I WONDER how many of you remember evenings with friends on a bungalow verandah in some small upcountry town in India, swapping ghost yarns as the dusk deepened into night.
Do you recall, as
I do, sitting in shadow, reluctant to turn on the overhead bulb because the
light invariably attracted tiny moths or “flying ants” during their season, and
listening to the shrilling of crickets in the garden interspersed with the
“meduck, meduck” croak of frogs from a nearby pond? The
It was the time for sharing tales of strange and eerie happenings. We’d sip our pre-dinner drinks, shivering slightly in the warm night air, as we listened intently to stories of shape-shifters and other unearthly beings. On moonlit nights, the shadows under the hedges and at the far end of the driveway seemed to lurk and writhe. The trees whispered furtive secrets, and did some hovering spirit whisper back? Oftentimes as we sat rigid with suspense, a bat would swoop under the beams of the verandah and we’d all shriek in horror!
Remember that? If you grew up in Anglo-India you will smile now and say, “Yeah, I remember those ghost yarn sessions. And I remember (Aunty Millie or Uncle Harry or Granny Simpson, or whoever. . .) who could see spirits.” We enjoyed scaring the heck out of one another, didn’t we? So, did you ever meet up with an honest-to-goodness spook?
I did. Come closer now and listen . . .
I’m going to take you with me to one of those old, sprawling railway colony bungalows. The kind with huge rooms and high ceilings.
This goes back to the early fifties, when I was about nine, and we were staying for three weeks as guests of an Anglo-Indian family—friends of my parents, whose daughter was around my age. Stan Hall was a railway officer, just like my dad.
We—my parents, my younger sister, and I—occupied a suite that led off a spine-like corridor running from the front to the rear of the Hall’s bungalow. Mum and Dad had the huge guest bedroom; my sister and I slept in the adjoining spacious dressing room.
It was customary for us children to bid the adults goodnight and be tucked into bed no later than eight. Neither my sister nor I ever had a night-light in our bedroom, nor did our ayah or our mother stay with us until we dropped off to sleep.
Yet going to bed
alone in that
My parents, who occupied the large main bedroom, weren’t exactly comfortable either. Mum had recurring nightmares of being chased through a maze of rooms by a shrieking woman brandishing a blood-soaked axe. Both my parents discovered that it was impossible to lock the bedroom door leading into the corridor. Despite shoving the large heavy iron bolt into place before going to sleep, if either of them woke during the night to use the toilet, not only was the bolt drawn, but the door stood ajar!
Interestingly enough, none of us shared our feelings at the time. I dreaded going to bed, but was afraid of being branded a cry-baby. Mum put her nightmares down to rich food at dinner. I suspect she also felt a bit reluctant to be accused of having a hyperactive imagination. Dad didn’t want to scare Mum about the door being open, and the same thing applied in reverse, so they never mentioned any of this to one another.
Not until very much later.
It was about five
years after this that we stayed again with the Halls—this time in the very
prosaic Fairlie Place Railway Officers’ flats in
“Guess what?” said
Stan, chuckling. “That suite of rooms in our
Did we ever!
Apparently a woman had been hacked to death by her husband in that guest bedroom suite. She’d sought to escape by fleeing from the room, but to no avail. Perhaps that’ s why it was impossible to lock the bedroom door—it was her escape route!
Okay, so now let’s
move on to another locale and another strange episode. This time it’s set in a
flat in Perambur,
An Anglo-Indian ICF officer’s wife dropped by to chat to my mother shortly after we moved in. She passed on some unsettling information.
Apparently the flat next door to ours had a sinister reputation. Everyone who had lived there had lost a male member of the family in sudden and tragic circumstances. This also held true of the family who were currently in occupation: the Moorthys had misplaced their front door key, so their teenage son had climbed up the building’s façade to the first floor verandah with the intention of opening the door from the inside. He’d lost his footing and fallen to his death.
Their remaining child was a daughter, Seema. As it happened, she was my sister’s age and they attended the same school.
When my mother heard this, she shook her head in sympathy, but didn’t think anything more of it, until about a month later, when we were puzzled by an odd occurrence. The front doors of our apartments stood side by side and led off a common landing. Every day at twelve-noon—right on the dot—and then five minutes later, and again at three in the afternoon, there was a rumbling and a vibration like a small earthquake, which lasted about thirty seconds each time. We discovered that this was because the front door of the adjoining apartment where the Moorthys lived was being violently shaken, causing the heavy glass panes of our front door to rattle in sympathy.
A couple of days
after this started, my sister Phyllis was next door playing with Seema, her new
friend and school companion, when the
Seema was referring to a large pipal tree at the back of the apartment block. It was reputedly the abode of a malicious entity, which some claimed was the spirit of a drunkard who had committed suicide by leaping out of the back bedroom window of the Moorthys’ apartment. After that, as my Mum had heard earlier, he supposedly claimed the life of a male member of every family who lived there.
