Have you ever had the experience of abruptly smelling the fragrance of a particular flower at night? There is a common belief in my country that if you abruptly smell the fragrance or scent of the "sampaguita" flower (Arabian Jasmine) at night, it means that the spirit of a deceased loved one has decided to pay you a visit.
Despite how absurd the above statement sounded, there is some truth to it; at the very least, it is true that the scent of sampaguita can be detected on certain evenings in my country. Why am I so confident? It's because I've personally experienced this strange phenomenon over and over again throughout the years. As for the spirit aspect, I am unsure because, aside from inhaling the fragrance of the aforementioned flower, I have not experienced anything else that is supernatural in nature.
Now, why must it be sampaguita instead of other flowers? I attempted to investigate the matter but was unable to find a satisfactory answer. Actually, no one, including my mother, seemed to know the answer to the question. Additionally, have you observed that I wrote "certain nights" and not simply "nights"? This was because the fragrance only appeared on the anniversary of my father's and grandmother's deaths and occasionally on All Soul's Day.
Quite a coincidence, wouldn't you say? But it was all true; the fragrance only appears on the specified dates. The first time I encountered the scent of sampaguita was during dinner on the evening of the first anniversary of my father's passing. My mother, who was eating at the time, abruptly stood up upon smelling the fragrance, retrieved a candle from a drawer, and lit it in front of a portrait of my father.
"Your father is reminding us to light a candle for him," she said before returning to her seat.
"What do you mean?" I asked incredulously.
"When one smells sampaguita in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, it is believed that a deceased relative is reminding them to light a candle for him or her," she explained.
As you might expect, I was extremely unnerved when I heard her explanation. But with repeated exposure to the phenomenon over the years, I eventually became accustomed to it.
When Mamang, my grandmother, passed away, we also experienced the same phenomenon on the night of her first death anniversary; however, by that point, everyone was somewhat prepared for it to occur, and we simply lit a candle in front of her portrait when the scent appeared.
Furthermore, this does not only affect me and my family but also other individuals that we know. In all honesty, I've lost count of the number of times I've overheard a relative or friend mention that they smelled the scent of sampaguita at night and believed that their deceased loved ones had visited them.
They would state something along the lines of, "Hey, I smelled sampaguita last night; I believe [deceased loved one's name] just paid us a visit." And no, they were not frightened when they told the story; rather, they were rather enthusiastic.
In fact, they were very enthusiastic. Normally, the notion of a ghost paying one a visit during the night would be frightening, but for us, it was not. Obviously, this does not imply that we do not fear spirits and ghosts, because we do. It's just that other than smelling the fragrance of flowers, nothing else happened—there is no apparition or supernatural phenomenon, if you exclude the fact that one can smell the scent of sampaguita in one's home despite there being no such flower nearby. It's just that one would typically not be afraid of family members visiting, even if the visitors in question were (supposedly) ghosts. That was the case in our culture, at least.
That being said, even to this day, I remain skeptical as to whether the fragrance of sampaguita appearing out of nowhere was a sign that a deceased loved one decided to pay them a visit or whether everything was simply a coincidence. It is possible that we were just unaware of the presence of sampaguita flowers in the area, and the scent we smelled was from these flowers, whose existence we’re not aware of. It is also possible that similar-smelling flowers to sampaguita were involved. Or perhaps our brain was just playing tricks on us and we were simply experiencing an olfactory hallucination (phantosmia). Regardless of the real reason, the fragrance of sampaguita do remind me of my deceased father and grandmother.