Casa Vallejo, the oldest hotel in Baguio City, has been hosting guests — both living and otherwise — since its conversion from a Bureau of Public Works dormitory to a hotel in 1923. Originally built in 1909 to house key personnel overseeing the construction of Baguio as the American colonial government's summer capital, the building's history spans the American period, the Japanese occupation, and over a century of continuous operation as a lodging establishment.
During World War I, the building allegedly served as a detention center for German prisoners of war — citizens of the German Empire who were living in the Philippines when the United States entered the war in 1917. If this account is accurate, it adds a layer of wartime internment to the building's already complex history.
Guests staying at Casa Vallejo report a range of unexplained acoustic phenomena: footsteps in empty corridors, the sound of doors opening and closing in unoccupied rooms, whispered conversations that seem to come from within the walls themselves. Some guests describe being awakened by the sensation that someone has entered their room, only to find the door locked and the room empty. Others report the sound of furniture being moved in the room above them, even when that room is confirmed to be vacant.
The hotel's architecture contributes to its atmosphere. Built in the American colonial style with high ceilings, wooden floors, and thick adobe walls, Casa Vallejo creaks and settles in the cool Baguio nights in ways that modern hotels do not. But longtime staff members distinguish between the building's natural sounds and the phenomena they cannot explain — sounds that respond to the presence of listeners, that stop when investigated and resume when the investigator leaves.
Casa Vallejo sits in the heart of Baguio's Session Road district, a city built at 5,000 feet elevation in the Cordillera mountains where the pine forests carry their own traditions of spirits and the mist that rolls through the streets after dark gives every building the quality of a place between worlds.