Ghost stories from India

The Lantern Keeper’s Bargain

In the autumn of 2005, I spent my fall break at my grandmother’s farm on the edge of the Blackfen Marsh. The farmhouse was a lonely, weather-beaten structure, surrounded by...

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The Last Lantern at Bhalukbari

The hills of Bhalukbari were not like the postcard images of pine forests and tea gardens that tourists carried home from Darjeeling. They were older, denser, and clung to the...

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The Bone Whistle

Every child has a monster under the bed, but mine lived in the coal cellar. That’s what I told myself, anyway, to explain the creaking door at the top of...

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The Humming Breadboard

After my mother passed, the old farmhouse settled into a silence that felt heavier than grief. I inherited the place, a sprawling relic of my childhood, and with it, the...

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The Lantern of the Umbral Flood

In the autumn of 1941, my grandmother’s family took possession of the middle segment of a three-part stone building known as the Millworker’s Terrace, which curved like a horseshoe around...

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The Gravel Tooth

After the first episode of paralysis, I told myself it was just stress. I was a graduate student in a new city, living in a converted attic above a bakery...

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The Lantern Man of Dead Man’s Cove

We were five idiots with a car full of cheap beer and a map that had a red circle around a place none of us had ever been. It was...

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The Night the Bell Wept

In the autumn of 2009, I was twelve, staying with my mother at my grandmother’s sprawling farmhouse in rural Vermont. My grandfather had passed away from a sudden heart attack,...

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The Rainmaker’s Visitor

I have never been one to believe in the supernatural. My name is Arjun, and I grew up in a cramped two-room flat in the bustling city of Kochi, not...

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Arjun, a 24-year-old audit associate at a prestigious firm in Kolkata, was burning the midnight oil on a client’s year-end financials. The sprawling, colonial-era office building, now a modern hub,...

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The Rooftop of the Marégraphe Hotel

In the coastal town of Bellerive-sur-Mer, where the old French colonial quarter huddled against the sea, the Hotel Marégraphe stood as a relic of a bygone era. Its name, painted...

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The Bargain of the Blooming Grove

In 1954, when my grandmother Priya was a girl of sixteen, her family moved to the dusty town of Kumbhalgarh, a place of crumbling forts and fig trees that seemed...

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The Sealed Compartment

When Aisha first arrived in the coastal town of Alleppey, she thought the maze of backwaters and narrow alleys would swallow her whole. She’d come for the JEE coaching at...

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The Locked Gate

I’ve never been the sort to believe in ghosts. I’m a practical man, an engineer who trusts in circuits and load-bearing walls. But what happened in my grandmother’s house in...

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The Last Supper at Koyna

It was late June, and the rain had turned the Western Ghats into a dripping, green labyrinth. Arjun and his four friends—Vikram, Sneha, Rohan, and Meera—had decided to escape Pune’s...

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The Banyan Tree’s Bargain

In the sweltering heart of Madurai, where the Vaigai river whispered secrets to the pylons of the old temple, there lived a woman named Meenakshi. She was a weaver’s daughter...

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The Lantern of the Hollow

The summer of my third year in college found me alone in the family house at the edge of the village of Karmali, nestled among the Western Ghats. Unlike the...

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The River Warden

I’d always considered myself a pragmatist. Ghosts, spirits, the restless dead—they were fodder for campfire tales and cheap horror films, not for rational minds. My friend, Elias, was the opposite;...

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The Coat Rack in Room 4

I was fourteen when I spent the night at my friend Mira’s aunt’s bungalow in the hill station of Kodaikanal. It was February, and the town was shrouded in a...

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The Clockwork of the Mango Grove

In the dusty village of Karuppanoor, cradled by the sun-scorched plains of Tamil Nadu, my grandmother’s tales were not mere stories but warnings woven into the fabric of daily life....

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The Cold Draft of Room 4

I turned eighteen last November, but I’ve never felt like a normal teenager. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been sensitive to things that aren’t there. When I...

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The Chair by the Window

I have always been open to the idea that there are forces beyond our understanding. But for most of my life, that belief remained untouched by personal experience. It was...

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The Vault of Woven Grass

In the autumn of 2004, I was twenty-one and had just moved to the outskirts of Jaipur with my parents. My father’s bank transfer had brought us to a sprawling...

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