Casa Mariquit in Jaro, Iloilo City, is the ancestral residence of Fernando Lopez, who served as Vice President of the Philippines under both Elpidio Quirino and Ferdinand Marcos. The house is a classic Ilonggo bahay na bato — a stone-and-hardwood colonial residence that has stood through generations of the Lopez political dynasty — and its second floor is reportedly haunted by ghosts who do not limit themselves to mere appearances.
The most extraordinary account from Casa Mariquit involves a visitor who fell asleep in one of the second-floor bedrooms and woke up on a wooden bench on the ground floor — with no memory of descending the stairs. The physical relocation of a sleeping person, without waking them and without any human agent to carry them, represents one of the rarest categories of paranormal activity in the Philippines: poltergeist-level interaction that affects the physical world rather than merely manifesting visually or audibly.
The second floor of the house generates more conventional haunting reports as well — footsteps in empty rooms, the sensation of being watched, cold spots in the tropical heat, and the vague outlines of figures glimpsed at the edges of peripheral vision. But it is the teleportation incident that distinguishes Casa Mariquit from the hundreds of other haunted ancestral houses scattered across the Visayas.
The Lopez family's history is intertwined with some of the most turbulent periods in Philippine politics, from the Japanese occupation through the Marcos martial law era. Casa Mariquit, as the family seat, absorbed the tensions and dramas of decades of political power. In Filipino supernatural belief, houses that serve as centers of power — political, economic, or familial — accumulate spiritual energy that can manifest in unpredictable ways. The entity or entities that inhabit Casa Mariquit's second floor are not content to simply appear; they interact with the physical world, moving objects and people according to an agenda that the living can only guess at.