July 8, 2025 • 37 mins
In this episode, a woman comes back from the dead to solve her own murder, something beyond the realm of what most people consider possible. And yet, the story of Teresita Basa was credible enough to appear in a U.S. court of law, come before a judge and jury, and send a man to jail for murder.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Zoe Louisa Lewis
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Associate Producer is Leo Culp
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
Theme Music by Tyler Cash
Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
Special thanks to:
Carter, Stephen L.. Invisible. Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Pre-order Mary Kay's forthcoming true crime book 'Madame Queen: The The Life and Crimes of Harlem’s Underground Racketeer, Stephanie St. Clair' here
SOURCES
General
https://books.google.ca/books?id=CM4DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=allan%2Bshowery%2Bjob%2Bedgewater&source=bl&ots=dS98q23rpz&sig=ACfU3U3EjQ7VZNBaUSThOMZEh_O0gVvLGQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwisuLnG-b72AhUGa80KHd84DwYQ6AF6BAg0EAM#v=onepage&q=allan%20showery%20job%20edgewater&f=false
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/09/17/voice-from-the-grave-evokes-a-murder-trial/13b6d805-2413-4015-b70a-b9b28ab5d40d/
https://jimharold.com/the-strange-and-sad-case-of-teresita-basa-by-em-hilker/
Chuas Obituary
https://legacy.suntimes.com/us/obituaries/chicagosuntimes/name/jose-chua-obituary?id=30203
Possession in the Philippines
https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/central-luzon-state-university/psychological-assessment/understanding-spirit-possession-in-the-philippines/67778613
https://www.aswangproject.com/spirit-possession-sapi-in-the-philippines/#google_vignette
https://pssc.org.ph/wp-content/pssc-archives/Philippine%20Journal%20of%20Psychology/2004/Num%202/05_Dissociative%20Symptoms%20in%20Filipino%20College%20Students.pdf
https://www.iheart.com/content/2023-10-17-classes-cancelled-at-high-school-in-philippines-following-mass-possession/
https://www.newsflare.com/video/520014/seven-students-exorcised-after-being-possessed-by-evil-spirits-in-the-philippines
Edgewater Hospital
https://www.edgewaterhistory.org/ehs/local/rise-and-fall-of-edgewater-hospital
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Detective Joseph Stahula was self
(00:42):
conscious and uncomfortable as he approached the one story brick
home in a quiet cul de sac in suburban Skokie, Illinois.
He was investigating the murder of respiratory therapist Teresita Basa.
Joseph was tired of spinning his wheels on the case.
There was so little to go on, and he was
(01:04):
close to giving up. A tip just came in from
a woman receiving threatening phone calls from one of Tarasda's coworkers.
Joseph was here to follow up. The detective knocked on
the door, a dark haired man in surgical scrubs greeted him.
(01:27):
This was doctor Jose Chiua, the woman's husband. Jose led
Joseph into a gold carpeted sitting room and motioned for
him to sit in one of the gold lure chairs
beside a gold draped window. It was nineteen seventy seven,
people still decorated in color. Then jose called his wife, Remy,
(01:49):
into the room and she sat beside Joseph. Remy explained
she once worked at the same hospital as Tacita, but
they didn't have the same shifts and they never really
knew each other. The one connection they did have was
an orderly named Alan. His shifts overlapped with both of theirs.
(02:10):
Alan was a friend of Terasita's, and Remy and her
husband believed he was the one behind the phone call.
As Remy explained the situation, Joseph noticed jose seemed anxious,
like there was something else on his mind. Finally, Joseph
turned and asked if there was anything he needed to
get out. Jose looked even more uneasy. We don't really
(02:35):
want to get involved. Didn't you already speak with the
Evanston police, Joseph shook his head. They told us about
the phone calls and that you knew certain other information,
but they were reluctant to give any details. Jose looked
over at his wife. He was silent for a long time.
Then he took a deep breath, looked into Joseph's eyes,
(02:57):
and asked, Detective, do you believe in the occult? Welcome
(03:17):
to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary
Kay McBrayer. Today's episode, we're calling Taracita Basa stretching the
boundaries of belief. There are plenty of true crime stories
out there that are hard to believe, but this is
one that's more than just far fetched. It's about a
(03:39):
woman coming back from the dead to solve her own murder,
something beyond the realm of what most people consider possible.
And yet the story of Taracita Bassa was credible enough
to appear in a US court of law, come before
a judge and jury and send demand jail for murder.
(04:02):
More after the break. I don't want to say that
I don't believe in the supernatural. I just don't want
(04:23):
to believe in it. I do not have the second sight,
and I do not want it. Here's a list of
other things I don't want. I don't want to hear
your dream about me. I don't want to know about
your premonition. I don't want to hear that you see
a little boy's spirit in my house, no matter how
benevolent it seems to be. I don't want you to
read my cards, or my palm or my tea leaves.
(04:47):
I don't want any of that. Keep all that shit
to yourself. I'm not saying it's not real, and I'm
not calling you a fraud, but I am a cynic
and I don't want to hear it because I don't
want to activate my frequency illusion. That said, I think
possession is an outlier. Okay, First, let me acknowledge that
(05:07):
I know. It is an established fact that well intentioned
exorcisms have resulted in the tortuous murders of many people
with mental and physical disorders, and obviously people in power
have abused the idea of its existence. And yet this one,
something about this one I can't shake off the way
(05:29):
I shake off the others. Maybe the idea of another
sentient thing entering my body without my permission and without
my knowledge is just too scary. It's just too real
to completely abandon. But even with my beliefs, I couldn't
accept an instance of possession as fact, especially not in
a court of law. But not everyone thinks like me,
(05:53):
and in some places the culture does widely accept possession
as fact. It's something to keep in the back of
our minds, at least as we talk about this case.
The Edgewater Hospital was an eight story yellow brick building
(06:17):
just a few blocks down from the lakefront in Uptown Chicago.
Originally constructed in nineteen twenty nine, it once functioned as
a low key rehab facility, and it was meant to
feel more like a luxury hotel than a hospital. It
was the kind of place where Frank Sinatra went to
dry out. But as the White Flight of the nineteen
fifties led to the economic decline of the seventies, the
(06:40):
hospital lost its sheen of luxury. Edgewater sank into bankruptcy,
and the buildings fell into disrepair. This tragedy involves three
people who worked at Edgewater during the mid nineteen seventies,
during its less glamorous period. The first of those three
(07:06):
employees is Taracita Basa, a generous extrovert who loved to read,
play the piano, and throw parties. Tarasita's childhood on the
island of Negros in the Philippines was idyllic. She spent
it chewing sugarcane with the neighborhood children on the veranda,
wandering through her mother's orchid gardens, and practicing piano on
the family's mahogany steinway. In nineteen forty seven, when she
(07:30):
was eighteen, Terasita left home to study music in Manila.
