I have read a few of the mermaid stories you have written about on your website. A teacher once told our class about similar tales from the Philippines. Are they real?
"The year was 2000 and I was 17 years old taking an extra-curricular class in my senior year. The class was regarding world history and specifically about the Philippines. The woman teaching the class was a historian/anthropologist who had spent her last ten years living and studying in the Philippines. After telling us the important stuff the last five minutes of the class convo drifted off-topic to her daily life there.
Being curious kids that we were we kept prodding for more personal info and eventually started getting stories of scary encounters with "creatures" native to that area. She told us that mermaids were very real. Mermen and merwomen were not fairy tales but real inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. She said the mermen would come out on certain nights and pull themselves up the shore and inland! Some mermen even brought their 3 pronged trident with them as a weapon and they would pull themselves into the city in search of people out too late unprotected at night.
The merwomen would sing and lure fishermen and children to be drowned. She started telling us of the wild ghost dogs but a parent listening in jumped in and told her this was inappropriate to be told in a school. The lady actually got in trouble for sharing these stories and we had a brief "apology" lecture where we were assured that those were just crazy stories and none of it was true and she was out of line for saying otherwise.
As you can imagine they've been burned in my mind and mermaids have fascinated me since. Do you think that these creatures are real? I've read a few on your blog and I'm fascinated with the stories." H
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