CLARK FREEPORT – The coming All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 is ghost hunting season here.
This former US Air Force base has become a favorite ofghost hunters since the Americans abandoned it in 1991.
But there are actually more haunted sites here than what has been so far featured in local and international media.
“Ghost hunters have frequented the abandoned hospital that is really haunted, but there are also ghosts in other areas,” said half-Aeta Josie Gilbert, 35, who has spent her entire life so far within Clark and surrounding mountainous areas.
Gilbert, whose American surname is derived from an American couple who had adopted her late father, cited the case of the Japanese ghost who plays accordion by a huge mango tree in Sitio Kalapi where she spent her childhood.
Kalapi is a hilly area not far from the mothballed Philippine Expo theme park at the northern portion of this freeport.
“I was a child then when I myself would hear the accordion whenever I passed by that mango tree. The Japanese ghost is known to all who lived in Kalapi,” she said. The tree, she noted, has always yielded bad fruit.
Gilbert said that one of her cousins who now lives in Sitio Hadwan has kept a tape recording of the accordion music.
“It was my father who told me and my siblings that the ghost belonged to a Japanese who was fond of playing his accordion under the mango tree during the last world war,” she recalled. Her father Carlito, who died only four years ago, used to be a jungle survival and herbal medicine resource person for US soldiers at Clark.
Japanese forces occupied Clark during the last world war. Clark was one of the most heavily bombed areas in the country as the Japanese forces invaded the Philippines. Thousands of both Japanese and American soldiers died here during the war.
Gilbert also cited a tunnel dug up by the Japanese in Sitio Hadwan, also in the periphery of northern Clark, as among the most haunted. She said that foreign ghost hunters are usually brought by Aeta guides to that tunnel where a “white lady” is not only felt but also seen gliding in the darkness.
“Those who want to see ghosts will not be disappointed there,” she added. A cellphone video of ghosts loitering in a stockroom of an old building here has become one of the most visited videos on YouTube. The video can be found by searching “Clark ghosts.”
The video was taken by a group of employees whose terrified voices in Kapampangan could be heard as they witnessed several transluscent ghosts moving around a stock room from the other side of a glass panel. The building where the video was taken was demolished three years ago to give way to a more modern structure.
