The White Lady of Balete Drive

A woman in white said to appear to drivers on Balete Drive in Metro Manila. Accounts date the first stories to 1949 or 1952, and where the story began is disputed.

Drivers tell of a woman in white on Balete Drive around midnight. CNN Philippines described in 2016 how motorists see her beside a lamppost and then find her in the rearview mirror, sitting in the back seat. The Philippine Star gave another version in 2013: many people believed a girl had been raped and killed on the street by a taxi driver and had come back for revenge, and that her victims were mostly taxi drivers alone at the wheel.

The origin is disputed, and both sides appear in one 2021 opinion piece for ABS-CBN News by Buddy Gomez, a former presidential press secretary. His informant Deogracias Ortega ties the legend to a road accident in 1949 on what is now Eulogio Rodriguez Sr. Avenue. According to Wikipedia's summary, Ortega and friends, among them Leni Garchitorena, were out on a joyride; she was driving, and she was the only one fatally hurt. Ortega recalls that in 1952 a magazine ran a follow-up on the accident alongside reports of ghosts seen on Balete Drive, and printed his high school graduation photo, which his brother had given to a visiting reporter. Garchitorena's family, he says, called him a publicity seeker. Wikipedia sums up his claim as that the whole legend was a made-up, embroidered product of that 1952 article.

Another friend quoted by Gomez remembers it differently. About a week after the accident, this friend recalls, newspapers were already reporting a young woman in white who flagged down taxis and private cars on Balete Drive, got into the back seat and vanished. The friend adds that a police captain was suspended for cowardice after refusing to patrol the street.

Hiwaga sa Balete Drive, a film by Peque Gallaga that ANCX dates to 1988, starred Zsa Zsa Padilla as a white lady who lures Jestoni Alarcon's character, a young man, into a mansion full of old spirits. CNN Philippines calls the street the template for female ghosts and notes the white lady's many returns in Halloween television specials.