Um.. But other than that, then they would say he’s asking about some problems we’re having with the business or this or that, and he would get some direction. They…they had these kind of sessions where one or more of them would kind of be in a sort of trance-like state. So I remember viewing that and thinking that was sort of interesting.”

Whenever I think of communing with the spirits, I picture ouji boards or fire-and-brimstone preachers in the deep south flailing around with snakes on their arms. I picture people getting real serious and asking about life’s deeper questions. It’s quite funny to picture this fairly frequent occurrence, where a member of the family would go into a trance and just ask advice for everyday problems. Obviously, the whole thing was treated seriously, as my dad had to earn a certain amount of trust before he was allowed to attend. But even so, there’s a lightness to it that is not normally associated with channeling spirits.