Every province keeps its own kind of dark. Filipino horror stories grouped by where they are set, with the folklore each region is known for.
Philippine horror is regional in a way that is easy to miss from the outside. The Visayas carry the heaviest aswang tradition. Metro Manila's ghosts are almost all encountered through a windscreen. Batangas and Ilocos Norte produce house stories because both provinces are full of shuttered ancestral homes. Baguio has fog, pine and a wartime past.
These pages collect the stories we have set in each place, along with the folklore and the conditions that make the region's horror what it is.
National Capital Region
Metro Manila produces a particular kind of horror story: one told at speed, by someone who is working. Its ghosts turn up in taxis and jeepneys, in stairwells of buildings that never fully emptied, on stretches of road that are busy at six and abandoned at two.
16 stories from Metro ManilaBenguet, Cordillera
No Philippine city has a denser haunted reputation than Baguio, and the reasons are structural. It sits at altitude in pine forest, spends much of the year inside cloud, and carries heavy wartime history — the city was devastated in 1945, and several of its best-known buildings date from before that.
1 story from Baguio CityCalabarzon, Southern Luzon
Laguna sits close enough to Manila to be a weekend destination and far enough to still be farmland, and its horror stories live in that seam. On one side there are sitios where a single old acacia is the tallest thing for a kilometre. On the other there is the expressway.
1 story from LagunaThese provinces have one story each so far. Their pages will grow as more stories are published there.