A good ghost story chills the blood, pleasurably. This one is no different, except that it is also about food and home, and it happened to me.

It is a privilege to have your own provincial homestead. For us, it was our ancestral house on Zavalla Street in Sta. Rosa, Laguna, where every Halloween the cousins would gather, and childhood would unfold among capiz windows, tinadtad, and tales of the unseen.

Our maternal home stood since the late 1800s, a typical bahay na bato with stone foundations, wooden on the second floor, and capiz windows that filtered sunlight into honey-colored squares. The Custodios lived there for generations, alongside old families like the Tiongcos, the Silvas, the Perlas, the Belizaros, and the Relovas.

At the center of the courtyard rose a mango tree so large its branches reached over the roof like a canopy. It was more than a century old, the heart of the house. Its shadow stretched across our childhoods, marking the seasons, especially those long Undas weeks when everyone came home.

Those were the days that taught us who we were through food. My only sister and I grew up in the city, where we learned to hold cutlery like little diplomats and measure portions the Western way. But in Sta. Rosa, we relearned how to eat with our hands, food placed on banana leaves, with appetite, with joy.

Breakfast meant warm pandesal, still steaming from the panaderia, smelling of toasted flour and brown sugar. My grandfather Osvaldo Custodio would arrive with a brown paper bag balanced on his bicycle handlebar, the aroma of fresh bread trailing behind him.

For lunch, there was tinadtad, chopped beef from the public market, simmered in its own juices, the soup soured with kamias. A Southern Tagalog sinigang classic. The steaming pot of soup would arrive at the table glistening, the smell filling every corner of the kitchen. Often served beside it is paksiw na tulingan, a favorite of my dearly departed mother. Skipjack tuna or bullet tuna cooked in vinegar, kamias, salt, then wrapped in banana leaves.

Merienda is puto Biñan, its surface soft and springy, big as a pizza, topped with grated cheese and salted egg then slathered with condensed milked and melted butter.

After dinner, we would gather in the living room where my grandfather Osvaldo, always neat, tall, his hair parted sharply, told stories that blurred truth and fable. He spoke of kapres who smoked tobacco under trees, of spirits that lingered between river and field. We listened wide-eyed, our imaginations lit like the candles we melted into balls after visiting the cemetery.

Our nights began with Magandang Gabi, Bayan on TV and ended on banig mats spread across the wooden floor. The air was cool, carrying the clean scent of the province.

Our lolo Osvaldo is a natural storyteller, and like all great tellers of uncanny tales, he made us believe. Perhaps that was why, on one particular Halloween night in the 1990s, I decided to test his stories for myself.

Sleep would not come. The moon was full, the house quiet. I slipped out of our banig while my cousins slept and crept toward the outdoor courtyard with the giant mango tree, silent and curious. The air was still and heavy.

Then I smelled tobacco, distinct and rich, curling through the air. My paternal grandfather, Feliciano Sr., smoked the same kind, but he was far away in Malabon. I squinted at the mango tree, its branches framed by moonlight, and something shifted there, darker than shadow.

A shape. A presence. And then, softly, almost teasing, a voice said, “O ano, matapang ka?”

I ran. Not screaming, only running, heart pounding, back into the wooden safety of the house. By morning, I wasn’t sure if it had been real. Even now, I doubt myself. Was it true? Or only the overimagination of a sleepless child? Yet I know what I felt, what I smelled, what I saw under the moonlight. What I heard. For me, it was real.

That night’s fear faded by breakfast, the way it always did. In our family, no ghost story lasted longer than the first bite of hot pandesal or the sip of coffee that followed.

My own late mother, who grew up in the house, told us of her halcyon days there playing in Zavalla Street and climbing the branches of our old mango tree. And she would tell us of her memory of seeing a white lady floating just outside the house, seen through the capiz windows.

In Sta. Rosa, food had a way of taming even the supernatural. Daylight always erases fear. The smell of coffee—Folgers with Coffeemate—filled the house. Buttered toast for the children, pandesal for everyone, and laughter echoing down the wooden halls. My grandfather would bring in more bread, a bag swinging from his bicycle handlebar. The courtyard would be alive again, our cousins chasing one another under the same tree that had scared me the night before.

That mango tree fell during a typhoon in 1995, its trunk split clean by wind and rain. The house on Zavalla Street still stands, but quieter now.

Like the mango tree, many of the old houses in Sta. Rosa are gone.

Gone are the nights when we played patintero under the moonlight, when everyone knew everyone in our street, and October air turned cold enough to make you reach for a blanket. Memories of my mother cooking sinigang, and eating her favorite paksiw. I sometimes wonder if my mother’s spirit would visit her childhood home there on Zavalla Street.

But memory remains: of my mom, the golden brown puto Biñan, the sour steam of sinigang na tinadtad, the comforting scent of warm pandesal at dawn, and the faint whiff of tobacco drifting through the years—reminding me that some ghosts are not meant to frighten, only to remind.

That was the night I learned of things you cannot explain.

And it was also the night I learned what home truly was—where a little fear, folklore, food, and love, live together, forever bound by memory.