Bicol University in Legazpi City, Albay, hosts an unusual supernatural population that includes a kapre who lost his home but not his attachment to the campus, and a phantom wild boar that roams the interior of academic buildings — a combination of entities that spans the full range of Filipino supernatural categories.
The kapre of Bicol University inhabited a century-old acacia tree on campus grounds for as long as anyone could remember. The tree was massive, its canopy providing shade across a wide area, and the kapre who lived in its branches was a known presence — students reported seeing the glow of his cigar at night and smelling tobacco smoke drifting across the campus in the evening hours. When Typhoon Glenda struck in 2014, the acacia tree was destroyed, uprooted by winds that stripped the campus of much of its mature vegetation.
The remarkable detail is what happened next: the kapre did not leave. Despite the destruction of his dwelling tree, he continues to be reported on the campus — seen sitting in other trees, perched on building rooftops, or standing in open areas where the acacia once stood. The loss of his home has apparently not weakened his territorial attachment to the university, and students and staff continue to encounter him in new locations, as if he is searching for a suitable replacement tree.
The phantom wild boar is the campus's other distinctive entity — a spectral pig that has been seen trotting through campus buildings, its hooves audible on tile floors. Wild boars were once common in the agricultural lands surrounding Legazpi before urbanization pushed them into the mountains, and the phantom boar may represent a creature from an earlier era of the landscape, still following the routes it traveled when the university campus was farmland.
The combination of a displaced kapre and a phantom boar gives Bicol University a supernatural ecology that feels uniquely provincial — less polished than the wartime ghost stories of Manila's institutions, more rooted in the agricultural and natural landscape of the Bicol region.