Real life ghost stories I’ve heard

Have you heard a real life ghost story? Whenever I’m travelling and meet someone new, this is the first thing I ask people. Have they seen any ghosts that have jumped onto them from spooky corners or any hazy female figures dressed in white that they saw shimmering on a lonely, dark road? I write ghost stories because I’m highly curious about ghosts, monsters and all things that belong to the dark. In this blog, I wanted to share with you a few stories I’ve heard from friends and strangers over the years. They’re all true, atleast to the people who told them to me.

Double suicide in IIT Kanpur

I stayed at the beautiful IIT Kanpur campus for a few weeks a couple of years back. It’s a dense, big campus, a whopping 1055 acres of lung space in the outskirts of the chaotic madness that is Kanpur. At a literary meet, on asking, a student told me about a room in one of the hostels, where there had been two suicides in a row. After the second one, the authorities locked up the room. In the night, some students could hear a rattling sound from the room, if someone was trying to open the door from inside. This student even approached the room door one night when the noise was disturbing him from his late night studies. “The door knob turned even though I knew there was no one inside,” he said. He ran back to his room, firmly shutting the door. “Yeah,” said another, “but the next year the room was cleared and just given to a first year student. The ghost is forgotten.” I wondered if the first-year student had experienced anything, but I never got to talk to him.

The man with a lantern

I heard this story in the mountains somewhere in the Himalayan region. Most people there have various paranormal experiences in their pockets. They tell them as if it’s an everyday occurrence and don’t think of ghost stories as something unnatural, the way we city dwellers do. In this case, an old man told me about a time when he was young. He was walking down a lonely stretch of road at night, in darkness as there was not much moonlight. He saw a man up ahead of him walking with a lantern and called him since it was too dark and the jungle had a lot of snakes and wild things. The man didn’t turn. He reached the man and touched his shoulder. The man turned and the lantern he carried illuminated his face. There was nothing there. No eyes, no lips, no nose. “I turned and ran so hard that I have no idea where I went,” said the old man.

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A dancing table in Switzerland

I got this story from a friend, an enthusiastic blogger who has experienced it herself when she was little. “My great-grandmother had a small round wooden table, a tabletop with a central stand on three split legs that would rock and knock when people gathered around it for a ‘spirit’ session,” she says. Ever the curious, she approached the round wooden table one evening with a few cousins and an uncle, determined to dispel the illusion. When the table started to wriggle and tilted to stand on one leg, she asked her uncle to stop pushing it and freaking them out. “I got an electric shock from the offended table because I refused to believe it could shake on its own accord.”

Read a real-incidents inspired ghost tale based in Manipal

Have any paranormal incidents to share? Put in a comment below. I would love to hear your experiences.