The only thing we must fear is the fear that stops us from fighting the real ghouls.

As the world dresses up for Halloween, with plastic fangs and costume capes, here in the Philippines we are faced with a far more terrifying reality. Our scary stories don’t end on the 31st of October; they are the headlines we read every day, stories starring our own brand of localized monsters. Forget the jack-o’-lanterns; our deepest fear is the systemic sickness we call corruption.

We tell our children to beware of the manananggal, the self-segmenting viscera-sucker, a beautiful woman by day, a winged predator by night, who preys on the unborn and the weak.

We fear the colossal kapre, the giant lurking in the shadows of old trees, powerful and unseen, smoking his massive cigar as he watches over his territory. We are wary of the shape-shifting aswang, who walks among us in human form, only to feast on our vital organs under the cover of darkness.

But let’s be witty and honest this Halloween. These creatures of folklore are mere placeholders for the actual terrors that drain the lifeblood and resources of our nation.

The manananggal is not a mythological fiend; she is the corrupt official who splits from her public duty — the lower half of her body, the honest, accountable part, left abandoned while her upper half, greedy and winged, flies off to gorge on public funds.

She is the one who approves “ghost projects” — flood defenses, infrastructure and calamity funds that exist only on paper, sucking the marrow out of the budget meant for the poor and the storm-battered. She is visible during the day, performing her duties, yet is a nocturnal predator feasting on the national treasury’s innards.

The kapre? He is the powerful, entrenched political dynast. Unusually tall and muscular, shrouded in the smoke of influence and backroom deals, he sits atop our institutions — the massive, unmoving figure of power and entitlement. He is the one you can’t see but whose presence dictates the landscape of opportunity.

He guards the mutya (pearl of power) of public office, not for the people, but for his clan, occasionally seducing or intimidating a few to do his bidding while the rest of us are left suffocating in the smoke of his cigar — the smoke of impunity and self-interest.

And the most chilling of all, the aswang, is the very systemic nature of corruption itself. It’s the multi-headed, shape-shifting monster. It’s the ordinary-looking bureaucrat who turns into a money launderer after office hours, the senator who inserts billions into a “pork barrel” provision, the contractor who delivers substandard projects for a massive kickback.

The aswang is a community of predators, perfectly integrated into society, making it nearly impossible to tell the neighbor from the nightly ghoul. They are protected by a pack mentality, their greed a contagious sickness that eats away at the nation’s vital organs — our healthcare, education and infrastructure.

This Halloween is a wake-up call, not just for trick-or-treaters, but for every Filipino who yearns for a clean government. What we should be afraid of is the apathy that allows these manananggal and kapre to operate openly. We should be afraid of a public that has normalized the presence of the aswang in our government hallways, shrugging off one scandal after another as “parte na ng Pilipinas” (just a part of the Philippines).

The true scare is not the sound of a rustling cape at midnight, but the deafening silence of a public that refuses to demand accountability.

What we must fight against is the multo — the ghost of promises past, the specter of billions lost, the lingering injustice of the poor getting poorer while the powerful remain untouched. We must fight the dwende-like mentality of small-time bribery, the everyday under-the-table transaction that paves the way for grand corruption. We must realize that every tiny act of allowing the aswang to feed makes the collective body weaker.

Let this season of masks be a time for unmasking. Let the ghost stories of our folklore remind us that our true battle is against the dark forces wearing business suits, lurking in air-conditioned offices, and whose victims are not just single individuals, but all 115 million of us.

We don’t need garlic or holy water to ward off these monsters. We need courageous truth-telling, relentless vigilance and the solidarity of a unified citizenry to expose the manananggal’s severed half, chop down the kapre’s century-old tree of power and drive the aswang out of our communities and government.

This Halloween, remember: the scariest monster is the one we allow to live. Let’s turn our collective fear into a fierce demand for change, so that next year our scariest stories can once again be just fiction.