As a child, we always experience being scolded by our grandparents, parents or even our own ‘manang’ (elder sisters). They either punish us with asin, belt or even scare us with cebuano mythical creatures like ’sigbin’ just to change the way we behave or to mellow us from an afternoon of non-stop playing. They will always scream their lungs out, “hala sige ki-at naa bayay sigbin diha sa likod”. This type of scolding has worked for me at first but as soon as I grew more ‘horns’, a harsher punishment was done.

But I have often wondered how a ’sigbin’ looks like. I have heard a lot of stories about it from folks in our province. One of these is that ’sigbins’ are actually spies of aswangs (witches) and that they are kept in ‘banga’ or in jars. They never describe it in details but they say it looks like a kangaroo. Many have claimed to see one but there are no proofs of its existence. Over the years this curiosity of mine about the creature has slowly died out.

Not until the emergence of the band ‘Junior Kilat’ when they included a track from their very well-received critically-acclaimed album called ‘Original Sigbin’, my curiosity was then rekindled. This poses a lot of questions in my mind. According to them ’sigbins’ are stories that are only known around the Visayas provinces particularly Cebu. True enough, some old folks who usually tell stories about ’sigbins’ are found in the Visayas provinces. But are ’sigbins’ originally Cebuano? How does it look? Where can it be found?

I may ask these types of questions about the mythical creature over and over again and it might be that I won’t find any answers to them but all I can say is that the stories of every folk in big towns or hidden barrios are very much well weaved into details that one would feel that these stories actually happened. Stories and myths such as the ’sigbins’ is truly a gem into our rich heritage as Cebuanos and it has added a little pinch of spice into our childhood memories!!!!

(I’m still hoping to see one though..Heheheheh)