Halloween Storytime: The Goat Lady

'Wow... this seems much more... remote than you made it sound,' my partner, Ricky, said in a hushed tone as we dragged our luggage over the rutted dirt road. The area still bustled with life despite the late hour; stray dogs, untethered chickens and barefoot children roamed under the patchy streetlights. Colourful motorised tricycles passing by to larger towns guttered past explosively, stirring dust and still-hot air.

I hadn't visited my grandparents' home in the tiny settlement (it wasn't large or defined enough to quite classify as a village or a town) in Abuyod, Philippines for almost 10 years, and I'd forgotten how otherworldly the area could feel to an outsider – and, despite my mixed race and the ready warmth of my relatives, I, too, was an outsider of sorts. The haphazard arrangement of modest self-built houses and improvised wooden structures among the vibrant tropical trees contrasted sharply with the uniform brickwork streets and fenced-in gardens we'd left behind in England.

While the nearest town, Antipolo, was only a few miles away, accessible by jeepney or motorcycle, it was impossible to judge our proximity to broader civilisation from our immediate surroundings – the municipality of Teresa, Rizal lies deep within a valley surrounded by agricultural land and marble-rich mountains. At night, the darkness was as thick as the heat-laden air, as encompassing and constrictive as a swaddling blanket.

We'd arrived in the late spring of 2015, approaching the hottest time of the year, for a long-overdue family reunion. My grandad, at a resilient 90-odd years old, wanted to see all his grandchildren and great-grandchildren together in one place in his lifetime. A few of my cousins and I had made a nearly 7,000-mile trip to a place we felt deeply connected to yet had only visited a handful of times between us. From Abuyod, we planned to converge in Kabankalan, where my uncles and aunts had grown up and could pass on the stories of their youth to the younger generations.

Sadly, my grandma had passed away shortly before our trip, and knowing I'd missed the chance to ever see her again made it a particularly poignant one. I remembered her as an abundantly warm and caring woman, with an infectiously childlike energy, ready to effusively welcome and embrace and fuss over us despite the language barrier and lack of opportunities to spend time together. I'll always regret that I never knew my grandparents better, though my mum, ever the storyteller, has been more than willing to supply any details.

In my grandma's absence, the house she and my grandad had been staying in had lain largely unused and fallen into a mild state of disrepair. Part of the roofing had begun to peel away and lights – including the one in my designated bedroom – no longer worked. The modest two-bedroom bungalow nevertheless offered a decent standard of accommodation: running water, modern furnishings and, crucially, air-conditioning – luxuries not all of our neighbours were lucky enough to have.

While by no means extravagant, the house was one of the 'fancier' ones in the vicinity, so it also benefitted from additional security in the form of steel bars striping across the mosquito-netted windows and doors. (An unfortunate necessity – on an earlier visit, after returning from a day trip, my little brother had once seen a disembodied hand creeping past the bars into his bedroom and groping around blindly for something solid before making a hasty retreat when he entered the room.)

Despite my unfamiliar surroundings, the lack of light in my room didn't bother me much – I was sharing with Ricky, after all, and we had a small torch at the ready, making each night in the small space feel like a little campout. Surrounded by family both in the house (my mum, two brothers and grandad) and the immediate vicinity (a smattering of uncles, aunts and cousins), I had no reason to feel unsafe or uneasy, either. This didn't last long.

Early one morning, soon after we'd arrived, in the pale half-light between night and day, I was awoken by a noise. It wasn't unusual to hear noises in the area before sunrise – the high-pitched maraca shake of cicadas, the overeager crowing and general scuffling of roosters (which, contrary to popular media depictions, crow much earlier than the break of dawn, as I quickly found out). The sound I heard, however, was unlike anything I'd ever heard before.

