Loakan Airport, the small regional airport serving the mountain city of Baguio in the Cordillera region, is haunted by the specter of a child on a bicycle — a figure connected to one of the airport's most tragic accidents. According to security guards who have patrolled the facility over the years, the child appears on the runway during nighttime hours, pedaling across the tarmac before vanishing at the point where, in life, they were struck and killed by an approaching aircraft.
The apparition is always described the same way: a small figure on a bicycle, moving at a leisurely pace as if unaware of any danger, visible for only a few seconds before dissolving into the darkness. Guards who have witnessed the figure describe an instinctive urge to shout a warning, even though they know intellectually that what they are seeing is not a living child. The figure appears most frequently during the cool, foggy nights that are common in Baguio's high-altitude climate, when visibility on the runway is already poor.
Loakan Airport sits at an elevation of nearly 1,500 meters in the Cordillera mountains, an area where the indigenous Igorot peoples have long held beliefs about the spirits of the dead returning to the places where they died. In Igorot tradition, the "anito" — ancestral or nature spirits — are particularly active in locations associated with sudden or violent death, and the boundary between the living and the dead is considered thinnest in the mountain fog.
The airport has been the site of several aviation accidents over the decades, most notably a crash in 1987 and another in 1990, and the combination of its dangerous approach, mountainous terrain, and history of tragedy has given Loakan a reputation as one of the most haunted airports in Southeast Asia.