Demonic Hysteria in Quezon City

Panic and hysteria ensued in the Quezon City barangay (the smallest administrative district in the Philippines) on the 22nd of January, 1993 after a group of children witnessed a giant black humanoid figure while burning some wood next to a tamarind tree in a local forest.

## The Incident

They described the entity as having a tail and a pair of horns, and this sight apparently prompted some of the students to go into a trance-like state and speak in tongues, after which the figure vanished. The chaos wouldn’t stop there, though.

Although this first event may have been vague, the next report hones into the anomaly with chilling specificity. The first person to suffer from what can only be described as demonic possession in this bizarre outbreak was a 12-year-old schoolgirl called Joy Bolante - who was attending classes when she suddenly caught sight of a ‘*tall kapre\* standing under an old sampaloc tree near the school’s herbal garden*’. She told her classmates about it before promptly fainting. While she was unconscious, her classmates said that they heard her talking in a man’s voice. Joy was taken home later that day.

On Sunday that week (24th of January), Joy was taken to Camp Crame Hospital - and then when they presumably couldn’t help her she was instead taken to the local chapel so that the clergymen could ‘*drive out the evil spirit in her*’. The older and conventionally wiser folk in the neighborhood were quoted as saying that the evil spirit lived in the trunk of the tamarind tree, and had been angered after schoolchildren had burnt wood near its tree. Plot twist - it turns out that Joy Bolante was one of these unwise youths.

Everything seemed to calm down for a few days, and perhaps people thought that the supernatural terror had come to an end. Alas, they would be incorrect - as another girl suddenly fainted at 9am on the 27th, and started talking while she was unconscious. The neighborhood was instantly once again gripped with panic, and the fainting girl’s neighbours said that the voice emanating from the unconscious child ‘*identified herself as Jane*’.

Suddenly, the ostensibly demonic spirit started jumping ‘*from one child to another*’ in a hysteria-fuelled contagion. Among the many victims of this anomaly were 13-year-old Jean delos Santos, 12-year-old Geraldine Factora, 12-year-old Malet Juarez, 13-year-old Wilma Canuto, 13-year-old Gladys Cabata, 12-year-old Mayette Gonzales, 13-year-old Sandy Sevilla - as well as other girls named Joy (presumably the same Joy as earlier), Liwayway and Loreta - and seemingly even eventually all the pupils of Camp Crame elementary school.

The students had simply been attending classes when they suddenly started ‘*howling and screaming*’ and violently hurling objects around their classrooms. Priests and doctors quickly arrived on the scene, and a priest and a cult-leader (presumably a term that means something different than it does here in England) began performing an exorcism as two of the children fainted in front of the ‘*shocked*’ neighbours.

\*A big, black, arboreal giant known from Filipino mythology. Not necessarily a demon though.

## Sources

https://philparanormalsite.webs.com/spiritpossession.htm

http://thecid.com/ufo/uf14/uf0/140076.htm