There she lived with Senator Jose Romero and his family,
who were old friends of her parents. Jose Romero became
the Philippine ambassador to England just as Tarasita was graduating
from college. She went with his family to London and
(07:50):
obtained a degree in piano forte at the Royal College
of Music. On one occasion, Teraesita even met the Queen
of England. But the meeting that ultimately changed her life
forever was with a Russian composer named Alexander Shrepnan. Teracita
(08:17):
met Alexander after attending one of his concerts in Paris.
She was instantly charmed by the famed and talented composer.
He told her she was talented and possessed the potential
to become a truly great musician if she continued her studies.
Alexander and his wife both taught at DePaul University in Chicago,
(08:39):
and he suggested the city might do well for her studies,
so she moved to nearby Bloomington and enrolled at Indiana University. There,
Terasita studied music and piano. She went on to graduate school,
where she worked in an assistant ship teaching the piano.
But when she learned the Romeros were moving to Washington, DC,
(09:00):
Terasita left Bloomington and went to live with them. It
was in d C in nineteen sixty five that Taracida
met the only man she would ever really love. Tarasita
didn't like talking about the man she almost married, so
details of their whirlwind romance are hazy. We don't even
(09:23):
know his real name, but the story goes something like this.
Terasita met Joe at a party. He was a tall,
handsome lobbyist from Chicago who swept her off her feet
shortly after they started dating. Tarasda's immigration status put an
ocean between them. To maintain her student visa, she had
to return to the Philippines. She was only allowed to
(09:46):
come back to the States after two years, so Joe
followed her to the Philippines. Then, just a week before
Joe was going to leave the island, the other shoe dropped.
Tale as old as time. Terasida's father was tipped off
by an old friend Joe was wandering around the red
light district. The friend followed Joe to a brothel and
(10:09):
walked in on him with a seventeen year old sex worker.
Teresita was devastated and humiliated, and then her father's health declined.
He passed away from a respiratory illness in the early seventies.
(10:35):
Terasita packed up her things, bid goodbye to her mother,
and boarded a plane back to Chicago. No longer willing
to accept financial assistance from her widowed mother, Teresita resolved
to support herself in returning to her music studies. Terasita
enrolled as a respiratory student at a YMCA Community College
and supported herself as a typist until she graduated in
(10:58):
June of nineteen seventy four. Just a month later, she
got a job as an inhalationian therapist at Edgewater Hospital.
Teraseda returned to her nearly completed master's degree, and, in
(11:18):
the phrase all post grad students know, she finished all
but her thesis on the works of Alexander Shrepman. She
bought a piano and moved into a larger apartment where
she'd be able to host gatherings and play for her
new friends. Terasita met folks from the Filipino community and
from her church. She formed a band called the Mahogany
(11:40):
five plus one five Filipino musicians and a Polish drummer.
By the winter of nineteen seventy seven, Teraesina was back
to her real self, the glowing hostess, laughing and leading
the party. She was happy and full of life, and
on February twenty first first, nineteen seventy seven, that life
(12:03):
came to an end. It was eight thirty pm on
a chilly night in February of nineteen seventy seven. An
(12:25):
acrid stench of burning filled Terrecita's apartment building. Within minutes,
fire trucks pulled up. They ran toward the smoke gathering
in front of Apartment fifteen B. The janitor unlocked the door,
and the firemen used a pike to break the glass
doors leading out to the balcony. The air and the
apartment began to clear. The fire started in the bedroom,
(12:48):
where a smoking mattress now sat in the middle of
the floor. Something underneath the mattress continued to smolder, so
the fireman pulled away the mattress. They found a pile
of bedding and dirty clothes beneath. Then, as the men
sorted through the burnt fabric, their flashlight beams landed on
(13:09):
something which made everyone freeze. It was a woman's leg.
Tarasita Bossa was dead. She was lying under the pile
of clothes, naked, with a knife sticking out of her chest.
When the detectives arrived, there were a few details which
(13:31):
stood out to them immediately. The door was locked and
there were two beer cans in the living room. In
the kitchen, a cutting board rested on the counter with
a half chopped tomato and no knife. There was also
a note in her diary reading get tickets for as
But what stood out most of all was the destruction
(13:53):
of the apartment. Tarasita's carefully organized books were thrown from
the shelves, her below OVID record collections spread across the floor,
and her jewelry tossed over the top of the dresser.
Tarasida's door was locked from the inside, so the killer
must have been someone she knew and trusted. The position
of Tarasida's body initially suggested the crime may have been
(14:16):
sexually motivated, but the autopsy revealed Terasita was never assaulted.
It seemed the killer only undressed Terasita in the hopes
of misleading the detectives. The last thing the killer did
was to set the fire, probably hoping to get rid
of the evidence. It's not exactly the plan of a genius,
(14:38):
but the murderer was just smart enough, or maybe just
lucky enough, not to leave any clues behind. With no
hard evidence to go on, the lead detectives on the case,
Joseph and his partner Lee Epplin, decided to hit the pavement.
As they interviewed Tarasida's friends and acquaintances, they pieced together
her last day. Terasita went to work as usual. She
(15:10):
finished her shift and left the hospital around three pm.
Around sevent ten, she took a call from doctor John Abela,
another member of her band. They chatted about ticket sales
for the upcoming concert, but in the middle of the
phone call, Teracita paused to answer and knock at the door.
She told John she would call him back later. A
(15:32):
guest just arrived, someone she might be able to sell
a ticket to. Not long after that, she received another
phone call, this time from a friend at the hospital.
She heard a man's voice in the background and asked
Terasita if she was interrupting something. Terasita laughed and said
it was nothing like that and she would tell her
about it at lunch. The next day, they hung up,
(15:55):
and forty minutes later, her neighbor smelled smoke. By the
end of March, the detectives knew all the details of
this story from Tarasita's friends and family members, but that
was when things started to stall. Lee and Joseph followed
(16:19):
one dead end lead after another. Everyone she regularly interacted with,
from her thesis adviser, her friends, and even a legal
assistant who helped her with her immigration paperwork, they all
had alibis. Months passed and still there was no progress
on the case. Then in August, a phone call came
(16:40):
into the Evanston Police Department. It was from Remichua, another
Filipino woman who worked at the same hospital as Tarasita
and whom you might remember from the top of the episode.
