Even before it was finished in 1982, in time for the Manila International Film Festival, Imelda's film palace -- as others would call it -- suffered the first of its outrageous misfortunes. On November 17, 1981, during the pouring of cement, an upper floor collapsed, sending an untold number of workers hurtling into fresh cement or onto upright steel bars where they hung like barbeque (this was a witness's analogy, not mine) for hours until their bodies were retrieved.

The story all this time, or at least as I and countless others believed it, was that Imelda immediately ordered the bodies in the cement to be paved over so that work could resume and her looming deadline met. News about the tragedy was censored during the martial law era, so rumors and ghosts filled the vaccum.

Ghosts take over

Since then, as legend would have it, the Manila Film Center has become a haven for the supernatural, as spirits of the dead bodies encased in high-strength cement plead for recovery and a decent burial. So-called "spirit questors" have confirmed it, as well as various mediums (media?) and manghuhula.

In other words, that Parthenon-inspired white elephant in a dark, secluded spot next to Manila Bay is a fu****g scary place.

On top of that, it has become a gargantuan symbol of Imelda's edifice complex. The Manila Film Center did once house government agencies that promoted Philippine cinema, and is credited, at least by Marcos-era impresario Johnny Litton, for making possible Peque Gallaga's classic, Oro, Plata, Mata.

Later, after the Cory government repudiated everything Imeldific, the film palace lost its glamor when it became the government's central passport office. Then the 1990 earthquake struck. The building shook and the stairs and road around the structure cracked.

Sufficiently spooked, the passport people abandoned the building, which was visited afterwards only occasionally by people interested in the occult or film fanatics led by the CCP's Ed Cabagnot who once organized a colorum film screening there. In 2001, the Koreans started renting it for their version of the gay shows that draw the tourist multitudes in Thailand.


Giant Egyptian-inspired dog figurines now welcome Korean honeymooners to Filipino gay shows at the film center. In Egypt, dog gods from antiquity stand guard outside the tombs of the Pharoahs.
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All this time, the Manila Film Center has retained a reputation as a cursed, spooky remnant of Imeldific excess. Only the Koreans have had the guts to use it commercially.

The question that has hovered like Casper above all conversations about the place: How many are really buried in there?

That question drove our Halloween-night I-Witness documentary on what really happened on November 17, 1981. Fact-finding, not ghost hunting, was our mission.

I must say that we weren't that much more successful than the generation of ghost hunters who preceded us. But what we realized made us doubt what everyone has taken for granted all these years.

A half-baked conclusion

After numerous return trips to the film center's dark and eery catacombs, futile efforts to find a paper trail, and interviews with survivors and loved ones of dead construction workers, my half-baked conclusion: Not more than a dozen died (we heard figures as high as 169, which was based on an Inquirer account of a spirit questor expedition years ago), and NONE of them left behind in the Manila Film Center. Why are you surprised?

First of all, we couldn't find anyone who knew anyone in there, including relatives. If there really were dozens of skeletons still encased in cement in the film palace, we are almost sure we would have been able to trace loved ones, or they would have found us. The construction workers who survived the incident did not know anyone, nor did they know anyone who knew anyone missing in the building.

We know from years of working in media that the relatives of missing people are extremely persistent and vocal, driven as they are by a human desire for closure on their grief. I think this would have been the case even if they were bribed by Imelda, which is one theory for why they have been so quiet through all these years. I have my own theory: the missing don't exist.

One witness told us that workers cleared the bodies and the debris from the theater floor before resuming the construction, which was finished the same day that international stars like Jeremy Irons and George Hamilton waltzed in.

Anatomy of an Urban Legend

If the ghosts we hear about represent the souls of the dead unceremoniously buried under the theater floor, then they are probably ghosts in our minds. In other words, they are an Urban Legend that spread due to the confluence of the following: the horror of what happened in November 1981; news censorship during martial law which created a black hole where credible information should have been; hatred of the Marcoses, so many were prepared to believe the worst about an Imelda project; and the average Filipino's unquestioned belief in ghosts.

Unless someone can produce the facts to prove otherwise, or even just relatives, the case of the missing workers inside the Manila Film Center must be one of the country's biggest urban legends ever.

If there are any ghosts at all, they are the lies and illusions from the past which have yet to be exposed for what they are. Scarier than the ghosts in our minds are the real-life ghosts in our midst: a place of horrible tragedy that has been swept under the rug of censorship; an Imelda Marcos who still waltzes around town in her terno as if the crimes of martial law never happened; and the possibility that such horrors can happen again and no accounting takes place.

Our consolation is a new view of the Manila Film Center: it's not a giant tomb, but just the scene of yet another Marcos-era bloodbath. If all of those who have been so bent through the years on finding ghosts can summon the same will to locate all the facts, maybe we can finally see the truth.