Don't Look At The Mango Tree

Ever believe in a "Kapre"? #Not sure of the spelling# A Kapre is a large and hairy man who is often found sitting on huge trees while smoking a Tabacco cigar. When disturbed, they are said to bury you alive. I'm not sure if my description is accurate, but I do know they come in different sizes and are sometimes red-eyed. You know a Kapre is present because when one is around, you easily smell the strong odor of their cigars. Here are some encounters of Kapres in my grandmother's house at Paranaque City. It was usually my relatives or our helpers who have experienced seeing one.

My first encounter was when I was about 7 years old and we were all about to sleep. I know I wasn't dreaming since me, my grandmother, and the nanny along with my little sister all sleep in one room and we all heard it. It was late at night when we all heard something heavy walking fast on our roof! We all thought that maybe the mangoes from our tall mango tree were just falling and hitting the roof, but the sound sounded like heavy footsteps. Heavy like someone was jumping. We were all startled so my grandmother decided to take a peek from the window and saw a big man jump to our mango tree!

At night, my grandmother and everyone else in the house would not be roaming beyond 9pm. Our helpers know that very well. This is because when you go to our hallway, you'll notice it's a bit foggy and smelly due to the presence of a Kapre sitting in our living room smoking his cigars. We knew that he enetered the house sometimes because of our maids who do the laundry. One night, our maids decided to bring the newly ironed laundry at around 10pm. Definitely not a good idea because the laundry would be left near our living room so we can just go outside and get it ourselves the next day. As soon as they entered our hallway, there was the darkness, fogginess, and the foul smell.

While our maids were walking towards the rooms, they saw a large man sitting on one of our sofas. He was so huge that he fit the entire sofa. You can easily see his lit up cigar. Our maids then were so scared that they just decided to run back downstairs to their quarters. After that incident our maids learned the hard way to never bring up laundry at that time of the day.