Calabarzon, Southern Luzon
Horror Stories from Laguna
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.
Both settings produce the same category of story: something encountered by a person who is passing through and cannot stop.
Old trees and open road
Rural Laguna belongs to the tree spirits — kapre in the acacia and balete, nuno sa punso at the edge of the field, tikbalang on the wooded stretches that climb toward Mount Makiling. The customs that come with them are still in everyday use, tabi-tabi po included.
The southbound expressway that runs through the province supplies the other half: long unlit gaps, service roads feeding in from farmland, and drivers three hours into a trip. It is textbook vanishing-hitchhiker territory.
What we cover here
Our Laguna entry is the UPLB campus at Los Baños — Baker Hall and Narra Bridge — where student folklore sits directly on top of documented wartime killing in the locality. It is the clearest example in the archive of a campus whose stories have real history under them.
