THE BENGUET APPARITION…A True Story

 

 

A PORTLY Ifugao mountain guide watched the little group of helmeted Tagalogs who were directing the excavations of an ancient burial cave high in Benguet Province. He turned to his employer, a special correspondent of a local tabloid, and said: “They will find gold and death.” The startled newspaperman asked why.

“Because,” said the man, “the old gods live. This ground” – he waved his hand courteously toward the cave – “is sacred. There is a terrible curse upon those who desecrate the remains of our ancestors!”

Somebody told Rudy Azurin, the mining engineer and head of the excavations in the cave, this story. He did not laugh at it. He was a very sane, unemotional man. In all seriousness, he immediately said: “I recognize that possibility.” And this is the curious fact, that every Ifugao mummy is supposed to be guarded by ancient dieties and hermits.

The Ifugao mummies were buried with simple ceremonials, but they made no image of their gods, or inscriptions by which to identify the dead. Their wooden coffins, carved from trees were skillfully fashioned and shaped like a boat. Inside these boxes were fine jewelries. Gold and silver bracelets, anklets, earrings, and simple multi-colored wooden beads. There were a dozen mummies without coffins reposed against the wall. Some were wrapped in burial mats and there were big and small jars nearby.

Very clearheaded miners viewed the excavations with uneasiness. Such men do not believe in ghosts and curses, but they do not preclude the possibilities of psychic phenomena. Reluctantly, they took one mummy for public exhibit and wrapped it in plastic and hauled it into a waiting pickup.

With Rudy Azurin was Angelo Valencia, an archeologist and antiquity expert tasked to collect and restore artifacts in the cave. His was a tough job. Diggings for coffins and potteries with paintbrush instead of shovels was a delicate work which required a great amount of patience. I saw a good deal of him in the South where he restored an ancient Filipino boat, the “balanghay” discovered in Mindanao. I found him an extraordinary person, possessing such a sensitive temperament that he repeatedly anticipated my thoughts or words and began to respond to my remarks or questions before I could finish uttering them.

In February 1979, he was engaged by Engineer Rudy Azurin, Geodetic Officer of a mining corporation in Benguet, to “clean” a number of Ifugao artifacts for the firm’s private museum.

Eng. Azurin hoped to have this completed in time for a mid-year museum blessing. By patching and cleaning every weekday from nine in the morning till two or three the next morning, Angelo accomplished the work in three months – superb artistry that would have taken most restorers a year.

The Ifugao mummy and artifacts attracted much favorable attention. One history professor called them “the best archeological treasures in the Philippines.” A weekly magazine devoted a page to them with reproductions. Streams of mining executives and visitors visited the private museum to see them. But they were unaware – as was I when I first saw the artifacts – of the extraordinary, really fantastic circumstances under which Angelo had worked.

One day in October, Angelo told me the weird story. “When I got to Benguet,” he began, “I knew that if I was to complete the job in three months I should need every minute I could get, without distraction, and therefore I persuaded Eng.    Azurin to let me lock myself alone in the museum every weekday from nine o’clock on. I saw no one until I returned to my room in the executive house across the museum, where I regularly found Eng. Azurin waiting for me with coffee and toasted bread.

While I was working by my powerful single lamp on the creaky scaffolding the third or fourth night, a sudden long howling sound came out in the back of the museum. It startled me, but I thought it was some dog below the hill or from the nearby barracks. On the fifth night, while mixing plastic cement, I glanced at the lobby beneath me, which was rather fully illumined by my lamp’s downward flood of light … and  there was a figure, a man in black, moving back and forth in front of the mummy, raising his arms and gesticulating. I thought, of course, that the man was Eng. Azurin and went on mixing the cement. I told myself that he was probably out for night muscle stretching. As I entered the executive house that night, there was Eng. Azurin as usual. But he said nothing about having been in the museum, and I didn’t ask him about it, as I was tired and didn’t want to start any long conversation.

On the eight night, I happened about midnight to look down from the scaffold, and there was the figure again, the man in black, who, I assumed once more – without looking carefully – was Eng. Azurin. For almost an hour I heard him pacing the lobby, mumbling rhythmically, “Well,” I thought, “he’s humming a song.” Then – all quiet, only the barking of dogs outside.

Entering the executive house shortly afterward, what did I see but Eng. Azurin asleep on the couch in the lobby! Waking with a start, he jumped up and said, “Oh my, it’s past one o’ clock. Why didn’t that man wake me?” He was angry, explaining that he had lain down about ten, having instructed the housekeeper, Domeng, to wake him at eleven. Then I told him I thought I had seen him in the museum, but if he had been asleep ever since ten, I was impelled to think he was a somnambulist.”

“Believe me,” Eng. Azurin said seriously, “I’m not a sleepwalker.” He hesitated an instant, then asked, “Tell me, have you since coming here heard of the eerie tale that this museum is occasionally visited by a ghost or some strange phenomenon ever since we started the diggings?”

I answered, “No.”

