The White Lady of Laperal White House

Acrylic, pastel and pencil crayon on birch panel
30″ x 60”

On foggy nights in the City of Pines, people say you can still see her: the spectre of a little girl standing perfectly still on the third step of a grand white house, or a weeping woman watching from its tall glass windows. When I was young, my sisters warned me not to stare too long at those windows. They said that if I ever saw the red eyes that cried bloody tears, I would be cursed with bad luck. 

The story goes that a little girl was killed in an accident, run over as she chased her nanny across the street. Later, another tragedy struck when the nanny was murdered inside one of the bedrooms. Some say the nanny hung herself in the attic from guilt and grief over the girl’s death.

When I began searching for inspiration in Filipino folklore, my parents reminded me of our family’s connection to the Laperal White House in Baguio City. My Lolo and his brother once worked as gardeners there, and my Lola once dressed as the ghostly white lady during Undas to scare neighbourhood children. From our home, you could even see the back of the house across the hill of Teacher’s Camp. My parents spent nights in that house and used flowers from its compound for my mother’s wedding bouquet, including the white magnolia blossoms from the large, eerie tree in the backyard.  

As children, my friends and I would climb the towering back fence to forage for bayabas and sayote. I always avoided looking up at any of the windows. Sometimes I caught the faint scent of sampaguita and candle smoke near the walls and felt a sudden chill that made me stop in my tracks. I explored the house once, step by cautious step, but never the attic.

I never saw a ghost there, but the house never let me go. It waits in the corners of my sleep, pulling me back into its quiet halls. Even as an adult, sometimes, I would find myself walking its corridors in a dream, the air thick with silence and the soft creak of the endless stairs beneath me. I can feel the weight of unseen eyes watching. Sometimes I’m running from the spirits that cannot leave, hoping to trap me within its walls and hollow floors, doomed to gaze forever at the street below, and I with them.