Concepcion North Central School in the municipality of Concepcion, Tarlac, is haunted by the most specifically identified ghost in the Philippine public school system: Frank Russell White, an American school director who died of tuberculosis in 1913 while serving as part of the Thomasite educational mission to the Philippines.
The Thomasites were a group of over 500 American teachers who arrived in the Philippines aboard the USS Thomas in 1901, tasked by the American colonial government with establishing a public education system across the archipelago. They were idealistic, frequently young, and often unprepared for the tropical diseases that awaited them. Frank Russell White was assigned to Concepcion, where he served as director of the local school until tuberculosis — the leading cause of death among Americans in the colonial Philippines — claimed his life.
White's ghost is reported within the school he administered. Staff and students describe seeing a tall figure in early 20th-century American clothing — formal, out of place among the modern Filipino school setting — walking through the corridors or standing in the doorways of classrooms. The figure is described as pale and thin, consistent with the physical deterioration of a tuberculosis patient, and he carries himself with the bearing of someone accustomed to authority.
Unlike many Filipino school hauntings, which are attributed to anonymous wartime dead or unidentified accident victims, the ghost of Frank Russell White has a name, a documented history, and a known cause of death. The specificity of the haunting gives it an unusual quality: this is not an unknown spirit but a known individual, a man who crossed an ocean to teach Filipino children and who died in the town he had been assigned to serve. His continued presence at the school carries a poignancy absent from more anonymous hauntings — the ghost of a teacher who never left his post.