Spooky Scary Storytime Part 2

So let’s take a little trip back in time and halfway across the world to when I was about eight years old. I went to visit the motherland...the Philippines. Specifically, my mum’s village. Not the touristy resort vibes, the real deal. Dirt roads, open sewage, stone houses, the smell of cooking oil and guava trees in the air. Now there were times when I saw snakes slithering through the sewage, this was rough!

We were there for five weeks, and somewhere between playing with cousins, dodging the humidity in shopping centres, and surviving on Jollibee, I became violently ill. Apparently possessed. My cousins wouldn't come near me!

Like… couldn’t lift an arm kind of ill. Not just “kids get bugs” sick. Could have been anything, virus, a pissed of duwende, but I was not functional.

One of my uncles carried me down the narrow laneway near my Lola’s house. I remember that walk, it was more of a sprint. We ended up in a home that looked ancient, cold grey stone, candlelight flickering on bamboo furniture, shadows dancing on the walls. It smelled like herbs, and freshly cooked rice.

I was laid out like a sacrificial chicken on the kitchen table. And in shuffled this woman. Calm. Commanding. tiny as hell, no more than 4'8. This was my Lola Munding, my grandmother’s sister. A witch doctor, a healer, the family bruja. My mum was sent to collect herbs from a closeby garden while I lay there freezing cold in the dead of night that should have been sweltering.

She didn’t ask me questions, she only spoke to my mum and aunty, probably cause I didn't speak her language, but I was delulu anyway...she just got to work. She chewed up herbs (yes, like literally masticated that foliage in her own mouth) and spat them onto my joints and over my body, it was on my cheeks and everything. I remeber the warmth of her breath as she doused me in her sputum. No joke. Then she muttered incantations between chews, as she spat those leafy spitballs into my skin.

And that’s when I passed out. Just... gone. I was out cold on the table. Next thing I know, I’m waking up back in my borrowed bedroom, under a mosquito net, like I just time-travelled through a dream.

I was fine. Like, completely fine.

I still had the crunchy dried herbs stuck to my skin like nature’s glitter, and when I went to wash them off, my mum stopped me.

“No,” she said. “They need to fall off on their own.”

EXCUSE ME WHAT NOW?

You mean I’m walking around with spell leaves and my great aunts saliva all over me until they decide I’m healed enough to be clean again?! Okay sure, why not. It’s not like I just got spiritually spit-shined by the resident family bruja with zero medical equipment and a plant-based exorcism anyway, my younger cousins whispered behind their hands about me... probably calling me a demon, maybe it was? I was passed out, who knows what happened after they lathered me in herbs and slobber.

Anyway, ever since then, I've believed in the woo. I didn't feel my soul leave my body and I wasn't floating or anything, but I was instantly better the next day after a week of being unwell.

And now I believe in the idea that maybe healing doesn’t always look like white coats and syringes. Sometimes, healing is candles and whispers and ancient women who chew leaves and spit them on you after they just ate their dinner.

So yeah... I was baptized in bruja energy.

Stay witchy,

V 🌿🖤🕯️