Ghost stories from India

The Coin and the Cracked Tile

The afternoon sun beat down on the dusty parking lot of the Fairview Flea Market, turning the air into a thick, gritty soup. I trailed behind my friend Maya, past...

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The Mango Grove Lament

Every summer, I traveled with my family to my grandparents’ home in a small town in the eastern part of the country, famous for its orchards of sweet, golden mangoes....

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The Muddy Path

In the village of Kharagpur, nestled between the mustard fields and the dense mango groves, there was a pond called Chhath ka Talab. It was a small, murky pool, hidden...

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The Corn Husk Ritual

Mara had always been a quiet observer of the world, but her dreams were anything but silent. Since childhood, she’d seen slices of her own life unfold in vivid, tactile...

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The Unfinished Keepsake

I moved into the flat in the autumn of 2019, a year after our wedding. The building stood on a quiet lane in the older part of Pune, a five-story...

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The Fifth Step

The first thing I noticed about the building was the smell. It wasn’t rot or mildew, but something older, like dust from a forgotten archive. My friend Rohan had invited...

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The Lullaby of the Rotating Fan

I grew up in a sprawling ancestral house in the hills of Himachal Pradesh, a rambling structure of slate and deodar that had stood for over a century. My family,...

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The Unmoving Spectator

Three months have passed since the festival of the gopuram, and still I find myself glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see that figure again. My name is Arjun, and...

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The Ghat Courier

Arjun, a 17-year-old from Varanasi, was in his final year of high school, facing the relentless pressure of engineering entrance exams. His father, a retired government clerk, had enrolled him...

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The Loom of Hollow Threads

I’ve always thought of my grandmother’s house as a body, its rooms like organs, its corridors like veins. But that summer, for my cousin Meera’s wedding, the house seemed to...

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The Scent of Wintergreen

This happened during my second year of graduate school, in the old converted warehouse that served as our shared apartment. The place was cavernous, with brick walls and pipes that...

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The Salt Wife

In the coastal town of Greyharbor, where fog rolled in like a shroud and the sea gnawed at the cliffs, I, Elara, had a tight-knit group of friends: Niall and...

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The Cartographer’s Last Silhouette

In the monsoon-saturated heart of the Satpura range, where teak trees stood like ancient sentinels and the air tasted of wet earth, my grandfather, Harpreet, had carved a life from...

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The Monsoon Tenant

The hostel stood at the edge of the hill town, a five-story concrete monolith that overlooked a valley of terraced fields and a winding river. I was a final-year literature...

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The Photograph in the Corridor

A year after we moved into our new apartment on the outskirts of Pune, my mother began complaining of a recurring presence in the hall. Our home was a modest...

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The Faded Veil of Khopoli

In the sweltering summer of 1967, Meera, a young bride recently married into the Deshmukh family, moved to the small town of Khopoli, nestled between the Sahyadri hills and a...

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The Hollow Feast

I never put much stock in the supernatural until the autumn of 2011, when my grandmother’s death brought us to a place I’d only heard whispered about in family lore....

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The Last Kiln

My first brush with the impossible happened when I was six, in the damp autumn of the year the old brickworks burned. The town called it the Fire of the...

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The Wall That Breathed

I never thought I would become a believer. For years, every creak in the old house where I grew up was just the wood settling, every flicker of light a...

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The Night Shift of Broken Lights

My mother, Priya, never believed in ghosts either, or at least she thought she didn’t. She worked as a nurse at a small clinic in the town of Ashford, a...

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The Fifth Candle

My grandfather, Arjun, was a railway guard in the dusty town of Jodhpur, where the sun scorched the earth and the wind carried whispers of the Thar Desert. He lived...

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The Salted Glass

The idea of contacting the dead had always fascinated me, but my first attempt ended in disaster when a friend jokingly challenged the spirit to prove its existence and our...

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The Blue Saree of Winter’s End

It was the winter of 1998 when my friend Leela invited me to her ancestral home in a small town in the hills of Himachal Pradesh. The house, a sprawling...

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The Cobalt Silence

The apartment on the seventh floor of the Coral Residency had always been quiet, a small sanctuary above the endless hum of Mumbai. That’s why I chose it, for my...

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