
Santan Plaza is a haunted shopping complex located within the Philippine town of Taal.
History[]
Batangas Massacre[]
When the Japanese Empire descended upon the American-aligned Philippines in 1942, the Banaag family — old tobacco barons who made their fortune on the Spanish galleons, seven branches large at the time, with the patriarch Laurentio at their head — went against the grain by fleeing up to one of the northern provinces of Luzon Island instead of holing up in their home province of Batangas.
Six of his seven children deferred to his judgment. Vincenzo, his second-eldest, vehemently disagreed. By 1945, three years into the clan’s exile in the North, he yearned to return to their province and the towns they controlled. He was confident that the locals in the area were loyal, and likely as invested in surviving the war as his family. He believed that they would be able to hide from the Japanese well enough, and that being present would prevent them from losing more than they already had to looters.
On Valentine’s Day of 1945, a platoon of Japanese soldiers swept through the area, brutalizing civilians on the pretense that the locals were American sympathizers. The soldiers gunned down the servants who attempted to warn Vincenzo’s family before they could reach the villa. All members of Vincenzo’s clan save for two of his daughters and a baby boy were killed in their home. The two women survived only because they successfully hid among the corpses in a pile by the stairwell, and stoically withstood the bayonet wounds from soldiers poking at them to see if they would cry out.
In the aftermath of the war, Laurentio fenced off his son’s old property. He left the house standing after cleaning it up as best as he could: an offering to his ill-fated offspring, he would tell people, all the way to his grave.
Ocana Ltd.[]
The ghosts of these war crimes do not rest easy, but human greed knows no bounds. In the 1970s, real estate mogul Noelle Ocana came across Vincenzo’s land and saw an opportunity. The place was perfectly situated for a shopping complex. Locals who knew the story of the Batangas Massacre tried to warn the woman, and one of Vincenzo’s surviving daughters also refused to give up the property to Noelle “for her own good.” Such denial only encouraged Noelle further, however. Armed with their crooked lawyers and a few friends in high government positions, development company Ocana Limited gobbled up the land, paved it clean, and built the mall Santan Plaza on the site.
Ocana Limited was able to discredit the rumors of ghostly floods of blood washing over the walls and floors of the Plaza easily enough. They also succeeded in burying news of the first few disappearances that occurred after dark. But then people began to disappear within the Plaza in broad daylight, and franchise owners began threatening to pull out if the hauntings weren’t resolved. Santan Plaza eats people whole now: blood tax, in place of the offering Noelle Ocana destroyed.
Geography[]
Santan Plaza is a five-story Art Deco mall with New Californian-inspired embellishments. Bushes of pink, orange and red santan flowers were planted all over the area. Their scent always fills the place and sharply picks up whenever a haunting is about to happen. The mall welcomes guests only between 11 AM to 4 PM on weekdays. Locals hang blessed sampaguita garlands and garlic over every available surface and leave statues of saints or images of the Holy Family in nooks and crannies. Most of the stores have closed “indefinitely.” The occasional exorcist performs rites over the weekend, but more than a few priests have been devoured by the mall already.
Parts of the Plaza morph into a spectral hellscape after sunset. The walls, flooring, and ceiling seem to twist and shift between the mall areas that they actually are, and the bygone architecture of Vincenzo’s ancestral home. Partially visible ghosts reenact portions of the Valentine’s Day massacre at unpredictable intervals. The spirits of civilians who had been consumed by the mall cry for help from behind the walls, or scrawl out desperate messages in unsettling substances on windows and mirrors. Of course, none of this can be captured on any sort of permanent media, further building the horrific reputation of the place — it’s just a shopping mall unless one experiences the harrowing firsthand.
Inhabitants[]
The ghosts of Vincenzo Banaag’s family and the servants who have been massacred alongside them hunger to be recognized — but are also desperately lonely. They feel abandoned by Laurentio and the rest of the clan and have been restless ever since they watched Laurentio’s people fence the property off. The Banaags intend to grab as many of the living as possible and have them join their lot. Ocana Limited provided them with the perfect hunting ground in Santan Plaza.
The other ghosts in the area — those who were Vincenzo’s old servants, and the newer ghosts of the people who were consumed by the shopping center — are bound by the emotional power their kidnappers have over the land. Upward of 20 modern victims have been devoured by Santan Plaza. Some of them are poor local cops or security guards who had only wanted to do their jobs and investigate the strange noises within the mall after dark. Others are civilians who entered the Plaza to do their shopping and discovered that they couldn’t escape. Still others are priests who had been sent in by the local diocese to exorcise the ghosts, and ended up joining them instead. Some of them are trying to escape Vincenzo. They will try to aid mortals who are trying to save them, but their desperation to be free may hurt more than help.
Vincenzo’s spectral horde has become unfathomably desperate over the decades. Individual ghosts have flashes of humanity whenever someone manages to recognize them from old photos or from the memories of the province, but the intense emotions that bind them to their doom-site override all else.
The monstrous power they exercise over the area has allowed them to possess Santan Plaza and everything in it as though the mall was a body with its own limbs and internal organs. The ghosts move walls, open the floors like mouths, manipulate security doors, and toss things around at their leisure like poltergeists. They are able to supernaturally terrify victims and at night can manipulate the Santan Plaza itself, manifesting monstrous jaws or other traps out of walls and floor or twisting labyrinths corralling victims into flesh-eating features. The ghosts are bound to the Plaza and repelled by sampaguita garlands and garlic. (The latter does not prevent the ghosts from manipulating the mall to attack, though.)
References[]
- HTR: Hunter: The Reckoning 5th Edition, p. 202-204