Once a Home
by Bianca Labraque
Since time immemorial, Thomasians had widely known a particular old and cramped place along the well-lit street of Asturias — there stands an almost hundred year old house. It’s a good place for hanging out with friends, filled with exploding dim colored lights and loud music. But have you ever wondered why a simple house stopped becoming a place to call home, and instead became a place stuffed with noise and lots of stingy alcoholic beverages?
Perhaps being one of the most overlooked stories, the story behind the place we call, “Tapsi,” is darker as we had expected. The house was built in the early 1900s where the clash of Spanish and American Colonization happened. It was owned by a mestizo who had his wife killed inside the very place they call home during the Second World War. Since then, the house has been isolated and never been visited by anyone, but only the owner stayed home. He lived there until the last of his breath, and it was said that before he sold it to a rich family during the 1980s, he warned them of “Echoes and bloodshed,” but the new owners didn’t listen. Every night the new family that started to reside in there were haunted by blood curdling cries and sudden gunshots that can be heard randomly at night. When they look around the house, they find nothing. There’s no person crying, neither is there someone with a gun.
Ultimately terrified by the now haunted house, the new owners kindled an idea. To turn it into a restaurant-bar kind of place. And so they began their business of starting up a resto-bar inside the house. As time passes by, more customers came in and it became one of the busiest places around UST during nighttime. Since then, the cries and gunshots weren’t heard again…or maybe we just don’t hear it, because the banging of the loud music from the speakers and the voices of the constant chit-chatting students conceals the horrifying history of Tapsi.