She claimed to have received a number of threatening phone
calls from one of the orderlies at the hospital where
she and Tarasita worked, a man named Alioi. Actually, the
(17:02):
call to the Evanston Police Department was the second one
that Remy made. The first call she made was to
the Filipino consul general. In that call, Remy had more
to say. She also claimed that she knew it was
Alan SHOWI who killed Teresita. She said she knew because
Teresita entered her body and said it herself. The Chuas
(17:33):
did not believe in superstitions. They were medical professionals who
moved to the United States from the Philippine island of
Lucan three years earlier. Jose Chua was a doctor back
in the Philippines and his wife, Remy, was a pharmacist.
They were both in the process of becoming licensed to
practice medicine in the United States. They were a working
(17:55):
couple with four children, and they didn't have time for
ghost stories, and yet in the summer of nineteen seventy seven,
they were the center of a baffling supernatural occurrence. On
(18:18):
July eleventh, co workers said they saw Remy run terrified
out of the locker room of the Edgewater Hospital. When
asked about the incident, Remy brushed it off, but later
she told a different story. Remy claimed she was sitting
in the locker room when Teracita Bossa appeared. She was silent,
(18:41):
She didn't move, and she didn't explain herself. She just
stood there until Remy fled the room. Remy's strange behavior
continued at the hospital she started sitting at Tarasita's lunch
table and singing softly to herself, just as Tarasita once did.
Remy did not know Terasita, but suddenly she was acting
(19:03):
a lot like her. She would speak with Tarasita's distinctive
regional accent and make conversation about things Tasita loved, like
parties orchids in classical piano. Understandably, her co workers, many
of whom did know the murdered woman, did not find
this amusing. Several employees complained to Remy's supervisor, but when confronted,
(19:27):
Remy claimed she didn't know what they were talking about.
Remy's odd behavior continued until an afternoon in mid July,
when she showed up on her day off and verbally
accosted her supervisor seemingly unprovoked. She yelled about working conditions
at the hospital and complained about her coworkers. Her supervisor
(19:48):
tried to calm her down, but when she wouldn't stop yelling,
he fired her on the spot. To those around her,
it seemed like Remy was having some kind of breakdown.
That evening things we worsened. Remy and her husband were
(20:14):
sitting together in the living room when she abruptly stood
up and walked down the hall towards the bedroom. Jose
followed after her and found her lying on their beds,
staring at the ceiling. When he asked if she was
all right, she replied, Mama, Mama, are you there, Mama.
Jose froze. The voice coming from his wife's lips didn't
(20:37):
sound like her own. Something was obviously very wrong. He
asked her if she knew her name. Remy replied in Tagalag,
I am tacita Basa. Tagalag is one of the official
languages of the Philippines, but it was not the one
that Jose and Remy used to speak to each other.
(20:57):
They were both from Northern Lucan and spoke to each
other in their regional mother tongue. Not only that, but
Remy was speaking with an odd Spanish accent that he
never heard her use before. She repeated I am Tarasi
to Basa. Jose was terrified. She said she wanted his help,
she needed him to stop her killer. Jose insisted he
(21:20):
didn't understand, but Remy insisted right back that she needed
him to go to the police with the name of
her killer. But before she could give a name. Remy
blinked and her expression changed. She looked around and asked,
what happened? How did I get in the bedroom? Remy
didn't remember anything, and when her husband tried to tell
her about her odd behavior, she insisted it must have
(21:42):
been some kind of sleepwalking. Jose asked if she was
feeling all right, and Remy claimed she was fine, just
really thirsty. For the rest of the evening, Remy looked
fine until around eleven, the phone rang. Jose picked it up,
and a man's voice asked for Remy Chuah. Jose handed
the phone to his wife. She listened for a moment
(22:05):
and then hung up. Jose asked her who it was,
and she told him she didn't know, but he threatened her.
He told her she was going to be next. Okay,
if this was fiction, which it's not. It's a true story.
(22:25):
But if it was fiction, this is where I would
be punching holes in the conceit you mean, On the
same night Tarasina possesses Remy, Tarasina's killer calls her and
threatens your next Why would the killer just happen to
call Remy Chua a random coworker of his first victim,
Mere hours after, she was possessed by the very ghost
(22:46):
of the woman he killed. Unless the killer was now
a ghost too, I might be a skeptic, but when
a conceit as well established and consistent, I will go
with it. That's of course, if the story was fiction,
which it's not. It's real, and Jose later testified to
this call under oath. Jose hoped it was over after
(23:08):
this incident, maybe it was a bad and tasteless prank.
But then two days later it happened again. This time
it was in the middle of a phone call. The
chewas were trying to sell their house, and Remy was
talking to their real estate agent. Suddenly, she handed the
phone to her husband and said, Terosita wants to come back.
(23:30):
It happened just as before, only this time Terasita seemed
more desperate. She said, you have to go to the police.
Jose told her he couldn't, he didn't have any proof.
He was going to look crazy. Remy took his hand
and said if he needed proof, she would give it
to him. The third and final possession happened the following day.
(23:52):
Jose came home from work to find his wife sobbing
on their bed. She was crying for her mama back,
but this time she finally told him the name of
the killer. It was Alan Showy, and Teraraesita knew how
the Chewas could prove it. Joseph listened to the Chewas
(24:26):
story in a state of disbelief. It sounded crazy, and
yet there was something about jose He just seemed so earnest.
Then there was the jewelry. Chewas claimed. The spirit told
them about two pieces of jewelry Alan stole from Tarasita's apartment.
There was a jade pendant and a pearl cocktail ring
from Paris. Teresita also told them her cousin ron Selma
(24:49):
could identify the pieces if he saw them. As Joseph
drove back from the Chua's, he couldn't help thinking that
he was in an impossible situation. Alan Showi was a
good suspect, and even though he was a known friend
of Terasita's, the police had never really interviewed him. Alan
(25:18):
was a handsome black man in his early thirties. After
graduating from high school, he enrolled at NYU, but he
dropped out after about a year. From there, he bounced
around the United States and ultimately landed in Chicago. That
was when he moved in with a German immigrant named
Yanka Kalmuk and eventually got a job as an orderly
at Edgewater Hospital. Alan was known around the hospital as
(25:42):
a jack of all trades and he would often help
Terasda with repairs and odd jobs. Tarasita trusted it Alan.
He'd been to her apartment before and he was a
person she would have let in without a second thought.
But the minute Joseph mentioned where his tip came from,
he was going to be the laughingstock of the entire
police force. When Joseph returned to the station, he pulled
(26:15):
Tarasita's file. The first thing he saw was the note
from Tarasita diary get tickets for as as could be
Alan SHOWI. It took six days to track down Alan,
but the two detectives eventually found him in a tidy
little apartment where he lived with his pregnant common law wife, Yanka. Shawi.
