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A couple of weeks ago, I picked up my brother after work (he was hitching with me going home).  It was not that big a deal as his office was like five blocks from mine, and we both lived in QC.

We decided to have dinner at our favorite place in the Greenhills commercial area first so we could have a bite and catch up on each other before I dropped him off at his place.  Well, my brother lives in the Teacher’s Village area of the city, and the quickest route to his place from Greenhills was to drive down Ortigas Avenue, hang a right at N. Domingo and then turn left on… dumdumdummm!!!... Balete Drive! 

Well, I need not go over the urban legend of the supposedly haunted stretch of Balete Drive and the inevitable wandering White Lady.  Everyone knows about it.  And if you didn’t, well, where have you been?

I didn’t believe the legend myself, having driven through the relatively-short street hundreds of times.  That is, until two weeks ago.  I have a friend who lives near Balete.  Well, actually, she lives ON Balete, and there have been a few stories floating around about Gabe’s place, and about things going bump in the night.  Still, these stories sounded to me like the stories that you would tell each other late at night just to scare each other.  It was easy to pooh-pooh them as tall stories.

Now – all that aside - back to my little vignette.

After dinner, we got back on the road.  At about 8:30 or 9 in the evening, we had turned down Balete Drive, at the corner where the former Pepsi warehouse used to be, right beside the Magnolia Ice Cream factory.  Crossing E. Rodriguez was as problematic as usual, with some SOB making an illegal turn by the gas station.  Eventually we crossed the corner.  Nothing unusual.  That is until we crossed the third corner after the gas station.

As we crossed that corner where it intersected with Balete Drive, I had this inexplicable feeling.  You know how you would feel if someone were to suddenly sneak up on you and go, “Boo!” or “Surprise!” or, … you probably know what I mean.  Well, that was what I felt.  It was like someone ran up to the car, just the outside of the driver’s window, and then yelled “Boo!”

I didn’t actually see or hear anyone or anything.  But the feeling was very sharp and powerful.  Still, it was so momentary it didn’t even affect my driving.  I shuddered uncontrollably for a few seconds, and started sweating profusely.  I don’t mind telling you, I was scared.  I didn’t know what it was, and two weeks later, I still don’t know.  It was THE scariest moment for me.  Ever.  It felt exactly like someone jumping from behind a tree.  Except for the cold wave that followed.  My brother kept asking “What” and I couldn’t answer.

I had goosebumps all the way to my brother’s.  I couldn’t understand WHAT it was.  Obviously the place where it happened would have made it a foregone conclusion.  But I literally didn’t see anything.  In a way, I feel gypped.  Where is the white lady, or the wide-eyed knife-wielding man after another head for his collection?  If I had to be creeped out, I wanna see a real, honest-to-goodness ghost!  Heheh.  So, as far as ghosts stories go, this is one of the lamest.  The only thing that makes it non-lame is that it’s true.

I was still feeling it when I got home.  I wanted to ask someone who might know something about things like these, but I didn’t know who to talk to. I had drifted apart from the few friends I had that knew a bit about this hocus-pocus, ghosts-on-the-prowl, third-eye kind of thing, so I YM’d  my new friend Sandy, an American living in Australia who was into these kinds of things, and what she thought it was was someone trying to contact me about something important.  Yikes. She very kindly left out the phrase “from beyond the grave.” But, still, I repeat: yikes.

You would expect that I’d have nightmares about it long after.  Well, I have indeed been having nightmares every night since then.  Very unusual for a person who normally doesn’t dream.  And the nightmares are almost always the same – me looking out of my house’s second floor window (the window of the room that I used to share with my brother when we were small); in the nightmare, it would be sometime in the early afternoon, with the sun beating down brightly; and a shadowy figure walking down the little alley, approaching the house.  I couldn’t tell you who this stranger was, or even give a description – if it’s a guy or girl, what he or she was wearing, tall or short, or even if fat or thin.  Dreams can be like that.  And the nightmare would end right when the shadowy stranger reaches our gate, the nightmare fading away from that point, or I would wake up.

Last week, when my dad and my brother went to our mom’s grave to visit her on her death anniversary (as you know, visiting a loved one’s grave on their death anniversary is a Filipino tradition), I had to go pee, so I went to the little chapel-cum-mausoleum across the street.  The men’s room was locked so I had no choice but to use the ladies.  But just as I was about to enter the dark unlighted restroom, I felt the same thing.  Not as strong, but the same thing.  I rushed back out and went to where there were people.  I decided to hold it until we got to the restaurant where we had dinner.