BELIEVE it or not. While researching on the Balangiga Massacre that happened a century ago, we members of the Balangiga Research Group (BRG) have not only received moral support from living people. From eerie prints of photographs, we have also received prodding messages from each of the two greater heroes on opposite sides of that conflict.

These heroes were Capitan Valeriano Abanador, the overall commander of the successful attack on the American garrison, and Pvt. Adolph Gamlin, the mobile guard who was the first American soldier to be attacked in Balangiga on Sept. 28, 1901.

The entire attack virtually started with Abanador’s success at grabbing Gamlin’s rifle and smashing its butt in his head. Although sprawled and given up for dead in most accounts, Gamlin actually survived the crushing blow, was able to grab another rifle during the melee, fire the critical initial shots that repulsed the attack, and forced Abanador to call a retreat by the Filipino attackers.

The key role of Abanador, like the official cover-up of the Balangiga conflict, was suppressed by the American attribution that the mastermind of the attack was the non-Balangigan formal leader of the resistance in southeastern Samar.

And the key role of Gamlin was eclipsed by the accounts of glib-talking comrades who told fantastic tales of dozens of Filipino deaths from their blazing guns, and by Gamlin’s own humility and life-long refusal to glorify his own feat in Balangiga.

A century after the Balangiga conflict, these two greater heroes in Balangiga still managed to send eerie messages from the spiritual realm. Please suspend your logic and scientific judgment for a moment while I tell you about the occult related to our Balangiga involvement.

Balangiga in southern Samar was again a quiet and sleepy town in the morning of Sept. 29, following a weeklong frenzy of activities that culminated in the centennial commemoration of the “Balangiga Encounter” graced by thousands of revelers and guests the day before.

Right after breakfast, Bob Couttie (the British screenwriter of “Goodbye America” and “Legacy” movies) and I walked to the Balangiga cemetery to visit the tombs of known Balangiga heroes and to take pictures.

Our host, Mrs. Aurea Amano, made arrangements for us to be accompanied by the cemetery caretaker who lives next door. But we went ahead without her, confident that we could find our target graves by ourselves. We were proven wrong.

After about 30 minutes of futile search among the tombs and the graves, two elderly female caretakers of the cemetery arrived. We asked for the location of the tomb of Abanador. Only one of them knew where it was, and we were led to an unmarked tomb that we could not have found without a guide.

Bob and I took pictures of Abanador’s tomb and that of Pedro Duran, another participant of the Balangiga attack. We also asked for the grave or tomb of Casiana Nacionales, the lone woman privy to the Balangiga plot, but neither of our guides knew where this was located.

From the cemetery, Bob and I returned to our foster house and then we proceeded to the bank of the Balangiga River. Again, with the help of Mrs. Amano, we hired a banca and a boatman for our companions, Jean Wall and her brother, Richard Adolph “Dick” Gamlin, who had come all the way from the US to attend the Balangiga centennial rites. They wanted to experience a similar banca ride that their father, Pvt. Adolph Gamlin, went through during the escape of the mostly wounded American survivors to Basey in 1901.

It was time to leave for Tacloban after an hour of banca ride up and down the Balangiga River. Bob, Jean, and Dick left Tacloban for Manila the next day, Bob for his base in Subic, and Jean and Dick, for the US in two more days.

In Tacloban, it took six more weeks before the film in my camera was consumed, after which I brought it to the photo-shop for developing and printing.

As a matter of habit, I usually take 2-3 shots of important sites, scenes or landmarks with my camera. At the Balangiga cemetery, I took two shots of the tomb of Pedro Duran.

I, therefore, could not explain why I only took one shot of Abanador’s tomb. But I recall I was disheartened at that moment by the unmarked and neglected state of the tomb of the man whose heroism was a central focus of the activities the week before.

In the entire roll of film, only the shot of Abanador’s tomb showed some defect -- a white blot at the center of the photograph. Upon closer examination at home, I realized this was no ordinary blot.

Above a straight line near the bottom of the film, I had photographed a floating white apparition, shaped like the upper half of a sitting headless body with its back towards the camera.

A detached oblong-shaped figure, faintly resembling an old man’s profile and etched on the flat cement wall overlooking Abanador’s tomb, completed the human form for the white apparition, but with its head reversed and facing the camera.

