FAIRY TALES

An elderly neighbor assured me that when it comes to unusual tales and Visayan folklore, the person to see was the neighborhood hunch back, Lolo Delfin. She was right because I went home impressed. The visit turned out to be quite an educational afternoon. The psychic  septuagenarian was a perfect host and his animated story telling kept me glued to my seat for hours.

“Do you know that belief in fairies is universal?” Lolo Delfin began. “Foreign authors report that Britons, Scandinavians, Canadians, North and South Americans all have tales to tell about fairies. No oriental country is without legends about them. I believe this universality indicates a possibility of historic basis for truth – that fairies openly inhabited the earth once upon a time.”

Fairies, according to Philippine folklore, prefer live in lonely wooded areas and hillsides but when civilization expands into places of their original abode, they can choose to remain and live with human hosts using their powers of invisibility and transformation. Big, ancient trees like mango, rubber or banyan species, or clumps of bamboo may become an entrance to their homes. The Visayan bungsod or ant hill may be the gateway to a fairy community.  Human beings who have befriended fairies and had been to their homes point to these natural growth as the passage way.

Lolo Delfin asserts that fairies do exist and are still very much around. From the gentle hunch back from San Isidro, Jaro comes these intriguing tales:

The Boy Who Refused to Eat

Dante   was a preschooler who became friendly with another youngster who used to appear from a clump of bamboo that grew in the backyard of his parents’ house. One day he was invited by his friend to go through the dense growth where they entered into a beautiful garden where he met the parents of his friend. They were nice to him, offering snacks which he politely refused. What seemed only a few hours of play turned out to be actually a little more than three days of absence during which his hysterical parents and his neighbors searched for him.

The grieving relatives convinced that he had drowned in the nearby river were preparing a wake when the missing boy suddenly showed up. His mother had gone to a pile of lumber and amakan (bamboo matting)rolls  by the bamboo clumps in the backyard , looking for firewood on the third day of his disappearance. She heard a familiar whining and when she turned she saw her son crawling out of the large rolls looking stunned and drunk with sleep!

According to the boy, the reason he refused the offer of food was because  it looked like wiggly, white worms  and this repelled him. It is believed had he eaten the fairies’ food , he would have been lost to human society and would have become one of the fairy hordes.

It seems fairies do not remain invisible continuously  and glimpses of them are sometimes discernible  to the observant human, particularly oldsters or the unwary youngster who has developed a sensitivity to the psychic atmosphere. High noon or a particularly hot summer day appears to affect the invisibility of tamawos. Sightings of them at their abode or in groups specify this time of day.


The Fairy House

Manoling, a sixteen year old boy home from an exclusive boarding school in Manila once wandered into the vast orchard behind his parent’s mansion in Isabela, Negros Occidental. He saw a beautiful, colorful bird and followed it, hoping to find its nest somewhere. He came upon a clearing where some children were playing in the yard of a neat looking cottage surrounded by magnificent blooms, the likes of which he had not seen in his mother’s garden. Being the quiet and shy type, he just watched the children from a distance, the search for the bird forgotten. But the noon day sun proved too hot for the boy and so after a few minutes, he decided to head for home.

He found his agitated mother waiting for him, visibly irked over his delayed return. It was way past lunchtime and the food on the table had turned cold. While eating, he casually questioned his mom about the neat little cottage with magnificent blooms.

“ It seems so strange, Mama. I’ve never been aware that there was a house in that area of our plantation. Was that recently built? Who are those people living there?”

Donya Cristina was astounded and for a while thought her son had simply lost his way in the hacienda. But Manoling was insistent on what he saw. It was only then that she noticed his bloodshot eyes. He did not look too well either and so his mother hastily herded him to his bedroom so he could change his clothes and lie down. By this time the young man was already delirious with fever.

The hastily summoned family doctor diagnosed his affliction as a case of overexposure to the sun coupled with sore eyes. After three days of medication and bed rest, Manoling was as good as new. But the family driver who was also the neighborhood’s manogbulong (medicine man) cautioned him.

“Unless they decide to show themselves, tamawos as a general rule dont like being seen by human beings. You could have gone blind  or you could have lost your way… people have been known to wander for days in their own backyard. Avoid returning to the same spot this summer.”

It also seems tamawos can  also possess people. It may enter into the body of  a victim and control his behavior, all his physical senses .The victim may even show extra strength, speak in tongues and show clairvoyancy and other manifestations of the occult.

From a dissertation presented to the College of Arts and Sciences of UP Diliman, (1980) by Dr. Moises Ponteras comes this interesting tale of tamawo  possession:


Possessed By A Tamawo King

Alan was an army trainee of the 105mm Mowitzer Battalion of the Philippine Army stationed in Camp Jamindan, Capiz. His immediate superior was Captain Teves and he was detailed as one of the cooks in the Bachelor Officers Quarters.

Sometime in the middle of January 1975, Alan failed to return to camp after taking a bath in a nearby spring which was known for being a haunted place. The whole battalion was ordered to search for him. He was finally brought back to camp after much chasing in the nearby forest, but he was no longer the normal Alan before he left the camp.

Alan who was apparently mentally troubled was sent to Cebu or Mandaluyong for treatment, but was eventually shipped back to camp and was detained for further observation.

A babaylan (an indigenous folk healer)was called to diagnose his case and the diagnosis was two daughters of the tamawo king who owned the area where the army camp was located wanted to befriend him and the tamawo ruler, through Alan, wanted to express his disapproval of the soldiers clearing the place near the spring.

Whenever Alan was possessed by the tamawo king, his personality became a marked opposite of the frail trainee. His eyes would turn bloodshot and he would vomit a yellowish fluid. Then he would become violent and exerted extra human strength, requiring 15 able bodied trainees to hold him down.

In several occasions the king spoke to the officers of the battalion, repeating his warning that strange events would happen in the camp if the cutting of trees near the spring would not stop. It was only the timely intervention of the babaylan and his rituals that finally cured Alan.

After listening to Lolo Delfin’s stories, I decided to do a little research on fairies too. From my collection of “Mystery Books” published by Readers Digest, I came across Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker’s report on the “little people.”   It seems that in Great Britain fairies are perceived to be dimunitive, winged creatures wearing delicate, transparent garments. Dr. Shuker ‘s report also mentions modern-day sightings of the Little People in Great Britain:

In June 1933 an unnamed correspondent claimed that on eight occasions in August, 1931 she and her daughters had espied some 18 inches tall female fairies in their Warwickshire garden.   In the summer of 1964 some children claimed they had watched a number of little green men in white hats, hurtling stones and clods of earth at each other on a bowling green in Liverpool. And the most bizarre of all was the statement made by a group of ten year olds in September, 1979 who claimed they saw 60 gnomes drive out of the lakeside bushes in 30 tiny red and white bubble cars!

The gnomes were described as being “only half as tall as the children themselves, with greenish crinkled faces, red tunics, green leggings and white beard with red lips.

Despite vigorous questioning by their school headmaster, the children insisted they were telling the truth. Mary Johnson, a former secretary of the Fairy Investigation Society disclosed that she had recveived several other reports of Little People in Wollaton Park, often near the lake.