(26:37):
Was friendly and pleasant when he greeted them at the door,
and as he welcomed the detectives into his apartment, Joseph
couldn't help noticing that Yanka was sitting cross legged in
the dining room next to a stack of books about
ghosts and the occult. Alan seemed eager to help. Once
Joseph explained he was investigating the murder of tarased to Bassa,
(27:00):
he agreed to come down to the station and answer
a few questions. At the station, the detectives told Alan
they found his fingerprints all over Taraseda's apartment. They hadn't
actually found his fingerprints, and it seems to me, at
best morally ambiguous to lie that they did, but it
did get Alan to admit that he was in Taraseda's
(27:20):
home on the night she died. He said Tarasita was
complaining about her broken TV set, and Alan showy offered
to help fix it. He arrived around six point thirty,
and Taracita brought him a can of beer to drink
while he worked. That same can would later be found
in the wreckage of her trashed apartment. When Alan realized
(27:42):
he didn't have the right parts for the TV, he
left and spent the rest of the night at home
with Yanka. Alan said Yanka could vouch for him. They
left Alan in the interrogation room and drove back to
his apartment to speak with Yanka. While they were doing that,
another cop was getting in touch with tarasida friends and family,
(28:03):
asking if anyone would be willing to come in and
look at some jewelry. Yanka agreed to come down to
the station and even bring along her jewelry box, though
she didn't understand why she needed to. Charasida's friend, Richard Passatti,
was waiting at the station, and as soon as he
saw Yanka, he went white. He pulled Joseph aside and whispered,
(28:27):
that woman is wearing Tarasedas ring. It was the pearl
cocktail ring Tarasida's mother bought in Paris. When Richard looked
through the rest of Yanka's jewelry, he found a jade
pendant of Tarasitas as well. Yanka said Alan gave her
the items as belated Christmas gifts. The detectives claimed that
(28:48):
when they confronted Alan with these facts, he admitted that
he was behind on his bills and was falling further
into debt. He knew Taraesita must have money, she always
tipped him so generally when he did work for her.
He heard she was from a wealthy family in the
Philippines and that she once met the Queen of England,
(29:08):
so he returned to her apartment after leaving to look
for the right parts for the TV. He put her
in a chokehold until she passed out. Then he dragged
her to the bedroom and dressed her, stabbed her in
the chest, and set her body on fire. When he
searched her apartment, he found only thirty dollars. By the
end of the night, Alan signed a confession, he was
(29:31):
charged with homicide, and the case was declared closed. At
least that's one version of the story. At the trial,
(29:51):
Alan claimed after police found Tera Sita's jewelry in Alan's possession,
that they threatened to arrest Yanka as an accessory to murder.
Yanka was eight months pregnant, meaning if she was arrested,
she might very well be forced to give birth in prison.
The detectives knew that, and they used it to coerce
(30:12):
Alan into a confession. And there was more. There was
the fact Alan's fingerprints did not match the ones found
on the beer cans at Tarasida's apartment. There were the
five strands of hair found on Tarasieda's body at the
morgue which definitely did not belong to Alan Showi, and
perhaps most concerning of all, an attorney for the defense
(30:35):
discovered Remi Chua was known to sell jewelry at Edgewater Hospital.
When Yanka testified, she said that Alan told her he
bought the jewelry at the hospital, and a different picture
started coming together. After a grueling thirteen hours of deliberation,
the jurors could not come to a conclusion they were
(30:59):
actually divine along racial lines. The four black jurors believed
it was possible that Chicago police might use unethical means
to force an innocent black man into signing a confession
that seems so obvious to me. I'm tempted to write
off the reservation of the rest of the jurors as well,
(31:20):
because I guess they believed in ghosts more than racism.
But bear with me. The trial ended in a hung jury,
but before another trial could begin, Alan Showy ignored his
attorney's advice and changed his plea to guilty. Some people
might attribute this change to the influence of Tarasee to spirit.
(31:41):
Others might consider that if Alan was tried again and convicted,
he would face serious charges. Changing his plead to guilty
could have meant a more lenient sentence. In the end,
Alan did get some clemency. He was given the minimum
sentence for murder fourteen years, was out on parole after
(32:01):
four and a half. So what can we take from this?
Did Remicua stumble into the wrong room at the wrong
time and somehow become the unwitting host for the spirit
of Terracita? Did she have some knowledge of the crime
but worried that coming forward might implicate her? And if
that was the case, how could a possession help or
(32:23):
what place does it have in a crime at all?
We're going to understand that it might be good to
understand the way people see possession in the Philippines. In
October of twenty twenty three, a high school in the
small Philippine community of Lawis was closed following an incident
(32:47):
where fourteen students claimed to be possessed by sinister spirits.
It was called a mass possession, and it was not
the only one of its kind. Just a month earlier,
seven students were from their high school on the neighboring
island of Cebu after the apparent sudden onset of spiritual possession.
(33:08):
In twenty nineteen, a school on the island of Negros,
the same island where Tarasita grew up was closed after
twenty students collapsed in class due to similarly other worldly forces.
Spiritual possession is nothing new in the Philippines. The Filipino
word for it is sapi. It translates to joining. The
(33:29):
concept came from what scholars call folk Catholicism, that is,
the sect of Catholicism, which evolved when indigenous spiritual practices
fused with the religion imposed by Spanish colonists. Cases of
sapi can vary wildly, but many of them follow a
similar pattern. The possessed person begins acting strangely, and there
(33:53):
might be changes to their voice or posture. They will
usually admit they are possessed and speak as the possessing entity.
When the incident is over, the person often has no
memory of it. In fact, they may not even know
anything happened at all, which is a mercy. Can you
imagine being possessed? I mean no, I don't want to
(34:13):
imagine it. But imagine if you were possessed and you
knew it. Okay, But back to the anthropology. To Western doctors,
this phenomenon of possession can look a lot like a
dissociative episode caused by trauma, but in a twenty nineteen article,
professors Christina Jaime Montiel and Angelica Vidalo Eeing argue this
(34:38):
view of possession is limiting as long as the possessed
person believes they are occupied by a spirit in that
belief will have a real impact on what happens when
they are treated. They're saying, essentially, if Remy believed her
possession was real, and she came from a culture which
backed up that belief, then it was real. Even if
(35:03):
it came from a place of trauma and dissociation, like say,
if she witnessed or was a part of something terrible
like a murder. The question is did Remy believe she
was possessed? Could she have believed it if she was
unaware that it was happening, and did the possession bring
(35:23):
honest justice? Ghost stories never wrap up neatly. It's one
reason why I don't like them, in addition to the
many that I listed earlier. At the very least, I
will be unsettled, because, like with this ghost story, in
its unclear conclusion, I will leave it feeling uneasy and unsatisfied.
