Ghost stories from India

The Last Crossing

Ravi was a television repairman in the late 1980s, and his beat-up scooter was his lifeline. He lived on the outskirts of a small town, where the roads were barely...

Read Story →

The Ladder to the Loft

My grandmother used to tell me about the summer she turned twelve, the summer the Kulkarni family’s old wada in the dusty town of Satara felt more like a prison...

Read Story →

The Lamplighter’s Vigil

In the winter of 2006, I was living in a half-finished apartment block on the outskirts of a town that never quite slept. The streets were a maze of narrow...

Read Story →

The Liminal Frequency

Mira had always been attuned to the in-between. As a child, she’d feel a pressure in the air before a storm, or a sudden chill in a sunlit room. Her...

Read Story →

The Terrace of the Unseen

My name is Arjun Mehta, and in the autumn of 2001, I was a ten-year-old boy living in the dusty town of Jodhpur, Rajasthan. The incident that people whisper about,...

Read Story →

The Rusted Weathervane

The summer I turned fourteen, my parents sent me to my great-aunt Maren’s farm in the high desert of Nevada. It was a dry, dusty place, nothing like the lush...

Read Story →

The Hollow at the Bend

The summer I turned fourteen, my family moved to the outskirts of Vellore, to a dusty town called Pallikonda. Our house, a crumbling colonial relic, sat at the edge of...

Read Story →

The Stillness on the Stoop

After the transfer, we moved into a third-floor flat in a sprawling, gray city. I, Devika, along with my husband Arjun and our two boys, Rohan (six) and little Kabir...

Read Story →

The Hue Shifter

I first noticed it with my son, Leo. We were sitting in the garden of my sister’s cottage, watching the last of the sun dip behind the pines. He was...

Read Story →

The Mist Walker of Mirewood Lane

My grandmother’s cousin, Elara, told me this story when I was a child, and it has haunted me ever since. It happened in the winter of 1968, in the small...

Read Story →

The Glass Chrysanthemum

The strange occurrence I’m about to share didn’t happen to me. It happened to my younger brother, Leo, who was twenty-six, newly married, and expecting his first child with his...

Read Story →

The Lantern’s Vigil

In the monsoon season of 1985, the city of Anandpur, nestled on the banks of the Khadki River, was known for its ancient stone bridge and its twenty-seven post offices....

Read Story →

The Lathe’s Last Turn

Mira was a practical soul, the kind who balanced her checkbook to the penny and never read horoscopes. At nineteen, she was already a fixture at the City Technical Institute,...

Read Story →

The Hollow Clatter

I moved to the outskirts of Nashik three years ago, into a two-room flat on the second floor of a weathered building named ‘Sai Residency.’ The place was cheap, and...

Read Story →

The Junction of Hollow Pines

The last exam of the thermodynamics paper was at eleven in the morning, and we had spent the entire week burning our retinas under the fluorescent lights of the hostel...

Read Story →

The Weeping Fig

In the arid outskirts of Jabalpur, where the Vindhya hills cast long, crooked shadows at dusk, stood a house that the locals called ‘the hollow one.’ It had been empty...

Read Story →

The Face in the Fountain

I was nineteen when it happened, two years ago, in the city of Jaipur. I was a student at a prestigious performing arts academy in the heart of the old...

Read Story →

The Game of Nines

In the winter of 1984, in the narrow lanes of our town, the evenings always belonged to the children. My cousins and I, along with our friends, would gather in...

Read Story →

The Weight of the Fruit

It had been a year since I last put pen to paper, and now this new story surfaced from the memory of my father’s younger brother, a man I called...

Read Story →

The Observation of the Glass-Eyed Woman

I have never been a superstitious man, not in the traditional sense. My childhood was steeped in the logic of science and the promise of technology. I devoured books on...

Read Story →

The Pale Branch

I first noticed the tree when I was twelve, three years after my family moved to the outskirts of Valladolid, a dusty town in the heart of the Yucatán. I...

Read Story →

The Bell That Counts

The train from Siliguri had been delayed, so I didn’t reach the junction town of Ghoraghat until half past four. The sky was already the color of bruised plums, and...

Read Story →

The Weight of Dry Grass

When my grandmother told me this tale, I was eight, and the memory has stuck like a burr in wool for over fifty years. It happened to her father, a...

Read Story →

The Iron Rain

It was the summer of 1978, and my father, Elias, was seventeen, living with his mother and two older brothers in a cramped tenement in the port city of Verram....

Read Story →