My Father's Hometown 5: Our Grandfather

This was happened to my eldest sister (1st sibling) November 1, 1998.

November 1 and 2 every year in the Philippines is celebration of remembering of our love ones who already passed away. We usually celebrate by cooking sticky foods for the souls, going to cemetery and light a candle on the tomb, pray for the souls, watch horror movies, and enjoy the vacation.

My eldest sister had a work that time so she needed to file a vacation leave to go to Pangasinan but her boss agreed her leave after their work of October 31. She's in Marikina that time so she have a short period of time to prepare and travel from Marikina to our province. On the road, she experience congestion and traffic so she arrived late at night of November 1. We decided to visit in cemetery tomorrow morning and call it the day.

The 4 of us again slept on the second floor of the house while my mother and my eldest sister was on the room below the terrace (where my grandfather died). When you read my first post "My Father's Hometown" I told there that the only division of that room was a silk curtain. There was no light on that room and the light from the living could reached that room when the curtain was opened.

In the middle of the night, she woke up my mother to pee so they accompanied each other to go to the bathroom at the back. When they returned, she laid on the bed but she knew that she was not sleeping yet but she experiencing sleep paralyze and she thought that her eyes were wide open because she could see the whole room. Then she noticed a shadow of a man in the curtain walking from the altar going to that room. She freaked out and tried to wake my mother but she can't move. Then she asked the man who is he but no response.

When the shadow entered the room she noticed that the face of the man was resemblance to my father and similar to my brother and she became shaky because this was unusual to her. The man spoke to her, "I'm your grandfather. We waited a long time to have a visitor in where we are now. Please have a visit and don't forget to put candles"and my grandfather disappeared.

Suddenly she rose as if it had been displeased and woke my mother and told the story to her. When they looked at the clock it was already 4am in the morning so they decided not to go back to sleep and prepared everything to go to cemetery. And the morning comes, first thing first that they did was to depart and they left us 4 in the house without knowing it.

They came back from cemetery that afternoon and told us the story and say sorry because they left us at home.

Thanks for reading.