The balete tree

A tree that Philippine folk belief has long tied to spirits. A missionary chronicle from 1738 describes people honouring it, and Wikipedia says some still see it as home to beings such as the kapre and tikbalang.

Juan Francisco de San Antonio, whose 1738 Crónicas appear in translation in Blair and Robertson's The Philippine Islands (1906), wrote that the people he described would worship old trees, above all the one called balete, and that people of his own day still treated it with respect. He said they also brought gifts to stones, reefs and headlands, and he put all of it down to what he called their natural fear. He also wrote that they knew one supreme God, whom the Visayans called Lauon and the Tagálogs Bathalà.

Mabel Cook Cole's Philippine Folk Tales (1916) records a belief that spirits dwell in stones, vines, cliffs, caves and baliti trees. No one sets out on a journey or clears a mountain field, Cole writes, without first asking these spirits to stay calm and send good harvests.

Wikipedia says that in parts of the country some people believe balete trees house engkanto such as diwata, kapre or tikbalang, and that sorcery rituals are sometimes held in the hollows the tree forms. It adds that some people advise against keeping a balete as a house plant, saying it draws ghosts.

John Maurice Miller's Philippine Folklore Stories (1904) puts the belief into verse. A being lives in the balete, anyone passing must say tabi, and anyone who forgets is visited at night by the Asuang, who throws stones until the victim dies of fright. That grouping of the tree's spirit with the aswang is the verse's own. Aswang is a broad umbrella term, and tikbalang, kapre and dwende are separate beings from it.