Manila City Hall, From The Air

In a forum I frequent, there's a thread that talks about haunted places in Metro Manila (again we see here the Pinoy affinity for ghost stories). The discussion circled around the less well-known and supposedly haunted locations in our metropolis. Mentioned were this old house along Roxas Boulevard/Coastal Road, various schools that used to be clinics, The Heritage Hotel (formerly the Regent of Manila), UP Diliman's College of Education, and dilapidated, gargoyle-guarded domiciles deep in tree-lined New Manila.

Someone wrote that he had heard somewhere that Manila City Hall looks like a coffin from the air. Writer and Palanca winner Maryanne Moll, a Super Moderator for the forum, cleverly looked it up on Google, and discovered that it was true! The city hall of our nation's capital does look like a coffin! Mary Anne says it still has to be verified, but she read on another site that when the structure was rebuilt after the bombing during World War II, the architect deliberately designed it that way to serve as a symbolic coffin for all those who died there.

Real life can be stranger than fiction! Fiction though has an added burden of having to work and make sense.

If I may paraphrase my favorite quote from one of the forum's members: "(From all the stories going around), there are enough white ladies (in the Philippines) to form a cheering squad."

Update: Maryanne PM'd me this additional info:

"In my post I have provided a link to the Pinoy Tambayan site where I got the info, but you should be logged in to view anything there, which is why I had to paraphrase in my post what I read in the Pinoy Tambayan thread. In fact, I registered in Pinoy Tambayan just to be able to see the posts about the City Hall that showed up in Google! I suggest you sign up, too, because it's an 8-page thread, and people who actually work at the City Hall have contributed to the discussion.

That would be a fabulous blog entry, of course. Creepy talaga, no?"

She also provided a site that shows other weird stuff found on Google maps.

Thanks, Maryanne!