The Banana Stalk Corpses

In the rural areas of the Western Visayan Islands, there is a prevalent belief that the dreaded aswang (supernatural evil creature that mingles with ordinary people) has the power to substitute a newly dead corpse with a banana stalk. Somehow the appearance of the substitute could undetectedly pass off as the real one – perhaps by the magical power of the aswang.

        Three teachers – two females and one male (named Mr. Doble, Ms. Duran and Ms. Dulay) – arrived a month before enrolment time and presented themselves to the village head who took them to the school premises. They were welcomed by Tiyo Lucio and Tiya Marta, a childless couple who lived just across the newly built school. The loquacious husband cheerfully told the teachers that they may board with them if they wish and also offered to help them  settle  in their new environment. He also boasted what a terrific cook and housekeeper his wife was, that he was in fact planning to buy her a portable oven.

        After refreshments, the guests were taken upstairs and showed the large, airy room with its own private little balcony. This delighted the trio and in return, they asked the farmer if he would be interested in the job of school janitor, promising they would strongly recommend him if he was. The farmer nodded excitedly; he could use the extra cash he said.

        Tiyo Lucio was a grouchy, middle age farmer with a mean mouth. Because of this, he was not so popular with the barrio folks. But somehow his new job changed all that. He was now cheerful and solicitous. His neighbors were likewise impressed by the confidence and importance the three city-bred teachers gave the old manand so it did not take long for him to redeem himself with the community.

       A few months after classes opened, the school head was summoned by the town mayor for a confidential interview. Imagine Mr. Dimaunahan’s shock when he was told that there was a slight possibility his three new teachers were impostors. The head countered that the teachers’ credentials were in order; that as teachers he was satisfied with their performance. Parents and students alike had only praises for the three who went out of their way to be serviceable to everyone in the community. With this, the town mayor instructed the school head to keep everything strictly confidential until further investigation had been made.

       It was shortly after this talk when a series of mysterious death overtook the children of the newly opened primary school. Another  boy did not come home one evening and so his worried parents along with other relatives organized a search party for their nine year old son, Jose.  They went directly to the teachers’ home and asked for help because earlier than evening, a classmate of the missing boy had implicated Arts & Gardening teacher Mr. Doble as perhaps the last person to have seen Jose; he claimed that when “Sir Doble” told them to go home because it was getting dark,  his classmate had lingered behind to finish weeding his assigned plot. Mr. Doble, was of course, concerned and worried. And so, without hesitation, the three teachers joined the search party.

      The boy’s body was discovered in shallow ditch near a densely wooded area. His abdomen was slashed open, his  entrails pulled out and his  heart and liver removed. The mother fainted at the gruesome sight and had to be carried unconscious, in a carosa  ( a native sled used for conveying goods)  with her son’s mutilated body.

      The teachers generously offered to help purchase the boy’s coffin, specially rushed for him since children’s coffins were not readily available  in the barrio. Except for the small opening to view the head of the corpse inside, the entire coffin was closed. Mr. Doble explained it was better this way in order to prevent the unnecessary exposure of his death which must be kept secret  until official investigations were made. The dead boy’s parents were grateful for the financial help and entrusted him with the full details of the funeral.  Mr. Doble insisted that the corpse must not be embalmed and that it should be buried within 24 hours.

      Another mysterious death struck in less than a month. This time a young girl did not return to her class after recess. She told a classmate that she was going to a certain spot where her group passed that morning to recover a package she had hung by a tree and forgotten. It must have been her lunch box, the classmate surmised. The girl failed to return for class and neither did she make it home that late afternoon.

      Her father and an uncle found her body behind a clump of bamboo, the package she went out to recover was still held tightly in her hands. Again, the child’s abdomen had been slashed open, her entrails pulled out and her heart and liver missing. Evidently she was struck from behind and was instantly killed, her skull cracked open.

      As with the first death, Mr. Doble, Ms. Duran and Ms. Dulay offered their help – it was the least they could do, they said, because after all these children came from the primary school where they taught. The parents were also very grateful and did not complain when Mr. Doble said, the body should not be embalmed; that it had to be buried within twenty four hours.

      Three more deaths took place within a short span of three months but  this time the children did not come from the same primary school. They were  children left by themselves in their homes by busy parents who had to tend to their fields. These horrible events brought the entire barrio in a state of hysteria. Parents refused to send their children to school, rice fields were left unattended, market stalls were closed; a pall of gloom had descended on the entire community.

      Activities in the barrio were practically in a standstill  with neighbors now distrusting each other; strangers too were treated with open hostility. But in the midst of all these, the community  never suspected the teachers because of their generosity and willingness to come to the aid of everybody;  they were ,as a matter of fact, even  excluded by the local policemen from their list of suspects because of the high praises from the victims families.

      On the sixth death, however, an older sister of the victim , who was working in Manila had telegraphed her parents not to worry because she was going to pay for everything. She wanted a decent coffin for her brother and because there might be a slight delay in her arrival, she told them to have the body embalmed for at least ten days.

      Without consulting the teachers, the parents brought the body to the town funeral parlor for embalming and to lie in state in an adjoining chapel. When the three teachers heard this, they hastily went to their boarding house , packed all their things and hired a passing caretela (horse drawn carriage)to bring them to the bus terminal.

      At the wake of all these reports,  the mayor called a conference of all  barrio officials  and police officers to discuss the strange killings. Questions were asked but nobody could come up with acceptable answers. Both mayor and police officers suspected that behind the murders was a deranged mind but the superstitious barrio officials were more inclined to believe that an aswang was on the prowl.

      The following morning, three strange reports awaited the mayor. He learned that the teachers were gone; the janitor’s house had been torched to the ground and the old couple was nowhere in sight, too. But the strangest report came from the town embalmer. The corpse of the dead child was a banana stalk dressed in burial clothes.

          Further investigation proved the mayor’s initial suspicion was right. He revealed that it was a statement made by his compadre - a retired public school principal from a large city in Metro Manila who had also attended the inauguration of the newly opened primary school in the barrio – that made him suspicious of the three. The retired principal narrated to him that as a new E.T.C. graduate in the 1940s, his first teaching job was in this remote public school  somewhere in Central Luzon. He reminisced what a big scandal it was when three alleged  impostors had been dismissed from their teaching posts for suspicions of witch craft. And he seemed to recall their names were Doble, Dulay and Duran but he could not say for sure.

       “It was much too long ago,” the octogenarian apologized. “ But there is something so familiar about those faces and names.”

      The three teachers were indeed impostors, but they had vanished without a trace. Three years later a series of gory incidents were reported in a far-flung fishing community in Mindanao. This time, the killings occurred after a newly opened maternity clinic hired their new batch of employees- two comadronas and a male nurse. Three mothers had been killed as they lay helplessly strapped in the delivery table. Their unborn babies were plucked from their swollen abdomens along with their heart and liver. The birthing assistants  disappeared without a trace when the finger of suspicion pointed to them.

      The mysterious deaths remain unsolved to this day. What was more horrifying besides the the apparent cannibalism was the fact that after learning of the banana stalk switching , the parents of the other dead children had their dead disinterred  and found inside the coffins, decaying banana stalks!

      What happened to the bodies of the children? Why was it necessary to make the switch and for what diabolical reason?