Fears of the Night: The Man's Chained Leg

I was not about one month in the seminary in Baguio City when this trembling, frightening, compelling experience came about.

I usually woke up at one o'clock in the morning to go to the restroom. My room was twenty meters away from the restroom. All lights were out except the yellow one in the middle of the corridor.

It was a normal cold weather in Baguio City. I slept with my thick jacket and a red scarf circling my neck. I didn't yet adapt to the cold temperature of Baguio.

I awoke and readied to come out of my bed when I heard a strange sound coming from the extreme left of the first-year corridor where the bell was hung, which signaled for us to wake up. Too strange. It sounded like a man wearing flap black shoes--the seminarians usually wore for attending masses and classes, like a formal black shoes you wore at school--stepping the one foot and dragging the other foot that audibly contracted the sound of chains.

One foot banged on the wooden floor that echoed in the whole corridor, and the other foot dragged the chains that screeched and creaked on the floor. It walked at a slow pace to the direction of my room. My room was about eight meters from the extreme left corner of the corridor. I listened attentively to the fearsome chained foot as it approached gradually to my direction. I was horrified and bathed with my own sweat.

I knew it was close, closer, and even much closer to my room. The eerie sound became louder and louder as it reached my room, but it stopped right in front of my door.

"Our Father... Hail Mary...Glory be...," I shiveringly prayed as I knew it was outside my room. The frigid night bothered me not as I was full of sweat as if I was basking under the scorching heat of the sun.

It stepped again but this time it mooched to and fro outside my door as if it knew I was listening.

I covered my whole body with my blanket. I didn't mind the inconvenience that I felt with the heat and the little air circulating around me.

It was still outside as if it was joking at me.

I continuously and repeatedly prayed until I did not notice that I fell asleep.

The bell rang; The alarm buzzed. It was 5:15 in the morning--it signaled to wake up and proceed to the chapel. I got up and rushed to the sink. I washed my face but I couldn't stop thinking of what happened last night. Was I dreaming? But it was a vivid dream; So vivid that it seemed not. It was real; I was not dreaming. It indeed happened.

That was the first experience I had inside the seminary in Baguio. I studied the history of the seminary and aside from its antiquity, the old corridor, where the first-year seminarians occupied, was the only seminarians' corridor that remained when the fire burned down the left portion of the seminary.