(35:59):
Thank you to John O'Brien and Edward Bauman for their
book Teresita the voice from the grave. I do not
have the fortitude to dive this deep into the occult.
So many thanks to Zoe Luisa Lewis for writing this episode.
We also used a number of articles in researching. All
of these sources are linked in our show notes. If
(36:20):
you want to learn more, join me next week on
the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for a story
about a sweet looking Chinese grandmother who earned her moniker
the Mother of All Snakeheads, by rising up the ranks
of the Fujianese gang world and becoming one of the
most prolific human traffickers of all time. The Greatest True
(36:54):
Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
Your host is me Mary Kay MC and this episode
was written by Zoe Luisa Lewis. Our show is produced
by Leo Culp and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Our theme
music is by Tyler Cash. Executive produced by Scott Waxman.
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Detective Joseph Stahula was self
(00:42):
conscious and uncomfortable as he approached the one story brick
home in a quiet cul de sac in suburban Skokie, Illinois.
He was investigating the murder of respiratory therapist Teresita Basa.
Joseph was tired of spinning his wheels on the case.
There was so little to go on, and he was
(01:04):
close to giving up. A tip just came in from
a woman receiving threatening phone calls from one of Tarasda's coworkers.
Joseph was here to follow up. The detective knocked on
the door, a dark haired man in surgical scrubs greeted him.
(01:27):
This was doctor Jose Chiua, the woman's husband. Jose led
Joseph into a gold carpeted sitting room and motioned for
him to sit in one of the gold lure chairs
beside a gold draped window. It was nineteen seventy seven,
people still decorated in color. Then jose called his wife, Remy,
(01:49):
into the room and she sat beside Joseph. Remy explained
she once worked at the same hospital as Tacita, but
they didn't have the same shifts and they never really
knew each other. The one connection they did have was
an orderly named Alan. His shifts overlapped with both of theirs.
(02:10):
Alan was a friend of Terasita's, and Remy and her
husband believed he was the one behind the phone call.
As Remy explained the situation, Joseph noticed jose seemed anxious,
like there was something else on his mind. Finally, Joseph
turned and asked if there was anything he needed to
get out. Jose looked even more uneasy. We don't really
(02:35):
want to get involved. Didn't you already speak with the
Evanston police, Joseph shook his head. They told us about
the phone calls and that you knew certain other information,
but they were reluctant to give any details. Jose looked
over at his wife. He was silent for a long time.
Then he took a deep breath, looked into Joseph's eyes,
(02:57):
and asked, Detective, do you believe in the occult? Welcome
(03:17):
to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary
Kay McBrayer. Today's episode, we're calling Taracita Basa stretching the
boundaries of belief. There are plenty of true crime stories
out there that are hard to believe, but this is
one that's more than just far fetched. It's about a
(03:39):
woman coming back from the dead to solve her own murder,
something beyond the realm of what most people consider possible.
And yet the story of Taracita Bassa was credible enough
to appear in a US court of law, come before
a judge and jury and send demand jail for murder.
(04:02):
More after the break. I don't want to say that
I don't believe in the supernatural. I just don't want
(04:23):
to believe in it. I do not have the second sight,
and I do not want it. Here's a list of
other things I don't want. I don't want to hear
your dream about me. I don't want to know about
your premonition. I don't want to hear that you see
a little boy's spirit in my house, no matter how
benevolent it seems to be. I don't want you to
read my cards, or my palm or my tea leaves.
(04:47):
I don't want any of that. Keep all that shit
to yourself. I'm not saying it's not real, and I'm
not calling you a fraud, but I am a cynic
and I don't want to hear it because I don't
want to activate my frequency illusion. That said, I think
possession is an outlier. Okay, First, let me acknowledge that
(05:07):
I know. It is an established fact that well intentioned
exorcisms have resulted in the tortuous murders of many people
with mental and physical disorders, and obviously people in power
have abused the idea of its existence. And yet this one,
something about this one I can't shake off the way
(05:29):
I shake off the others. Maybe the idea of another
sentient thing entering my body without my permission and without
my knowledge is just too scary. It's just too real
to completely abandon. But even with my beliefs, I couldn't
accept an instance of possession as fact, especially not in
a court of law. But not everyone thinks like me,
(05:53):
and in some places the culture does widely accept possession
as fact. It's something to keep in the back of
our minds, at least as we talk about this case.
The Edgewater Hospital was an eight story yellow brick building
(06:17):
just a few blocks down from the lakefront in Uptown Chicago.
Originally constructed in nineteen twenty nine, it once functioned as
a low key rehab facility, and it was meant to
feel more like a luxury hotel than a hospital. It
was the kind of place where Frank Sinatra went to
dry out. But as the White Flight of the nineteen
fifties led to the economic decline of the seventies, the
(06:40):
hospital lost its sheen of luxury. Edgewater sank into bankruptcy,
and the buildings fell into disrepair. This tragedy involves three
people who worked at Edgewater during the mid nineteen seventies,
during its less glamorous period. The first of those three
(07:06):
employees is Taracita Basa, a generous extrovert who loved to read,
play the piano, and throw parties. Tarasita's childhood on the
island of Negros in the Philippines was idyllic. She spent
it chewing sugarcane with the neighborhood children on the veranda,
wandering through her mother's orchid gardens, and practicing piano on
the family's mahogany steinway. In nineteen forty seven, when she
(07:30):
was eighteen, Terasita left home to study music in Manila.
There she lived with Senator Jose Romero and his family,
who were old friends of her parents. Jose Romero became
the Philippine ambassador to England just as Tarasita was graduating
from college. She went with his family to London and
(07:50):
obtained a degree in piano forte at the Royal College
of Music. On one occasion, Teraesita even met the Queen
of England. But the meeting that ultimately changed her life
forever was with a Russian composer named Alexander Shrepnan. Teracita
(08:17):
met Alexander after attending one of his concerts in Paris.
She was instantly charmed by the famed and talented composer.
He told her she was talented and possessed the potential
to become a truly great musician if she continued her studies.
Alexander and his wife both taught at DePaul University in Chicago,
(08:39):
and he suggested the city might do well for her studies,
so she moved to nearby Bloomington and enrolled at Indiana University. There,
Terasita studied music and piano. She went on to graduate school,
where she worked in an assistant ship teaching the piano.
