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University of Santo Tomas

Name: University of Santo Tomas
Address: Metro Manila, PH

University of Santo Tomas is a location reputed to be haunted in Metro Manila, PH. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.

Where is University of Santo Tomas?

Location: Metro Manila, PH
Type: School / university
Coordinates: 14.61, 120.99
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

Why is University of Santo Tomas said to be haunted?

The University of Santo Tomas keeps two histories at two different addresses, and almost every ghost story about it collapses the two into one. The Dominican college opened on 28 April 1611 inside Intramuros, six years after Archbishop Miguel de Benavides died leaving 1,500 pesos and his library for it; his executors did the founding, not him. The campus that people call haunted is in Sampaloc, and its Main Building, Renaissance Revival rather than Gothic, was inaugurated on 12 November 1927. Fourteen years later it became the Santo Tomas Internment Camp, where about 3,785 Allied civilians were still confined when the US 1st Cavalry Division broke in on 3 February 1945. Compiled camp records give 390 deaths, and the worst month came after liberation, when Japanese artillery shelled the freed compound. The campus legends that are actually documented were collected by the university's own student paper in 2006, along with the history professor who took them apart.

University of Santo Tomas, Metro Manila, Philippines — The Main Building at dusk. It is not the university of 1611 — that one stood in Intramuros. This building went up in 1924–27, in a Renaissance Revival style rather than the Gothic our own file used to claim, and fifteen years later it was part of an internment camp. Image: Armanbarbuco · CC BY-SA 3.0

What is the history of University of Santo Tomas?

The campus where the ghost stories are told is not the campus that was founded in 1611. That single fact undoes most of what gets written about the University of Santo Tomas, and it is not hidden: the university says so on its own history page. The founder never saw the place. Miguel de Benavides, O.P., third Archbishop of Manila, made his will on 24 July 1605 and died two days later, on 26 July. He left 1,500 pesos and his personal library so that somebody else could open a seminary-college to train young men for the priesthood. The executors of that will — the Dominicans Domingo de Nieva and Bernardo de Santa Catalina — did the founding. The college opened on 28 April 1611, six years after Benavides was buried, under the name Colegio de Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario, and was later renamed Colegio de Santo Tomas for Thomas Aquinas. It stood inside Intramuros, the walled city, beside the Dominicans' own Santo Domingo church. Everything that makes the institution famous happened there, in Intramuros. On 29 July 1619 the college was authorised to confer degrees in theology and philosophy. On 20 November 1645 Pope Innocent X raised it to a university. In 1680 the Spanish crown extended royal patronage to it; in 1681 Innocent XI declared it a public university of general studies, free to confer other degrees. Charles III added the title Royal in 1785, Leo XIII made it Pontifical on 17 September 1902. The move north is the part everyone skips. Enrolment outgrew the walled city, and in 1927 the university transferred to a 21.5-hectare property in the Sulucan district of Sampaloc. Its centrepiece, the Main Building, was designed by the Dominican engineer Fr. Roque Ruaño, built between 1924 and 1927 and inaugurated on 12 November 1927. It is not Gothic: it is Renaissance Revival, and it was the first earthquake-resistant building in the Philippines, conceived as some forty structurally independent blocks tied together only at the floor slabs. So the Main Building was fourteen years old when the war reached it. The Intramuros campus kept operating until the fighting destroyed it, and only one piece of it ever made the journey to Sampaloc: the seventeenth-century Puerta del Colegio, dismantled on the orders of rector Jesús Castañón in 1953 and re-erected in 1954 as the Arch of the Centuries. Its campus-facing side is salvaged original stone; the side that looks onto España Boulevard is a 1954 replica. On 4 January 1942 the Japanese turned the new Sampaloc campus into the Santo Tomas Internment Camp, the largest civilian internment camp in the Philippines. That is the history that belongs to this address.

