Ghost stories from India

The Conviction of Iron

The afternoon light in my grandmother’s den was thick with dust, suspended in the sunbeams that slanted through the lace curtains. I was sunk into the old floral couch, my...

Read Story →

The Clocktower at 2:30

The phone rang at 2:30 in the morning, a sound that sliced through the quiet of the old Verma house like a knife through silk. Meera, who had been dozing...

Read Story →

The Marble Labyrinth of December

My name is Arindam Sengupta, and I was a corporate lawyer in Kolkata. Born and raised in this city of joy and ghosts, I held dual degrees in Sociology and...

Read Story →

The Sack in the Cistern

My sister Priya’s wedding was a grand affair in the coastal town of Kochi, where the backwaters whispered secrets and the old colonial houses held their own mysteries. After the...

Read Story →

The Still Air That Moved

The apartment on Edgewater Lane had always felt too quiet, even for a Tuesday night. Lena had grown up in her grandmother’s house in the countryside, where the wind spoke...

Read Story →

The Stitched Wall

My name is Meera, and I grew up in a family that moved often with my father’s transferable job. We lived in many cities across India, and I lost the...

Read Story →

The Dust Motes in Room 14

It was a dead Tuesday in late October, the kind of afternoon that made the campus feel like a ghost of itself. I was with four others: my friend Maya,...

Read Story →

The Open Door

It was the summer before my fourteenth birthday when everything changed. I was staying over at Mira’s place while our parents went to a wedding three towns away. The house...

Read Story →

The Sixth Window

Marla had always found comfort in the rhythm of the old coast road—the way it curved along the cliffs, the salt air thick in her lungs, and the distant cry...

Read Story →

The Second Shift

It was the winter of 2018, and I was a senior at St. Aidan’s Academy, a boarding school nestled in the hills of Vermont. The campus was a maze of...

Read Story →

The Cart in the Rain

I was sixteen the summer my grandmother went to her ancestral home in Rajasthan. We lived in a sprawling bungalow in Shimla, perched on a hillside, surrounded by deodar trees...

Read Story →

The Whisper of the Banyan

I was eleven when my mother’s younger brother, Ravi, died. The official story was cirrhosis, a sudden collapse in a rented room above a tea shop in the old quarter....

Read Story →

The Hanging Garden of Hollow Eyes

I was seven when my grandmother first took me to the orchard. We’d walk through the tall grass, her hand warm around mine, until we reached the old stone well...

Read Story →

The Ceaseless Flicker

In the autumn of 2014, my mother and I visited my cousin’s new apartment in the industrial district of Marrow Falls. The building was a refurbished textile mill, with high...

Read Story →

The Garden of Wilted Marigolds

My aunt Meera told me this story, and the fear in her eyes as she spoke made me believe every word. It was the summer of 1997, and she was...

Read Story →

The Perplexing Visit

In the autumn of 1998, when I was barely seven, my family and I traveled to the rural village of Ashford Hollow for a week’s holiday. The village was nestled...

Read Story →

The Lens of the Lamp

Maya had always loathed bright light. It wasn’t just a preference; it was a physiological betrayal. A camera flash turned her world into a watery blur, a bare bulb overhead...

Read Story →

The Basket Maker of Dawn

In the half-light of a November morning, when the fog off the Padma River turned the world into a gray, breathing thing, I would pedal my bicycle along the cracked...

Read Story →

The Locked Door of Room 12

In the autumn of 2011, my family moved into the old Meridian Hotel, a grand but decaying building that had been converted into apartments. We lived on the third floor,...

Read Story →

The Cactus Garden

I never believed in ghosts. Not really. Growing up in the dusty outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, I had heard the usual stories about La Llorona weeping by the river or...

Read Story →

The Clock in the Corner

I never believed in ghosts. Not until I moved into the old dormitory at St. Aldric’s Academy, a boarding school nestled in a valley where fog pooled like cold sweat....

Read Story →

The Last Batch of Papads

In the sweltering summer of 2011, my mother, Nalini, had a ritual she followed every year: making papads. She would lay them out on white cotton cloths across the flat...

Read Story →

The Gatekeeper’s Ledger

It was the summer of 2019 when the heat in Kolkata became unbearable. I lived in a rented flat on the third floor of an aging building, its walls stained...

Read Story →

The Mangrove’s Debt

It was the summer of 2010, and I was fourteen, with the restless energy of a caged animal released into the wild. My family had sent me from the cramped...

Read Story →