A bleating, keening wail rose and fell outside the house, passing close by our window. With only single glass panes and a flimsy mesh panel to keep out mosquitoes, snatches of indecipherable words sifted through, contorted by the drawn-out, shuddering cries. The wails seemed to drift around the house in a meandering orbit, impossible to place exactly. We didn't see any movement outside the window or hear any footsteps or rustling of the unkempt brush that bordered the house. Most unsettling, however, was the strangeness of the sound itself: the voice was like an old woman's but carried an unhuman, goat-like quality.

Unable to make out much in the darkness of our room, I lay motionless in bed, prickling with sweat and breathing shallowly in the stifling heat that had gathered overnight in the absence of a continuous electric fan. After a few beats, I shout-whispered to Ricky, 'Do you hear that?'

'Yes.'

'What is it?' 

'I don't know.'

I felt only slightly reassured that he was awake despite being a normally heavy sleeper. We listened to the anguished bodiless wails hover about the house a while longer, eyes wide and hearts racing, willing it not to approach our window again. After a few minutes, it faded away, as if dispelled by the strengthening morning light. I promptly snapped on the torch and leapt out of bed.

On entering the living room, we were met by the surprised stares of my mum and grandad, who were seated at the dining table poring over a Bible and devotional materials in a pool of lamplight. It turned out that they regularly studied religious texts early in the morning as part of their daily worship practice – the morning was one of the coolest parts of the day, so it was perfect for anything that required concentration. It must've only been around 5 or 6am.

'What are you doing up?' My mum asked, alarmed at my wild, wide-eyed look.

'Are there any goats around here?' I blathered.

'No.' She appeared bemused. 'Why?'

We explained being woken by the strange noise, attempting to keep our voices low; seeming spooked, my mum said that they hadn't heard anything, despite only being in the next room. Apparently we hadn't been quiet enough, however, as my younger brother, Aaron, soon entered from the adjoining bedroom. I thought he might berate us for waking him; instead, without hesitating, he said, 'Are you talking about the crazy lady?'

'Yeah. Did you hear it too?'

He revealed that both he and my older brother, Gwynne, had heard the noise, confirming that we hadn't somehow dreamt it. Bizarrely, however, we all seemed to have slightly differing recollections of it, with none of us able to agree on where it had come from. However, we soon fell into referring to whatever we'd heard by a certain name, half-jokingly yet with a lingering unease: The Goat Lady.

The Philippines has a uniquely colourful folklore tradition, with a zoology of nightmarish creatures that populated the nighttime tales my mum would tell me in my childhood. One of these in particular, the Sigbin, a hornless goat said to smell like rotten flesh and walk backwards with its head lowered between its hind legs, might've come to mind had I stopped to consider it. The creature is believed to come out at night during Holy Week to drain the blood of its victims from the shadows. Its favoured prey, though, is children; it feeds on their hearts and fashions them into amulets. A silly little yarn meant to scare children into obeying their parents, no doubt. I made a point of not prompting my mum to recall any of these tales.

Other, more disquieting, stories found me anyway, however. These were less easily dismissed. In a quieter moment, when it was just the two of us, my mum told me more about the history of the house. We were only planning on staying there for a few nights, so it hadn't seemed relevant before, but after my grandma had passed away, apparently the house had been a hotbed of unexplained events.

Occurrences ranged from the relatively innocuous to the downright chilling. A gentle clinking in the kitchen, as of someone stirring a drink with a spoon, when nobody was there. The clacking of clothes hangers being pulled violently from side to side of the rail as if in a fit of rage – this, too, in an empty room – my room. It turned out that this had been my grandma's bedroom shortly before she passed away.

'Something happened almost every night. It was always at night,' my mum said. 'It got really bad.'

This culminated in sightings – both in the house and outside it. My grandma had a special chair outside the garage that she had always sat in. One day, after my grandma's funeral, my baby cousin had been staring fixedly at the empty seat.

'What is it, Chloe?' my older cousins asked her. 'What are you staring at?'

'It's Grandma,' the little girl said, stepping forward eagerly. 'She wants me to go to her.'

