Once, after a fraught night in a Bataan coastal resort, my three aunts complained to the hotel staff that the wooden pillar inside their bungalow had been crying. The desolate voice of a young woman, they said, radiated from the very core of it, and although my aunts made a point to reenact the voice, each wailing at a different pitch, they reported the issue to the front desk matter-of-factly, as if calling attention to a bathroom leak or a broken television. Finally adding: “You should really do something about her.”

The resort itself had been constructed piecemeal from colonial-era villas brought in from across the Philippines— dismantled at point of origin, transported, and then reassembled along the beach to look like a nineteenth century town plaza complete with horse-drawn carriages and a bell tower. Vaguely, it reminded me of an amusement park. There was a replica of a building whose original had been destroyed during the Second World War, and an open-air veranda with chess tables and mancala boards.

The wooden pillar in question, the sorrowful one, had been carved from a single, ancient tree trunk. Dark grain, warm to the touch. My niece suggested the crying might have been a dog somewhere. My sister added that we heard nothing in the room she and I shared. The loudest sound had been the air conditioner, though I did jump once, when the shadow of a lizard scuttled across the window. My brother-in-law, a building contractor in Manila, mentioned that he knows a guy (in the sense of knowing a “lighting guy” or a “window guy”) except this one is a spirit-talking guy, a kind of shaman he could recommend to the hotel management.

He said this without flinching. Because to those in his trade, otherworldly matters are just another calculation, like bargaining down the price of floor tiles or measuring the height of a retaining wall or choosing faucet knobs. And so one must always be ready to negotiate with ghosts and engkanto —what people in my mother’s province call the “not-like-ours” who are not human, nor had they ever been, but still exist as part of the community and are therefore neighbors.

Neighbors whose dwelling places are marked by elements of the natural world. Trees and rocks. Underground burrows. Mountain springs. While unremarkable at first glance, these entry points open to a vast inland territory that can only be reached by the not-like-ours and their chosen. There are cavernous palaces decked out with splendid feasts, always unsalted, and ornate furnishings. Paved roads. Cadillacs, even. The engkanto will generously bestow material gifts upon human lovers, and healing powers upon shamans who seek their counsel. But when spurned, they are known to inflict boils and fevers and delirium upon their victims.

The not-like-ours are hot-blooded, shrewd creatures. Not to be trifled with.

A contractor by himself can sacrifice a plump chicken (purchased alive, of course, at the market) to satiate whatever little spirits might be lurking under the dust of his building site. But if handling the inhabitants of a centuries-old balete tree, its spindly roots that take on the appearance of entwined legs stretched unfathomably long and vines drooping like tattered curtains, the job is now beyond the skills of a layman.

My brother-in-law shook his head. “Oh no, you’ve got to call in a professional for that one. Chop it down without getting permission from the you-know-what and, well…man, you’re not gonna believe it. Like a guy I know, the left half of his body turned the color of slate, and grainy, too, like those statues on Easter Island, all because he urinated on a tree I told him to leave alone. That’s what a curse looks like, the real deal…”  

For a modest fee, a hired shaman will engage in the usual rituals. The chanting of orations. The preparation of offerings on a low altar. Candles and incense burning in coconut shells alongside fresh eggs and betel nut. Boiled rice encased in palm leaves. Cups of fermented sugarcane wine. The shaman might even address the spirit directly, taking on the part of real estate agent, suggesting a different tree or boulder it might wish to live in. Outside the city, perhaps, and how do you feel about quiet evenings next to a river with nobody to bother you?

The engkanto are as sacred as a clay jug filled with cool water. In other words, not sacred at all, but intimately mundane. Unless what we understand as “mundane” is actually part of the sacred, and the distinction between the two is nothing more than a trick of language, a metamorphosis of vision. Consider a bus jam-packed with people rumbling down a provincial highway at sunset. In the very back of the vehicle, a cluster of passengers chat with each other in an unfamiliar tongue that sounds neither foreign nor local. They look a little different, too. Ruddy cheeks, slender bodies.

Switching to Cebuano, they ask the driver to stop here, right here next to the path which leads down to the riverbank. The driver stops the bus, opens the doors. While the passengers in the front give way, opening up the aisle, the peculiar ones in the back edge their way forward. They smell like clean, wet earth. Upon disembarking, they remain in a neat line as they march in the direction of the water. The bus driver closes the doors, resumes his journey down the highway. Then, a tingle of intuition. When he glances into the rear view mirror towards the river, he sees no people. The path is empty.

I’ve been told that the ability to see that other world hinges upon the act of looking backward in a different manner than you normally would —that’s how close we are to them. There is, for instance, one particular method rumored to be effective. The ritual uses two fresh coconuts, and into each one you must poke a hole —these will be your new eyes. Then, if you can manage not to fall, balance upon the fruit as if they were stilts and look behind you. But not in the regular fashion, which is over the shoulder, but rather upside down, staring out through the arc of your legs.

Within a single breath, a new landscape will resolve in your line of sight. Strange mountains, strange oceans. The air will taste different. And imagine the not-like-ours raising their eyebrows in wonder as you gawk at each other, the neighborhood fence dividing the worlds suddenly gone missing. How they might exclaim: Does the carnival pass through here now? Show us the jugglers, the knife throwers…what a mysterious thing you are!