Silliman University in Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental — the oldest American-founded university in the Philippines and the first Protestant institution of higher learning in Asia — carries wartime wounds across multiple campus buildings that served the Japanese occupation in different capacities. The hauntings at Silliman are distinguished by their specificity: each building generates phenomena connected to its particular wartime function.
Channon Hall is the most severely haunted, and for good reason. During the Japanese occupation, the building served as headquarters for the Kempeitai — the Imperial Japanese military police — and as their primary torture and interrogation chamber in the Dumaguete area. The Kempeitai were feared throughout occupied Southeast Asia for their systematic brutality, and Channon Hall absorbed the suffering of countless Filipinos who were brought there for questioning and who, in many cases, never emerged.
Students and faculty who use Channon Hall today report the sounds of screaming from locked rooms, the smell of blood in corridors that have been thoroughly cleaned, and the sensation of invisible restraints — a tightening around wrists and ankles — that afflicts individuals who linger in certain areas of the building.
Katipunan Hall, which originated in 1916 as Dumaguete Mission Hospital and served as both the university hospital and the general hospital for Dumaguete and neighboring towns, generates a different class of haunting. The sounds and apparitions here are medical rather than military: the squeak of hospital gurneys, the murmur of patients, and the occasional sighting of figures in medical clothing moving through the building's older sections.
Edith Carson Hall and Doltz Hall, both dormitory buildings, complete Silliman's haunted campus. Students in these buildings report the nocturnal disturbances common to Philippine university hauntings — footsteps in empty corridors, doors opening on their own, and the feeling of sharing a room with someone who is not visible but whose presence is felt with certainty.