BEHIND THE CHURCH
Besides the marshy area behind the Humåtak Mayor's Office by the river, associated with a murder scene from the 1980s, many people in Humåtak consider the area behind the church to be spooky.
The current San Dionisio Church was built in 1939 but, many decades before that, it had been the site of the Spanish governor's palåsyo (palace), along with other government buildings for soldiers, the sick, military defenses and storage rooms, since the bay was the major port of call for Guam at the time. The rock foundations for these government buildings are still there, hiding in the vegetation.
If the area behind the church is haunted, it is believed to be so because of the location's association with sick soldiers, ship's passengers and others who may have died in the port's hospital. Others believe the taotaomo'na (ancestral spirits) trail leads down from the hills behind the church to the bay through that area.
FOUNDATION OF THE PALÅSYO COMPLEX STILL THERE
AN UGLY MAN
One Humåtak girl, in her teens, was playing behind the church one day with a few other teenage girls when she saw a man also behind the church. She was immediately frightened; it was hard for her to describe the man, but he was scary and she had never seen him before. She and the others ran away.
But not long after she saw the ugly man walking toward her, and off she went screaming.
Yet a third time she was in the bathroom and when she looked into the mirror, the ugly man was behind her. Out she went screaming. On and off, she would see the man. The man stopped appearing only after she had gotten married.
A REMEDY
So the family of the teenage girl burnt some påtma bendita (blessed palm) to ashes, then had a boy in the family (some say it has to be the oldest boy) urinate into the ashes just enough to make the ashes into a paste, and that they applied to the forehead of the girl. The scary, ugly man would disappear for a while. But not permanently until she got married.
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