The Dominican Hill Retreat House — universally known as the Diplomat Hotel — is one of the most famous haunted buildings in the Philippines, an abandoned hilltop structure that has become a pilgrimage site for paranormal investigators and thrill-seekers from across the country. Its silhouette against the Baguio sky, perched on Dominican Hill like a Gothic castle, has made it an icon of Philippine supernatural tourism.
The building was originally constructed as a seminary for the Dominican Order, training priests for service across the Philippines and Asia. It was later converted into a hotel — the Diplomat Hotel — which operated for several years before closing. During World War II, the building was occupied by Japanese forces, and the atrocities committed within its walls during the occupation form the core of its haunted reputation.
According to accounts that have solidified into Baguio's oral history, the Japanese executed priests, nuns, and civilians inside the building during the occupation. The beheading of religious clergy is the most frequently cited detail, and headless apparitions are among the most commonly reported phenomena at the site. Visitors describe seeing figures walking the corridors without heads, nuns kneeling in prayer in rooms that have been empty for decades, and shadows moving across walls in patterns that do not correspond to any physical source of light.
The building has been investigated by multiple paranormal research teams, both Filipino and international, and it has appeared on numerous television programs documenting its supernatural activity. The consistency of reports across different investigators and different decades has established the Diplomat Hotel as one of the most reliably active haunted locations in Southeast Asia.
Despite its fame, the building has remained largely unoccupied since the hotel's closure, cycling through various proposals for redevelopment that have never been completed. Some attribute the failure to develop the property to the spirits themselves — a force that repels commercial activity and resists the transformation of their dwelling place into something that would diminish or deny their presence.