{ Unfinished. This is what you'd call a BLEAH essay. }

Imagine you're a journalist fresh from graduate school. The ground beneath your feet is where you don't want to be. You've spent four years of your life here in UP Diliman as a depressed, solitary undergrad who never got to develop his people skills. Tonight, your job was to interview each security guard from each building surrounding the Oval. This is your first project and the topic wouldn't have been sillier than interviewing their ghost experiences at their assigned post.

You are an intelligent, rational, nonsuperstitious human being. You don't believe in angels, in demons, in fairies, elves, poltergeists, and doppelgangers. But tonight after all these interviews, you don't know what to believe any more.

Standing outside Vinzons Hall, you remind yourself that these are just stories. It's funny how ephemeral speech goes: words fly out in the air, live there for a second, and die. Then it occurs to you that the buildings with the most ghost sightings are positioned in the shape of a pentagram: Benitez Hall (College of Education), Vargas Museum, UP Film Center, Melchor Hall (College of Engineering), and Vinzons Hall. At the center of this pentagram is the Main Library, where most apparitions gravitate; where recently, someone slipped from the third floor balcony and died crash landing on the ground floor during the Centennial celebration. You say to yourself, Words die in the air and they continue living an afterlife in the confines of your head.

As you stand there waiting for a jeepney, you realize you're all alone in the street. You can't hear a sound except for the buzz of a lamppost flashing strobes of light before it flickers and dies. Your watch says it's ten in the evening. You turn your head and glance at the Vinzons Hall entrance but the guard isn't there any more. He might have gone for a leak--there in that men's restroom at the ground floor.

In that restroom, someone relieved himself in one of the cubicles and felt a cold sensation at the top of his head. Upon looking up, he saw the culprit, a pair of cold, white feet that belongs to a white lady hung by the neck, her eyeballs red and bulging out of their sockets. The white lady's head turned towards him and her eyes shot directly into his. This man, he froze mid-pissing and zipped his member's foreskin as he scrambled his way out the restroom.

It's just a story, you remind yourself. You've heard a lot of similar restroom stories, and this could've just been passed on, replaced with this setting, until it reached this guard's mouth. The guard also said a man named Mang Romy used to live here during the seventies. As the years passed, this Mang Romy retained his youth when everyone else around him grew wrinkles and white hair. It was rumored that Mang Romy was Wenceslao Vinzons himself, whom this building was named after. Wenceslao Vinzons died during the Japanese Occupation but his body was never recovered.

You hear a roar of a jeepney and to your left, a jeepney appears packed with commuters. It's about to whiz past you but you wave your hands vehemently and scream, Wait! The jeepney stops a few steps away, and without an available seat, you have no choice but to hang onto the railings. The jeepney lurches forward, but instead of moving toward its usual route, it turns left at UP Law. You pop your head inside and yell to the driver, Where are we going? The driver glances at you from his rearview mirror, his eyes red, his lips shivering, but he doesn't say a word.

The guard at UP Law said that Justice Padilla used to step out from his portrait and roam around the building. Occasionally, someone would look at the portrait and swear Justice Padilla was looking at him. Then at the dead of the night, you'd hear a child's cry echoing from the hallway. Spooky building this is, said the guard. One time, he heard a wooden chair being smashed from the third floor balcony to the second floor. He swore he couldn't have hallucinated so he asked his fellow security guard and he heard it too. Together, they ran up the stairs armed with their flashlights and reached where the sound came from. But there wasn't any smashed chair. They roved the entire building, but there wasn't anybody anywhere.

Passing by Melchor Hall (College of Engineering), you look straight ahead just to spare your overactive imagination from seeing floating specters from the building's corridor. One story goes, three guys dared each other to go ghost hunting in this building at midnight. Upon reaching the third floor, nothing was out of the ordinary until the middle guy realized the boys to his left and right disappeared. Reappearing, the other two guys said a white lady passed through him.

Word did you say?

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