The University of Bohol in Tagbilaran City is haunted by two apparitions that students and staff have distinguished by the color of their clothing — a white lady and a far more unusual red lady. While white lady sightings are ubiquitous throughout the Philippines, the presence of a red lady makes the University of Bohol's haunting distinctive in the country's supernatural landscape.
The white lady conforms to the archetype found across Filipino ghost lore: a pale, long-haired woman in a flowing white dress who appears in corridors, stairwells, and empty classrooms, usually glimpsed at the edge of vision before vanishing when directly observed. White ladies in Philippine tradition are typically associated with women who died from violence, betrayal, or heartbreak, and their restless spirits are bound to locations connected to their suffering.
The red lady, however, is a rarer phenomenon. She has been described as a woman in a deep crimson dress — some accounts specify a traditional Filipina "terno" gown — who appears in the older sections of the university campus. Unlike the white lady, whose presence is characterized by silence, the red lady is associated with wailing. Students and security guards report hearing prolonged, anguished cries in sections of the building where the red lady has been sighted, sounds that echo through empty corridors and fade without identifiable source.
In Visayan folklore, the color red in supernatural contexts carries associations with blood, passion, and unfinished earthly business. Some Boholano elders suggest the red lady may be an "engkantada" — an enchanted being from the spirit world — rather than the ghost of a deceased human. Others believe she represents a woman who died during childbirth or from domestic violence, her red clothing symbolizing the blood that marked her death.
The university's campus sits on land in central Tagbilaran that has been continuously inhabited since the Spanish colonial period, and the accumulation of centuries of human drama within its boundaries may account for the coexistence of multiple spiritual entities.