Oct 31: Police have been known to catch drug users and criminals. However, in the Cebu City Police Office (CCPO) in Camp Sotero Cabahug on Gorordo Ave., it is not only the arrested persons that police have faced or “felt” in their camp. They believe there are “resident ghosts” in the different units. “May nagpu-push ng bell ko sa office, pag wala ako (There’s someone who rings my office call bell whenever I’m not around),” CCPO Director Joel Doria said.
PO1 Ana Grace Mira, one of the personnel, said she would often be the one to open the door to Doria’s office every time the bell rings. “When the city director is not around, all of us here would hear the bell ring,” Mira told SunStar Cebu. The city director rings the bell to signal to his personnel to get the documents inside his office.
However, the office was locked during one incident. PO1 Mira said they had to open it to check if rats were able to enter or to look for loose wiring that may have triggered the bell to ring. “It was working fine and was not broken,” said Mira.
PO1 Alexander Zapanta, who once slept inside the conference room, also experienced something he couldn’t explain. “I was sleeping on a folding bed in the conference room after a dawn presentation of a One Time, Big Time (an anti-crime drive).
A few moments later, someone was shaking it,” he said. There was no other person around when the incident happened, said Zapanta. The printer would also function by itself, with blank pages coming out even if no one was typing in the computer.
The city director’s office was once used as the administrative section of the CCPO where a policewoman died in 2006 after a policeman’s gun accidentally fired, and killed her in the process. A local radio reporter (who requested anonymity) was also recently hospitalized after she suffered a panic attack near the barracks of a unit at the CCPO.
“I was working on a horror story feature and was given a tour around their barracks. Even before, when I do some interviews, I sensed that something was wrong in the place,” she told SunStar Cebu. True enough, she saw a child crouched on top of a barrel inside the supply room.
“He was crying and looked like he was recently beaten up. Then another person peeked from above,” she said.
A few hours later, she had trouble breathing and froze up. The location of the barracks was once used as a morgue. On the second floor of the CCPO’s administrative building, a senior police official also fell victim to one of the unseen residents.
“It was around 2 a.m., and I was getting documents for my seminar overseas.
There was no one around when I felt a force hitting my head,” she said.
Senior police officers who had been assigned in the camp for a long time would often advice the new ones to offer a prayer for the lost souls at the camp.
Sunstar.com.ph