'Whatever you do, don't go over there,' my cousins cautioned her, exchanging concerned glances.

'But Grandma is smiling at me.'

This became a regular occurrence.

It emerged that the sightings weren't confined to my family, either. A local taxi driver described waking early in the morning, when it was still dark and no one else was up, to begin his shift. Despite being used to spending long periods on his own at night, he would always hasten his steps outside my grandparents' house on his way to his vehicle. The reason for this hardened taxi driver's fear? There, in the chair outside the garage, like clockwork, my grandma would be waiting each day, smiling at him in the darkness.

The house, I was told, was now widely regarded as a figure of fear locally. A black spot. Perhaps this was why no builders would come to work on it, despite my mum's attempts to hire someone to fix the roof.

Perhaps most terrifying, however, was my mum's own close-up encounter. One night, after turning out the light in her bedroom and lying in her bed, she saw the figure of my grandma standing there smiling serenely down at her.

'It was as though she was really there. She had my mum's face,' she said. 'I tried to call out, but I couldn't speak. I tried to get up, but I couldn't move.'

'That sounds like sleep paralysis,' I interjected, attempting to dispel my mounting discomfort.

'I wasn't asleep. I had only just switched the light off. She appeared instantly.'

'How could you see her if the light was out?' I probed further, though more unnerved.

'I don't know. But I could see her clearly somehow. Eventually I managed to break free from the paralysis and switch the light back on. As soon as light filled the room, she disappeared.'

This happened three times that night. As soon as my mum turned the light off, the spectre would reappear, opaque and tangible, but as soon as she turned the light on, the apparition would vanish, like an uncanny face in the dark that reveals itself to be a pattern in the curtains or woodwork, a mere trick of the light.

'She looked just like her, but some details were... wrong. She was wearing a dress I'd never seen before. Stripes. Red and white. She'd never worn a dress like that before.'

'What did you do?'

'I finally found my voice. I confronted it and told it to get out – I said I knew it wasn't my mum.' She was adamant on this point. My grandma had been a cheerful, loving lady. Playful, perhaps, but never angry or malicious. Whatever had been haunting them couldn't have been her. This was in keeping with my family's religious beliefs; while they believed in God and an afterlife, ghosts and spirits were not the souls of the departed, they insisted, but treacherous likenesses assumed by fallen angels.

'And then I prayed,' she added simply. 'Eventually it just... faded away.'

Soon after, my mum decided to combat the spiritual attachment in classically practical, down-to-earth Filipino fashion: with a quite literal cleansing. She deep-cleaned the house, getting onto her hands and knees and scrubbing furiously with bleach and water. Then, she gathered all my grandma's clothes and possessions, everything she'd treasured or anything her scent still clung to, amassed them into a small bonfire outside and burned them to ashes.

'I was heartbroken to do it, but I felt like I needed to get rid of that energy. After that, things were much better; the house was quiet again.'

I had to smile at my mum's postscript to her story, however. 'I slept in that room again, but after that I always kept the lights on throughout the house. I never turned them all off at night again.'

Thankfully, we left for Kabankalan soon after without further incident. In that contracted span of time, the house was otherwise a place of warmth for us: of shared family meals, catch-ups with cousins I hadn't seen in a decade and laughter over the chronology of my mum's hairstyles in old photo albums. Time has a way of reconciling you to bizarre events, whether through rationalisation or denial, and we brushed the experience off as an eccentric old lady or a wild goat. I'd heard they can sound startlingly human-like, after all.

Once we had returned to England, several weeks later, my mum pulled me aside. 'By the way, I mentioned the noise you heard to your cousins,' she said, a note of urgency in her voice. 'They were shocked when they heard your description. The sound – they immediately recognised it. They said that only one person had an unusual way of crying just like that: your grandma. Whenever she was upset, she would make the strangest sound – like the bleating of a goat.'



For my other Halloween Storytime posts, click here. Had any eerie encounters of your own? Let me know in the comments!

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