***
A little background
As Mina explained in the intro note, my family is from Bacolod -- Cadiz City on the northern part of Negros Occidental, to be exact. As a kid I spent my summers in our ancestral house there, and as it's a super old place with lots of history -- built in the 1930s, it was used as a garrison by the Japanese during the war. No one will tell me what went on there during the Occupation (maybe no one knows), but suffice to say that the townsfolk tried to burn the house down and my great-grandfather had to talk to them to let him move back to his own house after the war.
So yeah, it's creepy; it's near the highway but might as well be isolated for how dark it gets at night; and when Mina told me she loved her Bacolod vacation and wanted to write a story set there, I told her some of the ghost stories I have from the old house. One thing led to another and then we started collaborating on Spark!
Do you want to see the old house?? I bet you do! Click on the link to check out the pics:
Fair warning: I was practicing bokeh shots during my last trip to the house (in 2010...sigh, so long!) so there are a lot of flowers in the foreground stuff here:
 |
| The front of the house, facing the highway |
 |
| The balconaje in better detail |
 |
| side terrace. The balcony is my lola's room. |
 |
| Back of the house. That window on the left is at the room where I usually stay om when I visit, and where I usually hear someone sweeping with a walis tingting. Right by the second floor. At three in the morning. |
 |
| The pool where I (and my dad, and his 9 siblings, and my cousins, and my siblings) learned how to swim. That patch of green over the left side is the start of the sugarcane plantation. |
 |
| Sugarcane fields across the highway. |
No comments:
Post a Comment