But when she learned the Romeros were moving to Washington, DC,
(09:00):
Terasita left Bloomington and went to live with them. It
was in d C in nineteen sixty five that Taracida
met the only man she would ever really love. Tarasita
didn't like talking about the man she almost married, so
details of their whirlwind romance are hazy. We don't even
(09:23):
know his real name, but the story goes something like this.
Terasita met Joe at a party. He was a tall,
handsome lobbyist from Chicago who swept her off her feet
shortly after they started dating. Tarasda's immigration status put an
ocean between them. To maintain her student visa, she had
to return to the Philippines. She was only allowed to
(09:46):
come back to the States after two years, so Joe
followed her to the Philippines. Then, just a week before
Joe was going to leave the island, the other shoe dropped.
Tale as old as time. Terasida's father was tipped off
by an old friend Joe was wandering around the red
light district. The friend followed Joe to a brothel and
(10:09):
walked in on him with a seventeen year old sex worker.
Teresita was devastated and humiliated, and then her father's health declined.
He passed away from a respiratory illness in the early seventies.
(10:35):
Terasita packed up her things, bid goodbye to her mother,
and boarded a plane back to Chicago. No longer willing
to accept financial assistance from her widowed mother, Teresita resolved
to support herself in returning to her music studies. Terasita
enrolled as a respiratory student at a YMCA Community College
and supported herself as a typist until she graduated in
(10:58):
June of nineteen seventy four. Just a month later, she
got a job as an inhalationian therapist at Edgewater Hospital.
Teraseda returned to her nearly completed master's degree, and, in
(11:18):
the phrase all post grad students know, she finished all
but her thesis on the works of Alexander Shrepman. She
bought a piano and moved into a larger apartment where
she'd be able to host gatherings and play for her
new friends. Terasita met folks from the Filipino community and
from her church. She formed a band called the Mahogany
(11:40):
five plus one five Filipino musicians and a Polish drummer.
By the winter of nineteen seventy seven, Teraesina was back
to her real self, the glowing hostess, laughing and leading
the party. She was happy and full of life, and
on February twenty first first, nineteen seventy seven, that life
(12:03):
came to an end. It was eight thirty pm on
a chilly night in February of nineteen seventy seven. An
(12:25):
acrid stench of burning filled Terrecita's apartment building. Within minutes,
fire trucks pulled up. They ran toward the smoke gathering
in front of Apartment fifteen B. The janitor unlocked the door,
and the firemen used a pike to break the glass
doors leading out to the balcony. The air and the
apartment began to clear. The fire started in the bedroom,
(12:48):
where a smoking mattress now sat in the middle of
the floor. Something underneath the mattress continued to smolder, so
the fireman pulled away the mattress. They found a pile
of bedding and dirty clothes beneath. Then, as the men
sorted through the burnt fabric, their flashlight beams landed on
(13:09):
something which made everyone freeze. It was a woman's leg.
Tarasita Bossa was dead. She was lying under the pile
of clothes, naked, with a knife sticking out of her chest.
When the detectives arrived, there were a few details which
(13:31):
stood out to them immediately. The door was locked and
there were two beer cans in the living room. In
the kitchen, a cutting board rested on the counter with
a half chopped tomato and no knife. There was also
a note in her diary reading get tickets for as
But what stood out most of all was the destruction
(13:53):
of the apartment. Tarasita's carefully organized books were thrown from
the shelves, her below OVID record collections spread across the floor,
and her jewelry tossed over the top of the dresser.
Tarasida's door was locked from the inside, so the killer
must have been someone she knew and trusted. The position
of Tarasida's body initially suggested the crime may have been
(14:16):
sexually motivated, but the autopsy revealed Terasita was never assaulted.
It seemed the killer only undressed Terasita in the hopes
of misleading the detectives. The last thing the killer did
was to set the fire, probably hoping to get rid
of the evidence. It's not exactly the plan of a genius,
(14:38):
but the murderer was just smart enough, or maybe just
lucky enough, not to leave any clues behind. With no
hard evidence to go on, the lead detectives on the case,
Joseph and his partner Lee Epplin, decided to hit the pavement.
As they interviewed Tarasida's friends and acquaintances, they pieced together
her last day. Terasita went to work as usual. She
(15:10):
finished her shift and left the hospital around three pm.
Around sevent ten, she took a call from doctor John Abela,
another member of her band. They chatted about ticket sales
for the upcoming concert, but in the middle of the
phone call, Teracita paused to answer and knock at the door.
She told John she would call him back later. A
(15:32):
guest just arrived, someone she might be able to sell
a ticket to. Not long after that, she received another
phone call, this time from a friend at the hospital.
She heard a man's voice in the background and asked
Terasita if she was interrupting something. Terasita laughed and said
it was nothing like that and she would tell her
about it at lunch. The next day, they hung up,
(15:55):
and forty minutes later, her neighbor smelled smoke. By the
end of March, the detectives knew all the details of
this story from Tarasita's friends and family members, but that
was when things started to stall. Lee and Joseph followed
(16:19):
one dead end lead after another. Everyone she regularly interacted with,
from her thesis adviser, her friends, and even a legal
assistant who helped her with her immigration paperwork, they all
had alibis. Months passed and still there was no progress
on the case. Then in August, a phone call came
(16:40):
into the Evanston Police Department. It was from Remichua, another
Filipino woman who worked at the same hospital as Tarasita
and whom you might remember from the top of the episode.
She claimed to have received a number of threatening phone
calls from one of the orderlies at the hospital where
she and Tarasita worked, a man named Alioi. Actually, the
(17:02):
call to the Evanston Police Department was the second one
that Remy made. The first call she made was to
the Filipino consul general. In that call, Remy had more
to say. She also claimed that she knew it was
Alan SHOWI who killed Teresita. She said she knew because
Teresita entered her body and said it herself. The Chuas
(17:33):
did not believe in superstitions. They were medical professionals who
moved to the United States from the Philippine island of
Lucan three years earlier. Jose Chua was a doctor back
in the Philippines and his wife, Remy, was a pharmacist.
They were both in the process of becoming licensed to
practice medicine in the United States. They were a working
(17:55):
couple with four children, and they didn't have time for
ghost stories, and yet in the summer of nineteen seventy seven,
they were the center of a baffling supernatural occurrence. On
(18:18):
July eleventh, co workers said they saw Remy run terrified
out of the locker room of the Edgewater Hospital. When
asked about the incident, Remy brushed it off, but later
she told a different story. Remy claimed she was sitting
in the locker room when Teracita Bossa appeared. She was silent,
(18:41):
She didn't move, and she didn't explain herself. She just
stood there until Remy fled the room. Remy's strange behavior
continued at the hospital she started sitting at Tarasita's lunch
table and singing softly to herself, just as Tarasita once did.
