José Nuñez

Manila, December 6, 1905.

[1] Vicente Fragante, one of the Philippine government students in the University of Wisconsin (1906), an Ilocano, says that the term mangkukulam is used in Ilocos to signify an invisible being. Whenever anything is lost or disappears, it is supposed that the mangkukulam has stolen it. The term pogot is used to signify a big black man. It is the bugaboo of the Filipino mothers with which they threaten refractory children. In some families an image to represent the pogot is shown to the children to cause them to be good. The pogot is said to inhabit unfinished or deserted houses, and to sit on the window-sill at night where he smokes a large pipe. In sparsely-settled districts the pogot also inhabits santol, tamarind, and lomboy trees. It is the custom of the small Ilocano boys, who partly live the belief, and who also wish to frighten their more timid playmates of the other sex, to make a great racket about the supposed abodes of the pogot, with tin cans and other instruments in order to scare him away. At night when the pogot is frightened or angered, he throws stones at the houses. These stones have the power of passing completely through the walls of the house, and strike against the dishes in the place where they are kept. The dishes are, however, unharmed, as neither are the people who may be struck by those stones. Ansisit is an Ilocan term for a sort of scarecrow, which is used to scare the children into goodness. It consists of an old coat through the arms of which is thrust a stick, while another stick is placed at right angles to it, thus enabling the coat to be set up or moved.

The Manila newspaper La Democracia, of August 29, 1903, contains an item in regard to some men who were hanged for killing a “witch.”

[2] Noceda and Sanlucar’s Vocabulario de la lengua tagala defines abobót, the same word as abubut, as a basket woven from rattan, which has a lid.

[3] Native of the Philippines, with medical experience, but no title. See Appleton’s New Velázquez Dictionary. Mediquillo is literally “little, or petty physician.”

[4] Probably the Dissertation sur les maladies convulso-clenico-toniques en général ([Montpellier], 1806), by Joseph Boy y Santa Maria.

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