THE ghosts I’ve seen on Halloween TV reenactments are all dressed in barong. My late friend Mel’s explanation was simple: You carry on the outfit you’re wearing when you die.
But when it was actually his turn to die, Mel wasn’t clad in finery—Who is? Mel was in a skimpy short and purple t-shirt with Betty Boop on it.
Maybe barong or a flowing white dress is God’s default. Or maybe because purple-colored ghosts don’t scare people—that is, if ghosts are supposedly meant to, well, scare people.
I was on Mel’s wake thinking about these things as he laid inert in his casket when suddenly something stirred at the back corner of the room where I sat, a shadowy figure his family assumed was Mel. I, on the other hand, wasn’t quick to believe and opened myself to the possibility that it might be another entity.
“Ever heard of ‘corpse stealers’?” I asked them.
Where I grew up, the funerals I went to weren’t left unattended because the corpse stealers are said to be just lurking in the dark, waiting for everybody to fall asleep so that they could take the cadaver with them. In one of the tall tales I heard, a corpse was taken apart in broad daylight. His mouth was torn right up to the ear and his chest cavity open. Even worse, it all happened in a blink of an eye.
So every time, we stayed wide awake into the wee hours, singing happy songs, tossing cards, even joshing kids with cheap scares that the corpse stealers were out to get them. It actually took time and more funerals later before I realized how stupid these spirits were. Because how come they never thought all the lurking around was futile and all they had to do was to wait until the body is buried into the ground?
But I was also quick to think that that would defeat the purpose. In the same manner predators weren’t scavengers, they weren’t grave robbers. They’re corpse stealers.
Why is it we haven’t seen these things on TV? And why is it nobody believed me when I admonished them to be vigilant because Mel was in danger?
They laughed at how “gullible” I was—that’s how they phrased it—but I still maintained that if it really were Mel, he must not scare the hell out of me because he must be wearing a purple t-shirt.