Calabarzon, Southern Luzon
Horror Stories from Batangas
Batangas horror is house horror. The province is full of surviving ancestral homes — coral-stone ground floors, hardwood upper storeys, capiz windows — and a large number of them are shut rather than sold, because dividing an inherited property among a dozen heirs is harder than leaving it locked.
It is also balete country, which gives the province both of its recurring settings: the old house and the old tree.
The house that nobody can let go of
An empty ancestral house in Batangas is usually empty for administrative reasons rather than frightening ones. That mundane explanation is exactly what makes the setting work — the building is maintained just enough to stay standing and never enough to feel occupied.
That mundane explanation is what makes the setting work: the building is maintained just enough to stay standing and never enough to feel occupied.
Balete country
The balete, the Philippine strangler fig, grows around a host tree and eventually leaves a hollow braided trunk. Batangas has old ones, and villages tend to route around them rather than remove them. The folklore attached to those trees — kapre in the branches, permission asked before passing — is recorded across the Tagalog provinces.
Nothing in the published catalogue is set in Batangas yet. This page covers the province's folklore background until something is.