The paranormal in the workplace

Jaime Licauco

Most paranormal occurrences or psychic manifestations we hear or read about happen in homes.
But these incidents can occur anywhere—in open spaces, churches, hotels, factories, business offices, schools, cars, ships, even inside an airplane.

Here are several true stories of paranormal happenings in the work place or commercial establishments:

Strange deaths in a car accessories manufacturing firm

In the mid-'80s, Bobby, general manager of the well-known firm in Makati City, called me because of certain strange happenings in their factory.

Bobby said when one of their employees died in October they did not see anything strange about it.

"Then in November another employee in the same department also died. Still nothing so unusual from our point of view. In January, a third employee in the same department also died. "That's when I began to think something strange was going on... Do you think there is something supernatural [here]?"

"I don't know," I replied. "Did you do anything different before the incidents began?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Well, anything new that you did in the factory that you did not do before. Think of anything you did before October."

Bobby said, "There's nothing unusual I can think of except I had our old warehouse cleaned to give way to an executive parking area. That warehouse was not being used for a long time..."

"That's it! "I exclaimed. "That could explain the deaths of your employees."

"What do you mean?" asked Bobby. "What has that got to do with our employees dying?"

"Hard to explain to a very rational guy like you," I told Bobby, a graduate of the Asian Institute of Management like me.

I told him that since the warehouse was not used for a long time, it could have been inhabited by negative elemental creatures.

When the place was cleaned, the creatures were dislocated. Bobby asked me if I could visit his factory and see if I could provide some explanation, and how to prevent future deaths, if indeed there was some connection among the strange events.

I brought a blind exorcist from Sampaloc who was known to contact bad spirits and get rid of them using a medium. The famous novelist and magazine editor Celso Al Carunungan came along out of curiosity.

The exorcist put his medium in a trance and asked the spirit to enter her. It was learned that there were hundreds of negative engkantos inside the warehouse.

When asked if they killed the three employees, the spirit said yes and explained, through the medium, "Because they were making too much noise at night."

I asked Bobby if that was true. He said the employees worked near the warehouse and usually worked overtime. To keep themselves awake, they played stereo music very loudly. That must have disturbed the engkantos.
They were also angered by the destruction of their habitat.

The exorcist asked them to leave the place but they refused. A battle of wills took place, which looked weird and surreal for us onlookers.
The exorcist said he would melt each one of them if they refused to leave. How one could melt a spirit, I could not comprehend.
Anyway, it took the whole afternoon before the exorcist finally "destroyed" all the so-called engkantos in the place.

Whether one believes this story or not, the fact remains that, after the exorcism, there were no more deaths in the factory, which eventually transferred to Quezon City.

Dead tycoon wants favorite desk back

I worked in a large, multinational company in Makati in the late '80s. When the famous son of the company founder died, a museum containing the history and family memorabilia was established within the building.
A company historian-curator was hired to oversee the museum and update the records. The tycoon had three sons, all of them educated in the United States. Each of them headed subsidiaries of the vast conglomerate.

One day, the youngest son noticed his father's beautiful narra desk was just displayed in the museum. He decided to use it as his desk and asked that it be transferred to his office.

I heard that employees started to experience ghostly manifestations in the son's room after that. When nobody was around, typewriters sounded like they were being used, paper clips flew from one desk to another and security guards noticed somebody going inside the private restroom of the son then disappearing.

The son did not believe in ghosts and considered reports of haunting merely the product of his employees' fertile imagination. When I was asked to check at the room without the son's knowledge, I noticed the center of the ghostly visits was the old man's desk.

I suggested that it be returned to the museum, as the old man apparently did not want it used by anybody else. The son, I was told, laughed at the suggestion.

The manifestations continued for some time until the son returned his father's desk.