The Thing at Red Beach

In my last post, I talked about the aswang. A common topic when folklore and Philippines get mentioned together. You might have expected that the next story will be related.

But no.

This one is a personal story. It happened to me. And #trustmebro this did happen.

(image is AI generated)

This was around 2011 or 2012. Me and my brother rode out to Red Beach on a motorcycle, maybe nine or ten at night. Could have been eleven. Late enough that nobody else was around.

We needed sand. We had a cat, and the litter box wasn't going to fill itself. That's the unglamorous part of any story that nobody will tell you.

That the night you see something that messes you up for years, you were out there scooping cat litter sand into a plastic bag.

Red Beach, if you don't know it, is laid out simple. Grass, then sand, then ocean. We parked and walked down to the sand and started filling the bag. That's it. That was the whole plan. Scoop sand, go home, done.

I was crouched down, focused on the bag, when I felt it.

I didn't hear anything. I felt something. That specific feeling on the back of your neck when someone is watching you from behind. I know how that sounds. I know everyone says that. But there's a difference between thinking someone might be watching you and actually feeling eyes on your back, and this was the second one. Steady and close and very deliberate.

I glanced at my brother. He said, without me asking, "footsteps". Something's walking around.

I didn't turn around. I want to be honest about that. I just kept scooping sand because we needed to finish and because some part of me had already decided that looking was optional. The feeling didn't go away. It got closer. I was sure there was no person behind me. I can't explain it but I was sure. A person has weight and breath and presence. This had presence but the other things felt wrong.

I looked at my brother again. He was already staring past me, straight at whatever was behind me, and he said "Bro. There's a dog. It's huge. Black. Huge eyes."

I turned around fast.

What I caught was the tail end of a jump. It had leaped toward one of the cottages up the slope and I only got maybe a split second of it. A shadow, long-limbed, already in the air. The legs were long. Longer than they should have been. That's the part that stayed with me, the length of it.
My brother got the better look. He said it was big, bigger than it should have been for a dog. Roughly one and a half times my height if it had stood upright.

He said the body was pure black but the eyes were white. Pale. And it wasn't completely solid. Shadow-y, he said. Like you could almost see through it, except it was blocking the lights behind it, so it was solid enough to matter.

Now, I've thought about this a lot since. A black Great Dane would be big. A Great Dane loose on a beach at night with no owner around would be strange but not impossible. Technically. Except I've lived here long enough to know that Great Danes in this part of the country are about as common as snow, and a black one, loose, at Red Beach, at eleven at night, that jumps like that and disappears the moment you turn around...

I don't know.

We finished filling the bag. We didn't talk much. We walked back to the motorcycle in a kind of deliberately fast enough walk, running is not something you're going to do in this situation.

Nothing followed us. We didn't find it. Nothing happened on the way home.

When I told my one of my nieces about the event, she asked me later if we had flashlights. We didn't. Just the street lights from the road, which don't reach all the way down to the sand.

She also asked if we were scared. I told her I wasn't scared at the time, I was just focused on the sand.

That's true, mostly.

What's also true is that I still think about the legs. How long they were in that one second before it cleared the frame. How something that size moved that fast and that quiet on sand.

"Could have been a dog."

I've been telling myself that for over a decade now and it almost works every time.