My Father's Tale of a Filipino White Lady

Sadly,  my father and I don't see each other often,  but he did send me a wonderful ghost story.  It is a personal story.  It was something he experienced when he was very young and living in the Philippine Islands.   The story is wonderful, because it is so rich in family and other history and because it includes one of my favorite kinds of ghosts.  It includes a  white lady.   All of you who read my blog regularly,  know I love these tragic ghosts and the sad stories that make them.  I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

"In 1949 after my father's untimely death at the tender age of 33 in early April my mother took my two younger brothers and I across the Pacific Ocean on a big Commercial Liner to visit my father's family in a suburb of Manila on Luzon ,the big island. I was only 5 years old but something so incredible happened which left me with a very clear memory and a large scar on my left knee.


I was in the back of my 19 year old cousin Spanky's WW11 Jeep on our way cruisin' the war torn streets of San Juan when he turned a corner past some old blown apart buildings (there were so many of these then). There was this girl in a long traditional white Filipino wedding dress just crossing the street and he started to swerve to avoid hitting her. I thought for sure he was going to crash into the old palm tree on the side of the road so I jumped out into the side of the road. I rolled and landed on one foot and a knee which happened to get impaled by an old piece of shrapnel. They scooped me out of the dirt and rushed me to the hospital where I ended up with 6 stitches from which I still bare the scare to this day. And I'm now almost 66 years old.

I never did figure out where the girl in the puffy sleeved wedding dress came from or went. And I never thought that my daughter would some day publish a story to kind of explain what happened."
 
Of course,  he is referring to my Filipino White Lady story from a few nights ago.  I wrote about this ghost without ever having heard this story from him.  It is strange how stories can come together.

The White Lady of the Philipines

It is probably no surprise that I love Halloween.  I wait all year for Halloween, so I was thrilled when my Halloween costume came today.   I ordered this one and in order to celebrate my love of ghost stories,  I am going to be a white lady this year for Halloween.  White Ladies are my favorite ghosts.   They are tragic, romantic figures wandering the shadowy realm between this world and the next.   White Ladies are the ghosts of young women who died tragically, often times for love.  They are always seen in long white dresses.   Every culture seems to have these white lady phantoms.   Carl Jung would have loved them.   It is no surprise that they are popular in the Philippines, as they seem to be popular everywhere.  My father is Filipino, so when I found this story, I couldn't resist putting it here as one of my favorite white lady stories.

The most popular Filipino white lady is the White Lady of Balete Drive. Like most white ladies,  this white lady appears as a long haired beauty in  lovely white gown.   During World War II,  the Japanese occupied the Philippines and were particularly cruel and brutal to the locals.   This is no surprise.  The Japanese atrocities during World War II were legendary and never were they worse than the Rape of Nanjing and the Rape of Manila, in the Philippines.  They called what the Japanese did to these two cities rapes, because they not only committed genocides, but did particularly perverse and sexually deviant things to the city's residents before they killed them.  Although this white lady is not from Manila, she was a victim of rape at the hands of Japanese soldiers during  World War II.   According to legend, she was raped and killed by Japanese soldiers during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in World War II.   Most of the stories associated with her are told by taxi drivers who have seen her on the road late at night.   Other drivers and travellers have also seen her wandering the lonely moonlit road of Balete Drive.  She is often blamed for the accidents along this road.  that Most of the stories that have come out about her were told by taxi drivers doing the graveyard shift.   One taxi driver even claims she asked him for a ride.

I found another interesting Filipino white lady story at http://www.castleofspirits.com/whitelady.html .  This is a first hand account of an encounter with a white lady and as I could not do the story justice by retelling it,  I thought it was more appropriate to put a link.  As I get ready for Halloween,  I will be thinking of these tragic white ladies.  I hope my costume does them justice.  My dress is above.