Timeline: the documented record of University of Santo Tomas

24-26 July 1605 Archbishop Miguel de Benavides, O.P., makes his will on 24 July, leaving 1,500 pesos and his personal library for a seminary-college, and dies two days later. He founds nothing himself: his executors, the Dominicans Domingo de Nieva and Bernardo de Santa Catalina, carry it out.
28 April 1611 The Colegio de Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario opens inside Intramuros, the walled city, six years after Benavides's death. It is later renamed Colegio de Santo Tomas.
20 November 1645 Pope Innocent X raises the Intramuros college to the rank of university. It is this document, and its 1681 confirmation by Innocent XI as a public university of general studies, that underlies the university's own claim to hold the oldest extant university charter in Asia.
12 November 1927 The Main Building, designed by the Dominican engineer Fr. Roque Ruaño and built from 1924, is inaugurated on the new 21.5-hectare Sampaloc campus. The university had begun leaving Intramuros that year because enrolment had outgrown the walled city.
4 January 1942 Japanese forces convert the fifteen-year-old Sampaloc campus into the Santo Tomas Internment Camp. The date is the one cut into the bronze plaque that the American Association of the Philippines later fixed to the Main Building wall.
February 1944 The Japanese Army takes the camp over from civilian administrators and cuts outside supply. Rations fall from about 1,500 calories a day to roughly 1,100 by November; a camp doctor later reports an average weight loss of 24 kg among male internees over the three years.
5 January 1945 Carroll C. Grinnell, chairman of the internees' executive committee, and three other camp leaders arrested in December are taken out of Santo Tomas and killed. Professor Jose Victor Torres notes that the executions took place at the North Cemetery, not on campus.
3 February 1945 The flying column of the US 1st Cavalry Division reaches the campus at about 20:40 and tanks of the 44th Tank Battalion break the fence. Roughly 3,785 internees are freed; the Filipino guerrilla captain Manuel Colayco, who guided the column in, is mortally wounded.
4 February 1945 The standoff in the Education Building ends. Some 47 Japanese soldiers holding around 200 internees hostage on the upper floors walk out of the campus under a negotiated safe conduct, with an internee acting as interpreter.
7 and 10 February 1945 Japanese artillery shells the campus after the liberation, on the day MacArthur visits and again three days later. Published tallies give 28 dead inside the compound, 16 of them internees. February 1945 becomes the deadliest month of the whole internment, after freedom rather than before it.
1954 Two pieces of memory arrive the same year: in February the American Association of the Philippines fixes its bronze plaque inside the Main Building, and the seventeenth-century Puerta del Colegio, dismantled in Intramuros in 1953, is re-erected at Sampaloc as the Arch of the Centuries.
14 November 2006 The Varsitarian publishes the first systematic inventory of the campus legends. History professor Jose Victor Torres uses it to kill the belief that the site was a burial ground: the archives, he says, show an open field with a swamp.
25 January 2010 The National Museum declares the Main Building, the Central Seminary, the Arch of the Centuries and the open spaces around them National Cultural Treasures, the first time buildings of an educational institution enter that roster.
3 June 2022 At the Baccalaureate Mass the Rector, Fr. Richard Ang, O.P., contradicts the university's best-known superstition from the pulpit: walking out through the Arch of the Centuries early does not get anyone debarred. "Hindi po totoo 'yun" - that is not true.

Is there a rational explanation for University of Santo Tomas?