“I have never had any experience with him or it myself,” Azurin went on, “but listening to several people who say they have, I have admitted there might be some strange occurrences which we don’t understand … The reason why you always find me here so late when you come out of the museum is that I have stood watch outside the door between ten and one every night since you began work, except today. I intended to rush in if I heard you cry out or start hastily to climb down.”

We decided that thereafter Eng. Azurin would come into the museum at about ten every night and stay until I stopped work.

The following night he came in at about a quarter to ten, climbed up on the scaffold, bringing me a pot of coffee and helped me with cement and wood glue mixing – something he did regularly thereafter – then went down again lest he distract me … Suddenly there was a strange rattle followed by a click or a knock at the back of the museum, beneath the mezzanine stairs.”

“Hear that, Rudy?”

“Yes, but wasn’t it a creak in the scaffolding?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

Then – another click, but in another part of the museum. It sent a chill through me, and at the same time sweat broke out of every pore of my body. With drawn gun, Eng. Azurin faced the rear of the museum and in a tense, sharp voice challenged, “Come on, show yourself, whatever you are, or speak if you can –“

I interrupted him with a yell, for just then I saw him – the “ghost” – moving down the lobby toward the mummy: an old man draped in black, with a strange, rounded face wrinkled and dark with a grayish tinge.”

“Look, Rudy!” I shrieked. “There he goes – to the mummy – he’s broken out the glass!”

“Shaking with terror, I started down from the scaffold where I’d worked on artifacts hanged on the wall, and barely managed not to fall off the ladder. The mummy’s case is made of high-grade glass two inches thick. The case was so made that not even the thin air could penetrate it and cause the mummy to deteriorate. Rushing to the lobby, Eng. Azurin found that the mummy was intact. The glass case had, obviously, just been broken. Outside, the dogs were yelping and squealing.

After the experience, whenever I got the ghost’s “signal,” as I called the sudden chill, I was impelled to rush out of the museum as fast as I could. The sensation was stronger than fear. I tried to ignore it a few times and worked furiously. I put blinders, made of cardboards, on either side of my face. I stuffed cotton in my ears. In the end I would always have to go – the feeling of horror was intolerable.

This went on for three months, usually between ten and one o’ clock. Once “he” came earlier in the evening, but the “signal” was weak. I put on my cardboard blinders and worked. “He” paced the area in front of the mummy on the lobby from the time “he” came until Eng. Azurin entered the museum at ten, accompanied by Domeng.

“This is my story,” concluded Angelo, “I don’t think I’m crazy. Nothing so intense, so terrifying has ever happened to me. A ghost? I think so – a preternatural being or something that is not substantial with flesh and bones and blood – call it what you like.”

The breaking of the mummy’s glass case was not hard to explain. I was inclined to believe that Angelo’s experience was largely his own creation. The “ghost,” I theorized, was a creature of Angelo’s subconscious mind. Perhaps, deep down, Angelo doubted he could complete the job on time, and his subconscious mind, getting wind – via his acute, penetrating intuition – of the ghost tradition, had created the “ghost” in case of failure. I told Angelo my theories. He complimented me as a psychologist but shook his head: I was all wrong he said.

“There are several people in Benguet,” said Angelo, “who have had ‘experiences’ with ‘him.’ The popular belief is that the ghost is an ancient Ifugao ‘priest’ sent by the old dieties from the world of the dead to ‘rescue’ the mummy. The dogs seem to feel ‘him’ for they barked violently nearly every time I saw ‘him.”

The story fascinated me, so recently, Angelo and I drove to Baguio and spent two days with Eng. Azurin at Benguet. The engineer and Ka Domeng, both of whom impressed me as being utterly incapable of any charlatanry, corroborated Angelo’s story in every respect. They both insisted that on the occasion when the ghost had made rattled noises all evening no living person could possibly have got in to initiate them, for all the museum’s doors had been locked and the keys – except Angelo’s – were in the executive house. Joking, I accused Angelo of breaking the mummy’s case himself. He laughed; he had too much to do to bother breaking glass cases. “Beside,” he said, “I’m not a thief.”

I looked up a number of persons who had heard the strange knocks, and had felt the chill. Some had actually seen the ghost, and they claimed that “he” looked like an Ifugao “priest.” The majority of villagers were convinced that the desecration of the burial cave disturbed the spirit, and that “it” came to shield the mummy from the curious. None of the latter knew of Angelo’s and Eng. Azurin’s “experiences” and talked no more about the “ghost.” Many, however, demanded the return of the mummy to the “punpunan” or burial site.

Eng. Azurin and I went into the museum at midnight during our visit – Angelo did not want to come with us – and stayed there about an hour and examined all the precious artifacts. But there were no knocks or clicks; we felt no chills and we saw nothing of the paranormal. I was told that sometimes apparently the ghost did not come for weeks or possibly months at a time. The dogs had been very quiet at night now for many weeks.

I left Benguet not as definite a skeptic or scoffer as I had been before, but certainly an agnostic. There seems to be “something” in the museum, but what it is I don’t know. But if there was really “something” to see, Angelo Valencia, if anyone, would see and experience it.