My quest to follow the Spirit Questors

‘UNFINISHED BUSINESS’ Members of the group Spirit Questors meet at what remained of the Ozone Disco in Quezon City, where 162 people died in a fire on March 18, 1996. —INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines — This was not your usual final project in school — or your ordinary class.

It was Feb. 13, 1995, and the class was Psychic Powers and Shamanism, an elective taught by Tony Perez under the Interdisciplinary Studies Program of the Ateneo de Manila University.

Tony is an important name in the country’s art and culture scene, being a bemedaled playwright and fictionist. But he is also a man of many unexpected talents and interests. On that particular day, he was holding the first Spirit Quest with his students at the building then occupied by the Communication Department, known as the most haunted place on the Ateneo campus.

Natural skeptic

Somewhat derived from Native American rituals, Spirit Quests involve a group whose members hold hands and help the visionary—anyone among the members who has psychic gifts — make contact with whatever may be haunting a place.

Tony’s first Quest revealed, among other things, that there was a portal in the building that allowed otherworldly entities to enter this plane.

If all this sounds bizarre to you, it didn’t back in 1995, when I first met Tony, who was immensely creative and amiable—and who also took his beliefs seriously.

We both had offices in that building (which today is no longer the Communication Department’s home) and would kill time chatting, especially about his ideas regarding the supernatural.

Then, as now, I was always a natural skeptic about these things. But there was one Saturday that year when Tony told me that he was taking a group of 10 students to what he said was a haunted house, where a mutual acquaintance lived.

He thought it would make for a good story. “An irresistible event,” he called it.

So that Saturday, I joined Tony and his Questors on their visit to that old house in Quezon City, where a visionary named Prell and another one we met named Charmaine spoke of a spirit by the name of Esperanza who still haunted the place because she felt her life had gone to waste.

‘Psychic journalist’

Speaking to Esperanza directly, Tony assured her this was not so. Eventually she moved on, according to Charmaine.

That visit would be followed by more Saturday Quests, with the Questors’ “invitations” usually involving the spirit of a dead person or elementals and nature spirits, like what Filipinos call duendes.

I took note of everything that Tony and the other visionaries said. A story soon took shape and was submitted to then Inquirer Lifestyle editor Thelma Sioson San Juan, who liked the piece and had it published.

It later became more or less a weekly feature. Think of me as the objective chronicler of the Spirit Questors’ activities, or what Tony liked to call a “psychic journalist,” a witness to people who see the unseen.

I paid close attention to the Quests and to the Questors themselves, and “The Spirit Quest Chronicles” appeared in Lifestyle almost every Sunday, eventually published by Anvil as “The Spirit Quest Chronicles Book 1” in 1997 and “Book 2” the following year.

The Spirit Questors began receiving many requests and soon enough their membership grew. But these were not folks merely looking for something different to do. Tony always hated the lazy “ghostbuster” tag that would be attached to the Questors later on, because they had strict rules being followed in their activities.

The most important rule: Their services are to be rendered for free to those who ask. They must also be invited first —and never initiate the Quest themselves.

Questors also do not participate in legal proceedings; it goes without saying that their testimony would not be admissible anyway.

The takeaway is that Spirit Questors are there to help people with problems that could not be dealt with in more conventional ways.

As Tony wrote in his introduction to the first book, the Questors “perform … a weekly public service on a zero budget and free of charge[,] involving assisting earth-bound spirits [in their] unfinished business and attachments and assisting the living through psychological counseling and alternative healing. They are available to persons unable to receive further consultation from the clergy, from doctors, from lawyers and from the police.”

Inexplicable things

The Questors would meet almost nightly and be divided into groups, depending on how many requests had been granted. The Quests could be held in derelict buildings without lights, could last until the wee hours of the morning and scare even the most skeptical among us.

I never saw a spirit or an apparition, but I heard and felt many inexplicable things. Once, during a Quest inside a long-abandoned building, there was a confrontation with a spirit that coincided with a long-dry faucet, in a kitchen that had been unused for a long time, suddenly working and dribbling water into the dirty sink. This gave us chills. Or I would hear a rusty swing outside suddenly moving on a windless night.

Once, and only once, I got so creeped out on a Quest—according to the visionary, it involved a mirror and a doppelgänger that passed through it—that I couldn’t sleep a wink when I got home.

Film Center, Ozone Disco

The most complicated Quests I had ever been on were at the Manila Film Center, notorious to this day as the city’s most haunted building, and at the remnants of the gutted Ozone Disco in Quezon City.

The Film Center was under round-the-clock construction in November 1981 when a portion collapsed, sending a number of workers to their deaths as they fell.

The accident happened two months before the opening of the Manila International Film Festival on Jan. 18 the next year. It remained unclear how many were killed; the Marcos government imposed a 15-hour news blackout soon after the disaster. Wire service reports, however, said at least 24 workers died and 60 others were missing.

The Film Center Quests were physically tougher compared to the others because the building had been shuttered for so long and the lower sections were narrow and dark.

The Questors were alone in their first visit but by their third they were accompanied by three camera crews. I was there—and heard faint sounds of busy shovels and axes, and also picked up the smell of “ginisa” (sautéed onions and garlic) as though someone nearby was cooking breakfast. At 2 a.m.

The visionaries spoke of men whose bones were still down there, wanting to be found after all these years.

The Ozone Disco inferno on March 18, 1996, killed 162 people and was considered the worst postwar fire in Metro Manila. (It took almost two decades before a Quezon City court found two members of the Ozone management liable for violation of the fire safety code.)

In November 1996, nine months after the fire, the Questors were asked to see the remnants of the place.

When the visionaries arrived, they soon found themselves speaking to so many spirits that Tony actually had to say out loud: “We can only talk to one spirit at a time.”

Blasphemy, fraud

I understood that many people didn’t take the Questors seriously. And there were some who were quite angry about their activities and about my stories.

The Inquirer received letters complaining that my series glorified blasphemy or gave weight to acts of fraud.

Honestly, I received more vitriol from those who said the Quests defied science than from those who said the group was anti-Church. Some even thought I was some kind of hack.

But what these critics didn’t see was how the Questors were trying to help people desperate for answers. Believe it or not, follow-up checks on many of these Quests revealed that the unusual activities had indeed stopped.

“Wow, you have a big third eye,” a visionary told me once.

“Would you like me to open it?” She was asking if I wanted to see what they saw. I remembered what I had recorded them describing in Quest after Quest, and this was a hard pass.

More than that, I wanted to be able to present an everyman’s experience of what being with the Questors was like. This was not just a bunch of bored thrill-seekers. In fact, most if not all of the Questors were Catholic—Tony is, as well—and prayers were sometimes recited during the Quests.

There were no occult rituals, no secret initiations. They were, ultimately, people trying to help other people in a different way.

Psychic phenomena

The Questors kept growing and growing. It seemed that there really was a growing interest in psychic phenomena in the Philippines, as Tony liked to say — something that would be reflected in popular culture and media, in literature, television, and movies.

In 1997, Lifestyle decided to discontinue “The Spirit Quest Chronicles,” and my last piece ran on June 8, 1997. I then stopped accompanying the Questors as my assignment had ended.

Tony would move on to several other universities and Spirit Questors would be formed in those universities as well.

I understand Tony is now in well-deserved retirement, and I have not seen him or any of the Questors in years.

Every journalist has a story that tends to follow them long after that story has finished, and this is mine. I have found out that many more readers have either read “The Spirit Quest Chronicles” when they ran in the paper or in book form than I thought.

It has been over two decades, but being a chronicler of the Spirit Questors for the Inquirer remains by far the most unusual assignment of an unusual career.