Whatever the truth, our servants were terrified by a series of strange happenings, and often, after dark, they swore they could hear footsteps walking up the wooden back stairs, which creaked under an unseen weight.
The pipal tree itself had a large smooth stone at its base, which was covered with turmeric powder and garlanded with marigolds, pieces of coconut, and other offerings. Several times a day, people would stand at its base, murmuring prayers with their hands folded together in obeisance.
After Phyllis came home from Seema’s apartment that afternoon, she began to run a low temperature. It persisted for a couple of weeks, and since she had no chest congestion, no cold or cough—and her blood tests came up clear—the fever defied diagnosis. Then one day, our dog Blackie escaped from our flat and my sis, although strictly forbidden to over-exert herself, impulsively ran downstairs and chased him across a large open field outside the building enclave. When she returned, unrepentant dog on a leash, her fever broke, never to return. Was it because she’d moved out of the bhooth’s sphere of influence for a short while? Who knows!
Surprisingly, when I went back to Perambur about three years ago, the apartment block, despite its wonderfully spacious accommodation, had crumbled into ruin. Nobody had even bothered to remove the railway officers’ nameplates on the doors, although the building was uninhabited. What really intrigued me, however, was that a wall had been built at the back of the apartment block, partitioning off the spirit-inhabited pipal tree, which now harboured a temple shrine under its branches.
So why had the apartments been abandoned by the Indian Railways? Was it because of a powerful malefic presence? And had the temple been built to appease its blood-thirst? Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate anyone in the vicinity who was able to speak with any authority on the subject.
My last tale about
encountering an otherworld apparition was when a group of us friends spent a
weekend at a little hill-station called Matheran in the vicinity of
Matheran at night is pitch black, so we used flashlights, until we emerged from our hotel’s little side road onto the town’s reasonably well-lit main street. The guys in the group, meanwhile, were horsing around—leaping out from bushes and moaning “Bhooth!”
Then came a moment that none of us was prepared for. Under a streetlight, about twenty-five paces in front of us and walking directly towards us, was a man dressed in a traditional white kurta and dhoti. Apropos our silly attempts at summoning up ghostly visitors, I said facetiously, “Hey folks, look! There’s our first ‘passing spirit’!”
The words were no sooner out of my mouth than the figure evaporated—literally vanished into thin air—and we were left standing stock-still, staring at a stretch of empty road under the street-lamp. We’d all seen him; there was nowhere for him to go. Yet before our very eyes, he’d disappeared without a trace. There were gasps of “Ohmigod!” and, panic-stricken, we all turned around and legged it fast and furious back to our hotel. Most of us had a hard time settling down to sleep that night.
The rest of the story unfolded the next day.
One of the guys in
our party had been unable to travel to Matheran along with the rest of us. He
arrived the following morning, and we met him at the station. On the way back
to the hotel, he pointed to a derelict old brick bungalow along the street.
“That’s the Red House,” he said, and went on to mention that it belonged to a
well-known
The Red House certainly had a brooding secretiveness about it. That afternoon, a couple of us, greatly daring, stood on the verandah and posed for my camera. When we developed the film, a hollow-eyed face appeared to be leering over our shoulders. It was just a trick of light and shadow, but eerie nonetheless.
The house was taken over some years later, given a bit of a face-lift, and turned into a board-and-lodging establishment. A young Anglo-Indian couple told me how they had unknowingly booked into the place for their honeymoon. They discovered that, as darkness fell, the front-desk staff disappeared and no one else was on the premises. Slightly uneasy but undaunted, they lit two candles, which were intended to provide a romantic glow in their bedroom. That is, until the door was suddenly whipped open by an icy wind that screamed, whined, tore off their bed sheets, and abruptly snuffed out the two candles. To their dismay, the electricity had also been cut off. Then, from the shadows in the corner, something chuckled softly. Fumbling around in the dark—she sobbing in terror, he groping for her hand—they fled (still in their nightwear!) to the railway station, where they spent the rest of their wedding night huddled together on a public bench. A short while after hearing this episode, I was told that the building had been abandoned once more.
On my last visit to Matheran in 2001, drawn by curiosity, I headed over to see the Red House once again. It had been demolished for good. The lot had been bulldozed and re-landscaped, and a multi-storied modern hotel now occupies the site. It is garish enough to intimidate even the most intrepid of ghosts.
Well, what do you think, my Anglo-Indian readers? Do you still swap
ghost-yarns wherever you live across the globe? Do you still curl up in horror,
or in giggles, over tales you heard way back when, in
I live in
* Margaret Deefholts, who lives in