I feel like almost all of us have heard of spooky stories about certain areas and localities. For instance, most Indians can identify with hearing ghost stories specific to the hills. Likewise, many people speak of ghost/supernatural stories surrounding certain landmarks, buildings and/or areas. Stories which can also be called local legends. So, we’ve compiled a bunch of confessions where people have opened up and shared urban legends they’ve grown up hearing about. And yes, they’re a little creepy.
See for yourself:
1. “I was in a pahadi village a few months back. A local told us the story of meeting a ghost on a trail through the jungle. Apparently, a group of 4 young men were hiking to a town which took them one full day to get to. On the jungle trail, they met an old man and asked him for directions. Then they saw the same man 4 times, standing on side of the trail as they kept on walking. After the 4th time, all of them sprinted till they reached the town.”
– masturr
2. “Grandma called it ‘Peddh Pitta‘ which translates to Big Bird. If it comes and sits on top of your house, and makes a noise, people are said to throw stones in its direction, to drive it away. Now that I’ve typed it out, I am picturing the big fluffy bird from Sesame Street sitting on top of a house and squawking.”
– bana87
3. “Don’t do kheti (farming) at night, it is said a woman who sits on trees lures farmers at night, and then buries them upside down till the waist.”
4. “In our village there is a nahar (canal) which has a puliya (culvert) over it. A dhobi lived near it, and he used to wash clothes near the puliya. During the monsoon the nahar gets flooded pretty quickly. One such day, it rained a lot and water was released into the nahar and the poor guy drowned.
No one goes near the puliya after 7 in the night. There is an aam ka bageecha there, during the summers when there are storms, a lot of mangoes fall off the trees, no ones goes to collect them at night. Some say they can even hear the sound of the dhobi to washing the clothes.”
5. “I have heard stories of a flying matka with a glowing diya in it. In fact, I have also seen it on two occasions.They say the house/person this matka breaks on, dies. Some say it goes to the target’s house and calls his name. If the person replies, a bad spell gets casted upon them. Sh*t my pants the first time I saw it. I had no rational or scientific explanation for what I saw. It definitely wasn’t jugnu or a drone.”
– sainibhai·
6. “My building had some story about an ‘Ood-bilau‘ creature. It was a very huge cat or dog like creature that would jump from building to building and would eat anyone who it’d come across. It would also only appear very late at night, and was almost like a ghost. One of our neighbours said that he had seen it and it had nearly killed him but because the sun was rising, it ran away.
The whole matter came to an end when one of the neighbours shot at a small tunnel in the building which was used for connecting wires. They claimied that its offspring was hiding there and they’d killed it. Don’t remember whether it was a real gun or not but it probably wasn’t.”
7. “You should not catch a bus passing through Aarey colony (Goregaon East, Mumbai) after 9 pm because ghosts travel in the bus after that. Even the conductors don’t try to turn around and look.”
8. “There is a society in Dahisar East (Mumbai), where on the 2nd floor, there used to be a sculpture of a lady in traditional attire (the skimpy kind) in a dance pose in the lobby area. Some people have reported seeing the sculpture move, some others have noticed the sculpture displaying a different pose but only when you go down from a higher floor via lift (the ones with grill doors).”
9. “This happened with my cousin’s family. They had shifted to this new apartment, but there was a famous rumour that during the construction of the building, a child somehow slipped from the building’s terrace. It was said that his aatma still haunts people living there. Everyone was too scared of using the elevator alone so the watchman used to tag along when someone was alone. No one would go to the terrace cause they’d heard a child crying around that place. People had even seen a kid, at the stairs to the rooftop, many times, late at night.”
10. “One of my Maa’s friends lived in a building, in Mumbai. If you’d stand in their balcony, you could see the ‘Tower of silence.‘ So she told us this story about a Parsi lady who had met with an accident, was in a coma and had no chances of recovery. Her family took her off of life support and they took her to the tower of silence for the cremation. The people in that building say that the lady woke up from the coma and found herself lying on the stone bed with a vulture sitting on her chest. She screamed loudly before she dying. After that incident, people of that building avoid standing in their balcony because they can hear that woman scream, a few of them have said they’ve even seen her wandering around at night.”
Every locality has its share of scary stories.