I was not scared at all by the apparition in the cemetery photograph. I heard that during his old age in the 1950s, Abanador had asked lawyer Dominador Amano, now also deceased, to write a Filipino version of the Balangiga conflict.

After having lodged in Amano’s house during two separate visits to Balangiga, I simply inferred the message (using Filipino phenomenology) that I have to pick up from what Amano had left behind, and also pursue my advocacy for the return of the bells to this town.

I relayed my observation on the cemetery photo to the other BRG members, Bob Couttie in Subic and Jean Wall in the US. Bob did not notice anything unusual in the pictures he took of Abanador’s tomb. But Jean disclosed for the first time a similar experience with eerie photographs she had taken in Wyoming and Nebraska in 1998. She sent me scanned copies of three photographs that showed paranormal handiwork of her father.

In late 1997, Jean went high profile with her campaign for official recognition of her father’s feat in Balangiga. Her case was picked up by mainstream US media and added mileage to the Philippine government’s campaign to have the two Bells of Balangiga at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming returned to the country.

In mid-1998, Jean undertook a pilgrimage to Wyoming to visit the memorial with the two famous Bells of Balangiga, and to Nebraska, to visit her father’s grave and the Nebraska City Post Office, where he had worked until retirement.

By that time, the “third bell” of Balangiga with a US Army unit in Korea had surfaced, and Bob and I had cast doubt on the authenticity of the Wyoming bells.

In her speech before the influential Wyoming veterans, who played a key role in keeping the bells on US soil, Jean warned about the basic impropriety of having “another headstone on your grave.”

She was alluding to the Balangiga label of the contested bells in Wyoming, whose origins were then put in doubt.

Jean’s figurative language virtually turned literal in three photographs she took during her pilgrimage.

In Wyoming, Jean took a picture with her camera of the Balangiga Bells Memorial, a curved brick structure that displayed two large bells reportedly taken from Balangiga after the fighting in Sept. 1901. But the photo that came out was partly overlaid by images around Gamlin’s graveyard in Nebraska.

A clear photo of the graveyard showed the wreath in front of a pot of flowers, forming a right triangle with the headstone to the left of the flowerpot. But in the bells' memorial photo, the wreath was aligned with the headstone and the pot of flowers. The wreath was also positioned in the center of the brick structure and the headstone was directly under the niche occupied by the relic we have identified as the 1863 bell.

Jean took a close shot of the 1863 bell to get its details and inscriptions. But the final print showed only the external outline of the bell in its niche. In place of the surface details were images of the grass on Gamlin’s grave with the headstone at the bottom.

In another photo, the faint mouth portion of a bell encased a clear picture of the Nebraska City Post Office Building where Gamlin retired from his government career.

The technicians at the photo shop theorized that the film inside Jean’s camera probably slipped and this caused a double exposure of the film. The “film slip” theory might explain the case for a single frame in a roll of film, but it could not explain the overlapping of Nebraska images on Wyoming scenes in three pictures from the same roll of film. The latter would have involved actual rewinding of the film, which is technically impossible with the film inside the camera.

Jean said she was greatly affected by the eerie pictures she took in 1998 but kept quiet about them until I brought up the parallel phenomenon. Her own experience with the paranormal had also urged her to keep pursuing official recognition for her father.

Around the middle of this year, some Wyoming veterans taunted our group (the BRG) to show independent proofs of the Balangiga origin of the bells in Wyoming. We took the challenge and, in the end, we were able to trace documents that could prove the 1889 bell in Wyoming (with the name of Fr. Agustin Delgado) and the 1895 bell in Korea (with the name of Fr. Bernardo Aparicio) indeed came from Balangiga.

Only the case of the 1863 bell remained somewhat problematic.

Since 1998, I have argued and claimed here in the INQUIRER that it was the small bell in Korea that rang in Balangiga during the attack. This claim was deemed credible and had developed quite a large following, including the National Historical Institute (NHI), over the next three years.

But with Jean’s eerie photographs as new evidence, I take back my old claim. The overlaid images of Gamlin’s headstone on separate photos of the 1863 bell in Wyoming provide more than sufficient paranormal proof that this was the church bell that rang in Balangiga in the morning of Sept. 28, 1901.

Believe it or not.

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