Diplomat Hotel (Dominican Hill)

The building on Dominican Hill began as a holiday house. In 1911 the Dominican order in the Philippines decided to build a rest house for its priests on a 17-hectare property in the cool mountain city of Baguio, and Fr. Roque Ruaño, OP – later the architect of the University of Santo Tomas main building in Manila – designed it. Construction began in 1913 and the retreat was inaugurated on 23 May 1915. A short-lived seminary, the Colegio del Santísimo Rosario, opened the same year but closed two years later for lack of students.

The Second World War gave the hill its dark reputation. Dominican priests and Filipino families sheltered there during the Japanese invasion in 1942; the building was later occupied by Japanese forces and, according to local histories, used by the Kempeitai military police, with prisoners interrogated and killed on the grounds. It was heavily damaged during the fighting of 1945 and rebuilt by the order between 1947 and 1948. Accounts differ on details such as who bombed it and how many died, and the victims are largely unnamed in the public record – which is part of why the ghost stories speak of them collectively, as headless priests and nuns.

In 1973 Diplomat Hotels, Inc. bought the property and converted it into a 33-room hotel, run by Tony Agpaoa, a Baguio entrepreneur internationally known – and much criticised – as a “psychic surgeon.” Agpaoa died in the 1980s (sources give 1982 or 1987), the hotel closed in 1987, and the empty building was looted and further damaged by the 1990 Luzon earthquake. It was in these abandoned years that the ghost stories multiplied.

The city of Baguio took ownership in 2005 and renamed the site the Dominican Heritage Hill and Nature Park. On 1 September 2014 the National Historical Commission of the Philippines unveiled a marker declaring the Dominican Hill and Retreat House a national historical site, and since 2017 the shell has hosted art exhibitions for Baguio’s Creative City festivals. In 2022, according to press reports cited by Wikipedia, the city began a rehabilitation programme funded by a ₱15 million conservation grant from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.

Visitors and local guides describe headless figures – often said to be priests or nuns – walking the corridors at night, the sound of clattering dishes and footsteps in empty rooms, screams and whispers, faces appearing in photographs, and the feeling of being grabbed or having one’s hair pulled. A Baguio ghost-tour guide told Kyodo News in 2020 that the reported spirits are mostly harmless.

Reports centre on the ruined interior corridors and rooms of the former hotel, the grounds and fountain area where war victims are said to have died, and the hilltop after dark, when the park is closed.

The Diplomat Hotel is a staple of Filipino TV ghost-hunting segments, horror films and Halloween features, and a fixture of Baguio’s ghost tours alongside the Laperal White House. It is also now a venue for the city’s creative and arts festivals.