The Guinayangan Republic

Did you grow up in Guinayangan? Particularly in Brgy.Manlayo? I am absolutely sure your parents or elders probably pop you a story with these scary tricks of making you stay at home and not wander around. “Sige! makuha ka dyan ng Sipay”. Huh?! I’m not a usual kid who startled by this stuff.”And what is this Sipay look like huh? What does he likes? (With my hands at my waist taunting my uncle) Provoked, my uncle Felix told me the scary character features of him. How the horrific look of him would frighten us and how he would make us their prey. This "Sipay” usually sneaks, snatch kids who are lurking around and wandered away from home. He has this sack where he usually put these meandered kids before beheading them.

They collect blood of young kids like you (gesturing a hand chopping my head). I was suddenly terrified and my shrewd young mind suddenly rattled by my intuitions. As my Uncle continues… The kids blood… what they do with the blood? I asked interrupting him. “You see? New bridges at Sumulong highway (Calauag Proper) are in constructions and in full swing. Probably, at this time they hunt kids. To strengthen the structures, they use rituals by spilling blood at their columns. That’s why bridges today are stronger. You know the son of Pareng Crispin? He was taken… (I don’t know him actually he probably making vague names to cloud my recognition of his true identity) but I was riveted to the story. I wasn’t terrified, I was petrified!

With my lucid mind to imaginative stories like that, I was elicited to draw out the sketch above from what my mind depicts it that day. I appallingly recall a bearded man with a sack draped with so much blood in it. Suffusing the road with blood spreading over as he dragged the sack full of chopped heads. He had an axe blooded from chopping off poor kids’ heads. I was sleepless for a week. Paranoia has haunted me every time I’ll be away from the house. Every dismissal, at the gate of the school, even a casual bearded man waiting for his child – I was featured him for a 'Sipay”. That was the most traumatic stories I’ve heard. With my unrelenting burst of fears I was even drawn to tell same exaggerated stories to my cousins hoping they could accompany me every time I went home. When travelling away from Quezon with a bus, every time we passed longer bridges I can’t hold my eyes from looking at every rusty columns of it, imagining it as dried blood that was spilled before.

Today I can’t help but think, how such a shammed urban legend had ever deceived me to believe it. But now I know why my uncle did it. I remember from that day on I became a house person. Just two months shy of eight years old, I begun to read books just to spend time in house after school. My high grades in reading comprehensions became the result of my atypical reactions to that spooky “Sipay”. That eerie legend became a contemporary story, retold to generations by generations just to make kids stay at home. I suggest parents should be careful on using such way to kids. It may cause adverse perceptions to their young minds. Hours before writing this I was intrigued to search for it, and I was astonished that many blogs have been mentioned it spawning in all parts of the Philippines with greater write-ups in Cavite areas. That makes sense, considering we were descendants of Caviteños.

I challenge you to try doing that phony storytelling to the kid’s today .For sure, they will retort with goggled info printing the facts that it is untrue. Those days are over, you can’t trick kids today. Those yesteryear’s parents told us stories to make us sleep and stay at home. Ironically, today kids will come to you at the wee hours before bed time telling you bizarre stories that will make you awake all night.

-by Cornelio Cenizal

Illustration by Cornelio Cenizal