Barrio Ungo

When you live in Naga, a town south of Cebu City, as I did during some of my most important years, ghosts and mythical beasts are present not just on Halloween but all year round. Naga, for some weird reason, has always been known to be the barrio ungo or lugar sa mga wakwak. I don’t know how the legend started but it goes way, way back even before your mothers and mine were born.

I lived in Naga for about six years when I was 7 to 12 years old, in a tiny barangay on the edge of town, and not once in those formative years did I ever spot an aswang. There were so many sightings though, like the santelmo that was seen rotating around our house, an ancestral home with a big yard that my Mother and I shared with a chunkful of relatives. Ancestral homes, with their enduring spookiness, have always been the preferred chill-out place for the otherworldly.

Like that duwende who told my cousin, John2x, to steal some very important family cassette tapes. My aunt was frantically searching for those tapes and found them in a box of toys John2x owned and when he was spanked for his thievery, he blamed the duwende who lived on our ceiling. My aunt, who told him about the duwende in the first place, asked him what the creature wanted with those tapes. When John2x had nothing to say but “ambot lang niya,” they made him kneel on a bed of salt for lying.

My aunts also had a cousin-in-law whom they never got along with. She was Tagalog, from Luzon and was an outsider by our very insular standards. It was said that she wanders outside her house past midnight, dresses in all-white, walks until she reaches the edge of a streaming river, and just stares at the water until she had to come back home before the sun rises. After a particularly bad argument with some of my relatives, she will then be reported to be seen nga nagtuwad sa kalibunan. When a pregnant woman in our barrio miscarries, they were whispers about her and pagpamalbal in the same sentence.

I was always afraid of her, even if she was nothing but a nice lady during the day who always left me candies when she passed by the house from a weekly stroll to the nearby market. I was always told to throw the candies away with a reminder from our katabang, “ayawg kaon ana kay matakdan ka.”

There was also this one guy, he was called Leony, short for Leonardo, maybe, and he was around 40-ish years old which was ancient for 9-year old me. He was always seen around our area, in our garden, in my lola’s sari-sari store, and he always wanted to talk me. He was also very quick to look at me weirdly and always had a creepy aura about him. I remember my older cousin, Kuya Bernard, always warning me to never eat anything Leony gives me, and to never ever go near him. Ayawg jud duol ana kay matakdan ka.

Years later, when I was already living in the city, I would learn that Leony was arrested for raping a 12-year old girl, and that he died in prison.

I also recall this one man, I don’t remember his name or what he looked like, only that he was flamboyantly gay, and they said he was ungo too. When he’s in a bilar, to play overnight mahjong or chikicha, the limos para sa patay was always lower than usual. The money was always lacking when he’s around and it’s because the ungo nga bayot steals the coins from the dead.

I remember a particularly weird thing my older relatives did: when this specific ungo uses our restroom, they immediately follow it up with some vicious cleaning, spraying cologne all over the room, even on the water in the balde that was used for flushing. Dali-on nato ug limpyo kay matakdan nya ta. How Johnson’s baby cologne keeps us from getting infected, I will never understand. And there are still so many things my family does that I don’t understand — especially when we have a pregnant woman in the house, or when someone’s very sick.

(Fun “fact”: when someone in your house is on the brink of death, an ungo is said to stick close to your home, feeding on the remaining life-force of the dying.)

I still have a lot of tiny stories of otherworldly sightings in my dear hometown of Naga, a place where the bad, the unliked, and the odd-ones-out are the specters, the sigbin and the abat. A place I was so embarrassed to admit as being my home when I was younger. It always made me feel a certain sense of dread every time I was asked where I’m from knowing what would come next. Miss Naga, Miss Wakwak, Tikbalang, Ungo. They ask me if I have lana, or kung mang-wakwak ko igka-gabii, or kung mamarang ba ko, expecting me to laugh along with them. But all your Naga jokes are old jokes to me so I just smile, sigh, or both and tell them, usahay.