West Visayas State University in La Paz, Iloilo City, has responded to its hauntings with a measure that is both practical and deeply unsettling: mirrors in the women's restrooms of Rizal Hall have been physically removed because of the ghost that appeared in them.
The mirror ghost is attributed to a murdered student whose identity and circumstances have been preserved in campus folklore though not in official records. Women using the restrooms in Rizal Hall reported seeing, in addition to their own reflection, the face of another woman — pale, expressionless, and clearly not a living person standing behind them. The apparition appeared in the mirror's surface with a clarity that made students scream and flee, and the frequency of the encounters was high enough that the university administration took the unusual step of removing the mirrors entirely rather than continuing to subject students to the experience.
The decision to remove mirrors rather than address a haunting through spiritual means — blessing, exorcism, or ritual — speaks to the pragmatic strain in Filipino institutional responses to the supernatural. The university did not deny the phenomenon or dismiss the students' reports; it simply eliminated the medium through which the ghost manifested.
Quezon Hall, another building on the WVSU campus, carries a different category of haunting. The building was converted into a Japanese garrison during World War II, and the spirits from that period are reported by students and faculty who use the building today. The wartime apparitions conform to the pattern established across dozens of former Japanese installations in the Philippines: figures in military uniform, the sound of boots and commands, cold spots in the tropical heat, and the general atmosphere of dread that accompanies spaces where interrogation and detention occurred.
The campus thus hosts two distinct haunting traditions — one rooted in personal violence, the other in wartime atrocity — coexisting within the same academic institution and managed by the same administration with a mixture of faith, pragmatism, and resignation.