Taong Basa ng Tacloban

Super Typhoon Yolanda, known internationally as Haiyan, made landfall in the eastern Visayas on 8 November 2013. Storm surges swept through coastal areas of Tacloban including San Jose and the ground along the airport route, and thousands of people died.

That part is documented history and it is the foundation of everything that followed. The legend did not arrive first; the disaster did.

In the months afterwards, accounts circulated of figures seen along the coast road and the surge-hit barangays — soaked, unspeaking, moving as though still going somewhere. They were reported by residents and by people working in the recovery.

Legends like this tend to appear where the dead could not be individually identified or buried in the normal way. We present it as a legend that emerged from grief on an enormous scale, not as a paranormal claim, and not as a comment on anyone who died.

Yolanda is recent, and there are families in Tacloban for whom this is not folklore. We keep the documented facts to the public record, we do not attach the legend to named individuals, and we do not dramatise any death.