The Ramona Apartments in the Ermita district of Manila, built in 1949 and named for its original owner Ramona Gonzalez, was haunted by the one person most entitled to haunt it: Ramona herself. Before the building's demolition, residents and visitors reported encountering the spirit of the woman who had built the structure, still occupying the halls and rooms of the apartment building she had created.
Ramona Gonzalez's ghost was described as an elderly woman in formal clothing who appeared in the building's common areas — the lobby, the stairwells, and the corridors between apartments. She moved through the building with the proprietary air of someone conducting an inspection, pausing at doorways, looking into rooms, and continuing her rounds as if checking on the condition of her property. Residents who encountered her described a sense of being evaluated rather than threatened — the ghost of a landlord assessing her investment.
The Ermita district of Manila, where the Ramona Apartments stood, has been one of the city's most densely built and frequently destroyed neighborhoods. Ermita was devastated during the Battle of Manila in 1945, and the postwar reconstruction produced buildings like the Ramona Apartments — structures built from the rubble of the old city, housing a population that was itself traumatized by the violence of liberation.
The demolition of the Ramona Apartments erased the physical building but the question of whether Ramona's spirit departed with the structure remains unanswered. In Filipino supernatural tradition, spirits attached to buildings face an uncertain fate when those buildings are destroyed — some are released, some are dispersed, and some transfer their attachment to whatever structure replaces the one they knew. Ramona Gonzalez, a woman who built an apartment building in the ruins of postwar Manila, may still be inspecting whatever now occupies her lot.