Remy did not know Terasita, but suddenly she was acting
(19:03):
a lot like her. She would speak with Tarasita's distinctive
regional accent and make conversation about things Tasita loved, like
parties orchids in classical piano. Understandably, her co workers, many
of whom did know the murdered woman, did not find
this amusing. Several employees complained to Remy's supervisor, but when confronted,
(19:27):
Remy claimed she didn't know what they were talking about.
Remy's odd behavior continued until an afternoon in mid July,
when she showed up on her day off and verbally
accosted her supervisor seemingly unprovoked. She yelled about working conditions
at the hospital and complained about her coworkers. Her supervisor
(19:48):
tried to calm her down, but when she wouldn't stop yelling,
he fired her on the spot. To those around her,
it seemed like Remy was having some kind of breakdown.
That evening things we worsened. Remy and her husband were
(20:14):
sitting together in the living room when she abruptly stood
up and walked down the hall towards the bedroom. Jose
followed after her and found her lying on their beds,
staring at the ceiling. When he asked if she was
all right, she replied, Mama, Mama, are you there, Mama.
Jose froze. The voice coming from his wife's lips didn't
(20:37):
sound like her own. Something was obviously very wrong. He
asked her if she knew her name. Remy replied in Tagalag,
I am tacita Basa. Tagalag is one of the official
languages of the Philippines, but it was not the one
that Jose and Remy used to speak to each other.
(20:57):
They were both from Northern Lucan and spoke to each
other in their regional mother tongue. Not only that, but
Remy was speaking with an odd Spanish accent that he
never heard her use before. She repeated I am Tarasi
to Basa. Jose was terrified. She said she wanted his help,
she needed him to stop her killer. Jose insisted he
(21:20):
didn't understand, but Remy insisted right back that she needed
him to go to the police with the name of
her killer. But before she could give a name. Remy
blinked and her expression changed. She looked around and asked,
what happened? How did I get in the bedroom? Remy
didn't remember anything, and when her husband tried to tell
her about her odd behavior, she insisted it must have
(21:42):
been some kind of sleepwalking. Jose asked if she was
feeling all right, and Remy claimed she was fine, just
really thirsty. For the rest of the evening, Remy looked
fine until around eleven, the phone rang. Jose picked it up,
and a man's voice asked for Remy Chuah. Jose handed
the phone to his wife. She listened for a moment
(22:05):
and then hung up. Jose asked her who it was,
and she told him she didn't know, but he threatened her.
He told her she was going to be next. Okay,
if this was fiction, which it's not. It's a true story.
(22:25):
But if it was fiction, this is where I would
be punching holes in the conceit you mean, On the
same night Tarasina possesses Remy, Tarasina's killer calls her and
threatens your next Why would the killer just happen to
call Remy Chua a random coworker of his first victim,
Mere hours after, she was possessed by the very ghost
(22:46):
of the woman he killed. Unless the killer was now
a ghost too, I might be a skeptic, but when
a conceit as well established and consistent, I will go
with it. That's of course, if the story was fiction,
which it's not. It's real, and Jose later testified to
this call under oath. Jose hoped it was over after
(23:08):
this incident, maybe it was a bad and tasteless prank.
But then two days later it happened again. This time
it was in the middle of a phone call. The
chewas were trying to sell their house, and Remy was
talking to their real estate agent. Suddenly, she handed the
phone to her husband and said, Terosita wants to come back.
(23:30):
It happened just as before, only this time Terasita seemed
more desperate. She said, you have to go to the police.
Jose told her he couldn't, he didn't have any proof.
He was going to look crazy. Remy took his hand
and said if he needed proof, she would give it
to him. The third and final possession happened the following day.
(23:52):
Jose came home from work to find his wife sobbing
on their bed. She was crying for her mama back,
but this time she finally told him the name of
the killer. It was Alan Showy, and Teraraesita knew how
the Chewas could prove it. Joseph listened to the Chewas
(24:26):
story in a state of disbelief. It sounded crazy, and
yet there was something about jose He just seemed so earnest.
Then there was the jewelry. Chewas claimed. The spirit told
them about two pieces of jewelry Alan stole from Tarasita's apartment.
There was a jade pendant and a pearl cocktail ring
from Paris. Teresita also told them her cousin ron Selma
(24:49):
could identify the pieces if he saw them. As Joseph
drove back from the Chua's, he couldn't help thinking that
he was in an impossible situation. Alan Showi was a
good suspect, and even though he was a known friend
of Terasita's, the police had never really interviewed him. Alan
(25:18):
was a handsome black man in his early thirties. After
graduating from high school, he enrolled at NYU, but he
dropped out after about a year. From there, he bounced
around the United States and ultimately landed in Chicago. That
was when he moved in with a German immigrant named
Yanka Kalmuk and eventually got a job as an orderly
at Edgewater Hospital. Alan was known around the hospital as
(25:42):
a jack of all trades and he would often help
Terasda with repairs and odd jobs. Tarasita trusted it Alan.
He'd been to her apartment before and he was a
person she would have let in without a second thought.
But the minute Joseph mentioned where his tip came from,
he was going to be the laughingstock of the entire
police force. When Joseph returned to the station, he pulled
(26:15):
Tarasita's file. The first thing he saw was the note
from Tarasita diary get tickets for as as could be
Alan SHOWI. It took six days to track down Alan,
but the two detectives eventually found him in a tidy
little apartment where he lived with his pregnant common law wife, Yanka. Shawi.
