In the forests between the municipality of Passi in Iloilo province and Dumarao in neighboring Capiz, there exists — or doesn't exist, depending on whom you ask — a city called Tumao. Like Biringan in Samar, Tumao is a vanishing city inhabited by supernatural beings, but its legend carries a distinctive detail that blurs the line between folklore and engineering history: the claim that American railroad builders deliberately curved the tracks of the Panay Railway to avoid building through the forest where Tumao appears.
The inhabitants of Tumao are described as a tribe of "Mongolian-looking" people — taller and fairer than the surrounding Filipino population, with features that suggest an origin outside the visible world. They are not ghosts of the dead but a living supernatural community that exists in a dimension parallel to our own, visible only when they choose to be or when a mortal stumbles through one of the boundaries that separate their city from the ordinary forest.
The railroad legend is the most intriguing element. The Panay Railway, built by American engineers in the early 1900s to connect the sugar-producing regions of Iloilo, does indeed contain a curved section in the area where Tumao is said to exist. The engineering rationale for the curve may be entirely topographical, but local tradition insists that the American builders encountered something in the forest — whether they saw the city itself or simply felt the overwhelming compulsion to go around rather than through — that convinced them to reroute the tracks.
Those who claim to have glimpsed Tumao describe structures that don't belong to any Filipino architectural tradition — buildings of unfamiliar design, lights that burn without fire, and streets where the Mongolian-looking inhabitants go about their business without acknowledging the mortal observer. Like Biringan, Tumao is said to claim those who enter it, absorbing them into a society from which return to the human world is rare and never complete.