"The vanishing boy of Manilla"

[palestine]

Here is a post on Substack that gathers a lot of positive comments; it is about a possession case.

The Vanishing Boy of Manila​

This is the opening line to Lester Sumrall’s bewildering personal account of a tale of the highest of high strangeness. The tale itself is one that has, for a variety of reasons, captivated me since I recently learned of it. It is an account of equal parts incredible fantasy and stark horror. In a way, it struck me as something of a modern fairy tale; a story in which the fantastical and whimsical lie in neat parallel to a subtle yet sinister undercurrent of unmistakable darkness, where a thin veneer of ethereal, otherworldly beauty obscures something much more disturbing.

During the church’s construction, in the year 1953, Sumrall would catch wind of a story that was sweeping across the city of Manila concerning the unusual incarceration of a seventeen year old woman named Clarita Villanueva. Forced by poverty into the world’s oldest profession, Villanueva had worked her way from a remote and rural village to Manila, where she claimed to be looking for a father she never met. While plying her trade to make ends meet, she offered her services to a plainclothes officer who promptly arrested the young woman on charges of solicitation.

On May 7th, 1953, Villanueva was taken to court, where, according to the testimony of witnesses, was suddenly possessed during the hearing. Over the following days, the young woman would lapse into fits of hysteria, thrashing about her cell, harming herself, and screaming that she was being assailed by unseen, demonic tormentors.

Occasionally, she would fall into fits of deranged laughter, as well. Though the city of Manila was by far and away the largest in the country at the time, the various neighborhoods and communities were tight-knit and well connected. It did not take long for stories of the possessed woman to spread beyond the confines of the immediate locale and spread across Manila and beyond. The spectacle grew to such a magnitude that the then-mayor of Manila and well-respected politician, Arsenio Lacson, would personally visit her in prison, along with doctors, professors, and scientists from across the Philippines.

After an exorcism of some sort, the author says:

It seems that Sumrall’s experiences with the sinister and inexplicable were many. His observation that the devil is not dead proved to be particularly prescient; it would not be long before Sumrall would confront what he believed to be the devil in the Philippines again.

The above is a sum up of what the article features. An investigation about what appears to be a case of possession, jumping from a person to another one.