The published record on Thomasian ghost stories is unusually good, and it argues against almost everything that circulates. The Varsitarian, the university's own student paper, inventoried the campus legends on 14 November 2006 in a feature by Rieze Rose T. Calbay. What it found is specific and locatable: a knocking felt inside a first-floor toilet cubicle in the Main Building, tied to a student said to have hanged herself there; crying heard from Room 406 of St. Raymund's Building, tied to a Commerce student who jumped from the fourth floor in 1987; a singing woman on the fifth floor of the Music Building; a figure glimpsed in the Ossarium technician's room. None of these is a corridor "heaviness", and none involves footsteps in the tower. The article's most useful source is the sceptic. Jose Victor Torres, a history professor in the Faculty of Arts and Letters, told the paper flatly that the 21.5-hectare campus had never been consecrated ground: "The archives have concrete evidence that UST was not a cemetery, but an open field, with a swamp." He also disposed of the assumption that internees were killed on the premises: four men were taken out of the camp and executed, he said, but at the North Cemetery, not on campus. Torres is not a debunker by temperament — he told the same reporter that in 1987 he and two friends greeted a man in a Dominican habit in Benavides Park at midnight and found him gone seconds later — which is exactly why his archival correction carries weight. His verdict on the rest was blunt: "Some people create the stories they fear. And some invent ghost stories just to entertain others." The university has since done the same thing in public with its best-known superstition. The legend that a student who walks out through the Arch of the Centuries before the Baccalaureate Mass will be debarred was contradicted from the pulpit by the Rector, Fr. Richard Ang, O.P., at the 2022 Baccalaureate Mass: "Hindi po totoo 'yun" — that is not true — adding that as an Arts and Letters undergraduate he and his classmates walked through it all the time. When The Flame surveyed the same superstitions in 2023, the explanation offered by Asst. Prof. Paul Castillo of the UST Publishing House was psychological rather than supernatural: the myths answer "a need to explain certain phenomena" and give students something to hold on to. What remains, once the folklore is set aside, is a documented mortality that needs no ghost. The compiled camp records give 390 deaths at Santo Tomas between January 1942 and March 1945, with people over sixty making up 18 per cent of the population and 64 per cent of the dead — and the worst month of all came after the liberation, not before it.

Can you visit University of Santo Tomas?

This is a working university of tens of thousands of students, not a heritage site with a ticket office. The campus occupies 21.5 hectares between España Boulevard, Dapitan, Governor Forbes and Lacson Avenue in Sampaloc, Manila 1008. Gates are staffed, entry is controlled, and there is no night access and no ghost tour of any kind. There is, however, a legitimate way inside the Main Building. The UST Museum of Arts and Sciences occupies part of it and is open to the public from Tuesday to Friday, 8:30 to 16:30. It closes on Mondays and on Saturdays — Saturday visits only by special arrangement approved by the museum director — and shuts entirely during academic breaks, public holidays and bad weather, so confirm before travelling. Admission is 50 pesos for the general public and 30 pesos for non-Thomasian students with ID; it is free for UST students, staff, faculty and alumni with ID, for ICOM members, for teachers accompanying school groups, and for senior citizens and persons with disabilities with valid ID. Groups of fifteen or more should email [email protected], with special arrangements made two weeks ahead. Telephone +632 8781 1815. A dress code is enforced — no spaghetti straps, no rubber slippers — and photography is allowed for personal use without flash. Two things are worth finding once you are inside. The bronze plaque installed by the American Association of the Philippines in February 1954 is on the wall near the Main Building entrance, and its wording is the camp's own epitaph: internees "suffering great physical privation and national humiliation from January 4, 1942, until liberated February 3, 1945". And the Arch of the Centuries stands at UST Plaza Intramuros, on the Espana side — the seventeenth-century stone facing the campus, the 1954 replica facing the street. The Main Building, the Central Seminary, the Arch and the open spaces around them were declared National Cultural Treasures on 25 January 2010. Treat them accordingly. The nearest transport is the LRT Line 2 stop at Legarda or the many jeepney and bus routes along España.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-14 · How we verify our content

University of Santo Tomas

Where is University of Santo Tomas?

Why is University of Santo Tomas said to be haunted?

What is the history of University of Santo Tomas?

Timeline: the documented record of University of Santo Tomas

Is there a rational explanation for University of Santo Tomas?

Can you visit University of Santo Tomas?

Sources consulted

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University of Santo Tomas

Where is University of Santo Tomas?

Why is University of Santo Tomas said to be haunted?

What is the history of University of Santo Tomas?

Timeline: the documented record of University of Santo Tomas

Is there a rational explanation for University of Santo Tomas?

Can you visit University of Santo Tomas?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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