Former Philippines presidential Press Secretary Trixie Cruz-Angeles, who served bloody dictator Rodrigo Duterte during his six year reign of repeated waves of extrajudicial vigilante violence against people who may or may not have actually been affiliated with the drug gangs he targeted, waxed nostalgically in an interview last week about her boss telling her he’d had late night encounters with ghostly presences in the Malacañang presidential palace, Politiko.com.ph reports.

“He would work overnight, sometimes late into the night because he would read everything that he would sign. So of course as the night grew deeper, he did not like to work alone in the room anymore. So he would then call for his top staff,” Cruz-Angeles told a Bilyonaryo News Channel program. “The truth about that, he said, ‘I’m scared because there are footsteps.’ He would feel that there were other beings in the room with him,” she continued, adding something about how his top personal security detail agents were all attractive, younger women he liked to ogle late at night.

That counted as a joke in the interview. Either left unsaid in Cruz-Angeles’s TV hit or maybe Politiko just left out of the article is that Duterte is currently in a jail cell at the Hague, awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court for the indiscriminate brutality that left anywhere between 4,000 and upwards of 20,000 dead between 2016 and 2022. Plus another few dozen killed extrajudicially while Hot Rod was mayor of Davao, some of whom he allegedly executed personally while cops had them cuffed to chairs. The interview and the Politiko write-up thus wasted an opportunity to speculate on if the footsteps were made by the departed souls of Rod’s victims, stalking him from beyond.