Ghost stories from India

The Hollow Station

The weekend trip was supposed to be a break from the city’s clamor. My parents and I, along with my cousin Nisha and her folks, had boarded the narrow-gauge train...

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The Green Lampshade

The summer I turned fourteen, my father’s railway transfer allowed us a stopover in the town of Jalore, a dry, dusty place where the heat shimmered off the roads and...

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The Carved Initials

It was the autumn of my second year at the Northern Institute of Technology, and the midterms were looming like a storm cloud over the campus. My friends, Marcus and...

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The Porch Light’s Pulse

I’ve always prided myself on being a rational man. Ghost stories, urban legends, all of it—I dismissed as folklore and overactive imaginations. But what happened to me three weeks ago...

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The Iron Cradle

The summer of 2005 was unbearably hot in the city of Pune, where I lived with my father. I had just finished my seventh-grade final exams, and the prospect of...

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The Frozen Ledger of Dharmanagar

My name is Rohan, and I grew up in a small village on the outskirts of Dharmanagar, a town nestled in the hills of Assam. My family was deeply rooted...

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The Bell That Never Rang

My uncle ran a fiber-optic cable laying company, and that December we were driving through the arid plains of Rajasthan, chasing a government tender. The village of Kuldhara, long abandoned...

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The Rattling Corridor

I work at a small logistics firm on the third floor of an old, converted warehouse in the dockside district of Visakhapatnam. Our office is a long, rectangular hall with...

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The Hollow Gate

I never wanted to move. The old farmhouse on Wrenwood Lane had been my sanctuary, even with its creaking floors and the whispering drafts that carried my grandmother’s name. When...

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The Lantern Maker’s Vigil

My grandmother, Elara, used to say that the house we lived in was a gateway, but not the kind you walk through. It was more like a held breath between...

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The Lantern in the Mangroves

In the late ’90s, I was a boy of twelve living in a coastal town where the houses leaned into each other like weary old men. My name is Arun,...

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The Cardamom Haze

During my third year of engineering, I found myself in the misty highlands of Meghalaya, not the steamy backwaters of Kerala. My father, stepmother, and little sister were stationed in...

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The Vow of the Iron Temple

Last May, I traveled to Sri Lanka with my family. Though I was born there, I’d grown up in Toronto, and the island felt both familiar and alien. The heat...

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The Tollkeeper’s Ledger

It was the last week of July, and the heat had baked the city into a concrete oven. I was at my desk, fanning myself with a magazine, when my...

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The Perimeter of Silence

In the autumn of 1994, my father was transferred to the Naval Air Station at Arkham Bay, a coastal town that seemed to exist in a perpetual state of dampness....

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The Bell That Tolled for Karim

In the parched outskirts of Kolar, where the red earth cracked under a relentless sun, my family’s sprawling bungalow stood like a forgotten relic. My best friend, Arjun, lived in...

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The Whiteout Ledger

The winter of ’82 had buried the Katterbach Air Base under a shroud of snow so thick that the perimeter fence was barely a whisper of wire beneath the drifts....

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The Lantern in the Fog

My name is Arjun, and this happened during my second year at a small engineering college in a city that never felt truly awake. That December, our college hosted a...

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The Salt on the Windowsill

Six years ago, I drove through the night to a coastal town I’d never visited, summoned by an old friend, Lena. She had inherited her grandmother’s house, a rambling Victorian...

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The Ceiling Thump

It was the summer before my final year at Meridian University, and I had rented a cramped attic room in an old Victorian house on the edge of town. The...

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The Lantern Hour

In the autumn of 2003, I was grinding through my final year of engineering at a college in Nagpur. The city had a peculiar rhythm back then: by 10 PM,...

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The Night She Left Her Jaw

It began in the waning weeks of autumn, when the old textile mill town of Graybrook was draped in a perpetual chill. The students of Bramblewick Academy for Technical Sciences...

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The Harvest Moon Vigil

The summer of ’94 found Arjun stranded in the dusty corridors of the Government Engineering College, his family having fled the oppressive heat of the plains for the hills. The...

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The Cinder-Spirit of the Old Orchard

Our house rose from the bones of a forgotten peach orchard, the soil still dark and rich with the rot of old fruit. My father, a man of practical hands...

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