This is Jacinto Borja Street in Tagbilaran City, in the Province of Bohol in the Philippines. A stone's throw away from where our house is located in Gallares Street, Borja is lined with restaurants and is an important side street connecting two major thoroughfares in Tagbilaran, CPG Avenue and Gallares.
This is the CPG Avenue intersection.
There is a school at the corner of CPG and Borja. It dates back to pre-World War II times and is allegedly haunted as well. I took the next two photos at around 7:00 in the morning. The school and its immediate vicinity somehow look perpetually gloomy, even in the morning sun.
Holy Spirit School of Tagbilaran. Even their logo looks like a creepy giant space bird about to swoop down on you.
There are two massive trees along the road, one at the Gallares end and the other one in front of Holy Spirit School near the CPG intersection. The trees are on different sides of the street: the one at the Gallares end is on the east side, and the one in front of Holy Spirit School is on the west. For simplicity, I'll be referring to the tree at the Gallares end as the first tree. The one in front of Holy Spirit School is the second. This is important. More on this later.
The first tree at the Gallares corner. The lot behind the tree used to be vacant and covered with tall shrubs.
The second tree in front of Holy Spirit School.
Borja Street flanks a local college. An urban legend states that the owner of the school made his fortune after digging up some gold encased in a tractor wheel their workers hit with their drills while erecting a new building.
One house in particular looks like it was stuck in the 1950s. It was set in a yard overgrown with their own house plants. The owner was probably aware of the rumors about their place being haunted, because they decided to decorate their fence and gate posts with statues such as these.
The owner is a good sport though, and wise to the changing ways of the world. As of Google Street View in 2022, their "haunted house" is now a heritage hotel and restaurant. Not bad, actually.
Now for the creepy story.
In the 1960s I had an aunt who had been living for weeks with my grandparents in the aforementioned house that was a stone's throw away from Borja Street. She was terribly sick and was actually dying at that point. One stormy evening near the end of her life, she asked to be taken to the Community Hospital at the town center for palliative care.
Tagbilaran was a very different place back then, with unpaved streets, spotty electricity and roadside shrubbery reaching far over your head. A swarm of tricycles sped through the streets. Two of my aunt's cousins flagged one down for her. They wrapped her in a blanket to keep out the rain and the cold, and stuffed her into the cab. The driver understood and took off for the hospital in a spray of mist.
Disaster struck as soon as the tricycle turned left at Borja. My aunt’s blanket had come loose and a corner got caught in the wheel of the speeding trike, and she was thrown out of the sidecar into the empty lot behind the first tree, which was covered with dense undergrowth.
Her cousins screamed at the driver to stop. They were in a dark section of Borja where there were no houses or streetlights, and it was raining hard. The cousins and the driver spent the better part of an hour calling out my aunt's name, combing through the shrubbery with only the motorcycle's headlight to shine in the dark, looking for her body. They found nothing. Eventually, the cousins called off the search and asked to be taken back home.
The following morning when they returned to Borja Street to try and retrieve the body in the daylight, a small crowd had already gathered. The tricycle driver was waiting for them there. They found my aunt, not by the first tree but near the base of the second tree a few hundred meters away. The body had long gone cold.
Eventually she was laid to rest. For the cousins, the affair was sad but expected. It was long rumored that the two massive trees at Borja street were gateways to a ghostly underworld. The night they returned from the failed hospital trip, the cousins relayed to our grandparents how they felt eyes in the dark watching them, mocking their despair. The tricycle driver, who was invited over for bread and hot coffee, concurred. It was then concluded that some unseen inhabitants of the road hid the body at the first tree, only to discard it by the second tree further up the road.
This was the story that was passed down into the family, and it sealed for everyone's minds how the road was rife with demons and otherworldly elements. For years, I would walk along this poorly lit road in the evenings and look over my shoulder for what might be lurking in the shadows.
As I grew older, however, I realized there might be another more rational explanation to my aunt’s fate. It may be less satisfying for people who like to believe in ghosts, but is none the less creepy as the first.
Perhaps my aunt didn't die immediately after being ejected from the tricycle. Perhaps her cousins called off the search too soon. Perhaps they didn’t look hard enough. Regaining consciousness a few hours later, my aunt realized where she was and where she needed to be, and decided to walk -- or crawl -- to the hospital herself.
She made it only as far as the second tree in front of the Holy Spirit School. There, in the thunder, rain, and pitch-black darkness, she raised her eyes to the heavens one last time — and saw nothing but the logo of the* *huge haloed space bird that looked like it was about to swoop down on her, gleaming in the lightning. Then she expired.
(Hell, if we’re letting our imagination get the better of us, that’s how I would have told it.)
So, yes, I have been to a haunted road. If ghosts are real, then at the very least my aunt's ghost is in that road now and she's very, very pissed at how she ended up passing.
Here's me having breakfast at the small restaurant which had opened at the empty lot behind the first acacia tree.