(26:37):
Was friendly and pleasant when he greeted them at the door,
and as he welcomed the detectives into his apartment, Joseph
couldn't help noticing that Yanka was sitting cross legged in
the dining room next to a stack of books about
ghosts and the occult. Alan seemed eager to help. Once
Joseph explained he was investigating the murder of tarased to Bassa,
(27:00):
he agreed to come down to the station and answer
a few questions. At the station, the detectives told Alan
they found his fingerprints all over Taraseda's apartment. They hadn't
actually found his fingerprints, and it seems to me, at
best morally ambiguous to lie that they did, but it
did get Alan to admit that he was in Taraseda's
(27:20):
home on the night she died. He said Tarasita was
complaining about her broken TV set, and Alan showy offered
to help fix it. He arrived around six point thirty,
and Taracita brought him a can of beer to drink
while he worked. That same can would later be found
in the wreckage of her trashed apartment. When Alan realized
(27:42):
he didn't have the right parts for the TV, he
left and spent the rest of the night at home
with Yanka. Alan said Yanka could vouch for him. They
left Alan in the interrogation room and drove back to
his apartment to speak with Yanka. While they were doing that,
another cop was getting in touch with tarasida friends and family,
(28:03):
asking if anyone would be willing to come in and
look at some jewelry. Yanka agreed to come down to
the station and even bring along her jewelry box, though
she didn't understand why she needed to. Charasida's friend, Richard Passatti,
was waiting at the station, and as soon as he
saw Yanka, he went white. He pulled Joseph aside and whispered,
(28:27):
that woman is wearing Tarasedas ring. It was the pearl
cocktail ring Tarasida's mother bought in Paris. When Richard looked
through the rest of Yanka's jewelry, he found a jade
pendant of Tarasitas as well. Yanka said Alan gave her
the items as belated Christmas gifts. The detectives claimed that
(28:48):
when they confronted Alan with these facts, he admitted that
he was behind on his bills and was falling further
into debt. He knew Taraesita must have money, she always
tipped him so generally when he did work for her.
He heard she was from a wealthy family in the
Philippines and that she once met the Queen of England,
(29:08):
so he returned to her apartment after leaving to look
for the right parts for the TV. He put her
in a chokehold until she passed out. Then he dragged
her to the bedroom and dressed her, stabbed her in
the chest, and set her body on fire. When he
searched her apartment, he found only thirty dollars. By the
end of the night, Alan signed a confession, he was
(29:31):
charged with homicide, and the case was declared closed. At
least that's one version of the story. At the trial,
(29:51):
Alan claimed after police found Tera Sita's jewelry in Alan's possession,
that they threatened to arrest Yanka as an accessory to murder.
Yanka was eight months pregnant, meaning if she was arrested,
she might very well be forced to give birth in prison.
The detectives knew that, and they used it to coerce
(30:12):
Alan into a confession. And there was more. There was
the fact Alan's fingerprints did not match the ones found
on the beer cans at Tarasida's apartment. There were the
five strands of hair found on Tarasieda's body at the
morgue which definitely did not belong to Alan Showi, and
perhaps most concerning of all, an attorney for the defense
(30:35):
discovered Remi Chua was known to sell jewelry at Edgewater Hospital.
When Yanka testified, she said that Alan told her he
bought the jewelry at the hospital, and a different picture
started coming together. After a grueling thirteen hours of deliberation,
the jurors could not come to a conclusion they were
(30:59):
actually divine along racial lines. The four black jurors believed
it was possible that Chicago police might use unethical means
to force an innocent black man into signing a confession
that seems so obvious to me. I'm tempted to write
off the reservation of the rest of the jurors as well,
(31:20):
because I guess they believed in ghosts more than racism.
But bear with me. The trial ended in a hung jury,
but before another trial could begin, Alan Showy ignored his
attorney's advice and changed his plea to guilty. Some people
might attribute this change to the influence of Tarasee to spirit.
(31:41):
Others might consider that if Alan was tried again and convicted,
he would face serious charges. Changing his plead to guilty
could have meant a more lenient sentence. In the end,
Alan did get some clemency. He was given the minimum
sentence for murder fourteen years, was out on parole after
(32:01):
four and a half. So what can we take from this?
Did Remicua stumble into the wrong room at the wrong
time and somehow become the unwitting host for the spirit
of Terracita? Did she have some knowledge of the crime
but worried that coming forward might implicate her? And if
that was the case, how could a possession help or
(32:23):
what place does it have in a crime at all?
We're going to understand that it might be good to
understand the way people see possession in the Philippines. In
October of twenty twenty three, a high school in the
small Philippine community of Lawis was closed following an incident
(32:47):
where fourteen students claimed to be possessed by sinister spirits.
It was called a mass possession, and it was not
the only one of its kind. Just a month earlier,
seven students were from their high school on the neighboring
island of Cebu after the apparent sudden onset of spiritual possession.
(33:08):
In twenty nineteen, a school on the island of Negros,
the same island where Tarasita grew up was closed after
twenty students collapsed in class due to similarly other worldly forces.
Spiritual possession is nothing new in the Philippines. The Filipino
word for it is sapi. It translates to joining. The
(33:29):
concept came from what scholars call folk Catholicism, that is,
the sect of Catholicism, which evolved when indigenous spiritual practices
fused with the religion imposed by Spanish colonists. Cases of
sapi can vary wildly, but many of them follow a
similar pattern. The possessed person begins acting strangely, and there
(33:53):
might be changes to their voice or posture. They will
usually admit they are possessed and speak as the possessing entity.
When the incident is over, the person often has no
memory of it. In fact, they may not even know
anything happened at all, which is a mercy. Can you
imagine being possessed? I mean no, I don't want to
(34:13):
imagine it. But imagine if you were possessed and you
knew it. Okay, But back to the anthropology. To Western doctors,
this phenomenon of possession can look a lot like a
dissociative episode caused by trauma, but in a twenty nineteen article,
professors Christina Jaime Montiel and Angelica Vidalo Eeing argue this
(34:38):
view of possession is limiting as long as the possessed
person believes they are occupied by a spirit in that
belief will have a real impact on what happens when
they are treated. They're saying, essentially, if Remy believed her
possession was real, and she came from a culture which
backed up that belief, then it was real. Even if
(35:03):
it came from a place of trauma and dissociation, like say,
if she witnessed or was a part of something terrible
like a murder. The question is did Remy believe she
was possessed? Could she have believed it if she was
unaware that it was happening, and did the possession bring
(35:23):
honest justice? Ghost stories never wrap up neatly. It's one
reason why I don't like them, in addition to the
many that I listed earlier. At the very least, I
will be unsettled, because, like with this ghost story, in
its unclear conclusion, I will leave it feeling uneasy and unsatisfied.
(35:59):
Thank you to John O'Brien and Edward Bauman for their
book Teresita the voice from the grave. I do not
have the fortitude to dive this deep into the occult.
So many thanks to Zoe Luisa Lewis for writing this episode.
We also used a number of articles in researching. All
of these sources are linked in our show notes. If
(36:20):
you want to learn more, join me next week on
the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for a story
about a sweet looking Chinese grandmother who earned her moniker
the Mother of All Snakeheads, by rising up the ranks
of the Fujianese gang world and becoming one of the
most prolific human traffickers of all time. The Greatest True
(36:54):
Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio.
Your host is me Mary Kay MC and this episode
was written by Zoe Luisa Lewis. Our show is produced
by Leo Culp and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Our theme
music is by Tyler Cash. Executive produced by Scott Waxman.
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