In 2011, a family massacre in Barangay Tabunok, Talisay, Cebu, left a mother and two of her children dead at the hands of the family patriarch, who then took his own life. The Ponce residence, site of the murder-suicide, was abandoned afterward — but according to neighbors, the dead women continue to arrive home every night.
The most striking detail of the haunting is the phantom taxi. Residents of the barangay describe seeing a taxi pull up to the abandoned house after dark, its headlights illuminating the facade. Three women in white emerge from the vehicle, walk to the front door, and enter the house. The taxi then drives away and vanishes. The women are believed to be the spirits of the three murder victims — the wife and her two daughters — returning to the home where they were killed, reenacting an arrival that, in its original form, ended in their deaths.
The specificity of the phantom taxi elevates the Ponce residence haunting beyond a standard apparition story. The ghosts are not drifting through the house or standing at windows — they are arriving by vehicle, paying a fare that cannot be paid, and entering a home that no longer exists as a dwelling. The nightly repetition of this arrival suggests a residual haunting in which the victims are trapped in a loop that returns them to the moment before the violence began.
A balete tree in front of the residence adds to the property's supernatural burden. The tree is said to be haunted by an agta — the Cebuano equivalent of the kapre — whose presence predates the massacre and who has remained in place as the human tragedy unfolded around him. The agta and the murder victims coexist on the property, representing different categories of the supernatural: the agta as a permanent nature spirit and the murder victims as the recently dead, bound to the house by the violence of their departure from life.