Elementals Who Hated Loud Noises

I believe that some elementals hate loud noises and I have three stories to support this.

I live in a small, rustic community located along the northern suburb of Dumaguete City in the island of Negros in the Philippines. Our place is actually a rural subdivision that still had a lot of big fruit trees (usually mangos, jackfruit, marang, etc.) and mahogany at the time of my stories. Most residents (especially the senior ones) still believe that engkantos or fairies still reside among the trees.

My first story occurred sometime during the late 1990's. I just arrived home from work in the late afternoon when our neighborhood was disturbed by a loud noise coming from the open exhaust pipes (i.e., no mufflers installed) of two big Harley Davidson motorcycles that were driven by two long-haired, bearded Americans in their early or middle 50's. These guys had the appearance of typical biker outlaws that wore jeans and sleeveless, denim vests; and rode without any helmets on. They stopped in front of a neighbor's house where they inquired about some bungalows that this neighbor of mine was renting to foreigners. I went out of the house to eavesdrop on their conversation, all the while, the big motorcycles had their motors idling in the typical loud "potato-potato" tempo of Harley Davidson motorcycles.

I don't know what went inside the heads of these biker dudes when they decided to rev up their engines at full throttle causing a loud noise to permeate throughout the entire neighborhood. The noise was so loud that even my two children went out of our house to investigate where it was coming from. This went on for around 10 to 15 seconds when suddenly, both engines fell silent at the same time (yup, simultaneously).

I thought they intentionally shut-off their engines but I was wrong when I saw the two bikers began desperately to re-start their machines using the kickstarters (these were old model Harleys). This went on for around 30 minutes without any success. The two men were already red in the face and cursing from exhaustion (and possibly from embarrassment,too) when they finally gave up and went out of our subdivision to find a mechanic. They came back with a mechanic who immediately examined the machines. According to the mechanic, he was baffled why the bikes won't re-start because he just couldn't find any mechanical defects in them. The situation finally ended around one and half hour later (it was already dark by then) when they finally decided to hire a big pick-up truck to carry the two bikes out of the subdivision. They never showed up again in our place. The senior members of our place believed that elementals had intervened to shut up their loud noise.

My second story involved my wife and her toddler niece. This took place during the early 1990's when her niece was around 3 years old (N.B., the toddler was the daughter of her eldest sister). She was often left under the care of my wife for babysitting whenever her parents were at work. One morning, my wife was in the kitchen preparing lunch with her niece just playing in the immediate vicinity. My wife recalled that the cassette player/radio was playing some pop songs then with the unit on "Radio" FM-mode. As toddlers most often do, the child decided to throw some tantrums when my wife scolded her after she disobeyed her order to quit playing because my wife was about to turn the stove on --- the toddler gave out a loud, shrill scream out of anger and frustration. Suddenly, the radio fell silent.

My wife immediately examined the radio and discovered that the selector switch was turned manually from "Radio" to "Tape" causing the radio's music broadcast to stop. She was extremely sure that there was no cassette tape in the unit and the music she was listening to earlier was from a local FM station. This freaked her out since no one was near the radio when it fell silent. And once again, we believed that some invisible beings were responsible for this occurrence whenever their surroundings are disturbed by loud, irritating noises.

My last story involved my weed whacker (i.e., grass-cutter) and this happened around a year ago. This US-made weed whacker (with a German-sounding name) is a two-stroke machine that produces a noise similar to that of an old-model motocross bike when operated at high speeds. I use this equipment to cut the grass in our backyard, front lawn and the areas outside my fence. I recalled that during my initial operation of this unit, I sometimes got carried away by operating it at full throttle and this created a lot of noise. And, in two instances when I did this for a prolonged period of time (more than 5 minutes), my weed whacker suddenly went dead and won't re-start no matter how hard I attempted to operate the pull starter. I am 100 percent sure that it was not a case of overheating since the unit won't restart even when I let the engine cool down sufficiently (i.e., an hour of cool down). And I know it's not a fuel problem since I am very meticulous on the required fuel to oil ratio whenever I prepare the gas mixture before each use. In both instances, the mechanic who had a look at it scratched his head because his examination always produced results that showed that there was nothing wrong with my weed whacker (it was still technically new at that time) --- he just gave the unit a perfunctory wipe and the unit would restart with no problem at all. Since then, I have decided to go easy on the throttle whenever I operated this unit by not going on full throttle for prolonged periods of time so as not to disturb the silence that our local elementals want to preserve.