Ghost stories from India

The Unseen Chamber

My name is Clara, and this is my story. It all began during a school event in the spring of my second grade. The school was buzzing with excitement, and...

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The Last Bell

My name is Elias, and this is what happened to me when I was eight, in the autumn of 1987, at St. Jude’s Elementary. The school was an old, sprawling...

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The Third Floor Light

The fluorescent hum of the office was a constant companion, a low-frequency drone that settled into the bones after a few hours of the night shift. I worked for a...

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The Restless Pathan

This incident happened in 1999 when I was on a holiday visiting my cousin Parag at Lonavala (a popular hill station near Mumbai, India). Parag, at that time was in...

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The Lantern Keeper of Greyfield Hill

In the late eighties, my father was transferred from Mumbai to the misty hill station of Khandala, a few winding roads away from Lonavala. I was in the ninth grade....

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The Last Passenger

Maya had been staring at the same spreadsheet for three hours, the cursor blinking like a heartbeat. The rejection email from her grant application was still open in another tab,...

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The Weight of a Sunlit Afternoon

My name is Arjun, and I grew up in the dusty town of Ratnagiri, where the sea breeze carried the scent of salt and rotting fish. Four years ago, when...

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The Weeping Kiln

In the scorched summer of 1947, thirteen-year-old Elara lived with her family on the outskirts of a dried-up riverbed town called Vermilion Hollow. The town was named for the clay...

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The Hollow Lullaby

The last thing I remembered was the low hum of the ceiling fan and the weight of sleep pressing down on my eyelids. My name is Rhea, and I had...

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The Feathered Witness

My father never spoke of it until I was nearly thirty. He had kept the memory locked away, buried under decades of skepticism and the quiet rationality of a man...

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The Staircase Listener

My exam prep had driven me to the attic room, the one with the private balcony that overlooked the city’s jagged skyline. It was a recent addition to our otherwise...

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The Call in the Night

In a small village nestled between rolling hills, a group of young women often gathered to weave beautiful fabrics. One evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, they finished...

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The Charkha’s Lament

In the heart of rural Bengal, where the monsoon-scalded fields stretched like ragged quilts and the nights were loud with the chirring of crickets, my grandmother, Meera, was a girl...

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The Hollow Ring of Joy

The wedding at Bramblewood Manor was meant to be a celebration of new beginnings, but it became a testament to the old terrors that linger in forgotten places. Meera, the...

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The Summer of Bold Adventures

Years ago, in a bustling town, there lived a boy named Ravi. He was around nine years old and always full of energy. Every summer, his father would take him...

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The Second Slide

That summer in Chennai, the heat was a living thing, pressing down on the tin roofs and making the air shimmer above the tar roads. I was nine, and my...

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The Inheritance of Thorns

It began with a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. My name is Elena, and for the past few months, I’ve been haunted by something I can’t...

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The Tenant in the Light

In the summer of 1994, we moved into a rented flat on the top floor of a three-story building in the arid outskirts of Juárez. The building was called La...

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The Bone Chime of Bhadarwa

It was the eve of Kali Chaudas, the dark fortnight that heralds the new year in the village of Bhadarwa. The air was thick with the smell of damp earth...

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The Third Candle

The oak-paneled study of Rosewood Manor had always felt like a tomb, even on the brightest of days. Dust motes danced in the slanted afternoon light, but the chill in...

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The Last Turn Before Dawn

The fog rolled over the serpentine asphalt like a slow tide, swallowing the jagged edges of the cliffside. On any other road, the descent would have been a postcard, but...

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The Last Stitch

I hadn’t seen Elias in over a decade. We’d been inseparable as kids, but life had pulled us apart like worn threads. When my car coughed its last breath on...

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The Cinder Maiden

The day we moved into the ochre-walled apartment on Marigold Lane, the previous tenant’s parting gift was a half-burnt joss stick jammed into the keyhole. My husband, Arjun, laughed it...

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The Concrete Garden

In the summer of 1997, our neighborhood was a patchwork of half-built houses and drying laundry. At its heart stood a block of flats that seemed to absorb light, its...

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