I was able to get the story from the woman who works for us who I will call Ka-J. and I had some interesting things come up from similar aswang stories I had read before. Here's some of the highlights of the story while I try to work on the transcript maybe for the next few days:
Aswangs could possess people and would often do so for selfish and even petty reasons. The possessed person was possessed for such a petty and miniscule reason that I'm honestly so perplexed. She possessed the woman because she... smelled good???? Like girl WHAT???? Just ask for her perfume brand or her laundry detergent brand holy shit
They fear holy items like crosses and rosaries. The possessed person from the story was cutting up rosaries and that's what primarily gave the aswang away.
The aswang could make the person's voice change. The possessed person was speaking at a strange tone extremely unfamiliar to her children.
The aswang may speak different languages, maybe unintelligible to the average person. I asked if it was in Latin or whatever stereotypical thing, but Ka-J said she could not determine that.
When the aswang was asked "Where did you come from? Above or below?", the aswang answered that she was "From below." implying that aswang do come from hell at least from this one incident.
The aswang exorcism didn't fully work the first time around so they had to do it twice. After the first instance, she was apparently worse.
They dislike calamansi which is something I've seen in some sources. This was done as an emergency way to freak out the aswang.
Folk healers could exorcise the aswang out of the person. Sometimes they may need the assistance of multiple healers. Ka-J. had told me that there were up to 7 to 8 healers during the final exorcism.
Some other interesting bits from the story that was told to me after or are things that seem just a little interesting to not add in but didn't fit the rest of the list:
The folk healers used an item she called "saway" (Note that Ka-J. is Bisaya but considering this takes place locally here, they probably call it a different name in the Tagalog region). She describes it as a brown (stick?) thing with a thorn attached. She says that there's a bit of gold on the item and when it pricks the aswang, the wound doesn't heal. I don't know what this item is, but it's similar to some stories I read where they would use certain tree branches or the buntot pagi (stingray tail) to injure the aswang.
The aswang was apprently a 50-year-old aswang woman. Very specific thing to have come from the exorcism. Besides that, she also gave her name and her "earth address" but Ka-J has forgotten what these were but it's probably pretty local.
One of the folk healers have a YouTube channel where he uploads the cases he handles. I had the displeasure of finding one of the videos and it is genuinely disturbing. It was just a woman crying but there was something eerie about it. I may not investigate further and I'm not going to link it here not only because of its disturbing nature, but this would essentially probably doxx me and I don't want these poor people's faces floating around because of my post.
I will try to get to actually transcribing + translating the short interview from the recording in maybe a couple of days. I think I may need to take a short break though since I feel a little uneasy after hearing and watching all that.
