Monthly Archives: September 2014

Ever stayed at a place, in the same room, where someone committed suicide? Ever experienced the spirit talking to you? H.A.Anil Kumar did and shared his ghostly encounter with Travel&Deal.

When Sami Van Ingen drove me to his house, somewhere in the north of Finland, from Helsinki, a decade ago, I had already begun to see certain signs. I saw brand new walls of huge houses hung like hangers, in a factory, on the way. In no time, they could be installed together and an empty plot of land would metamorphose into a house in a day. Further, we came across two asphalt-laying machines which were laying asphalt to a wide road, further widening it, remote controlled from an office in Helsinki; and two police men were just watching the overall procedure.

Sami was not driving through a stretch of land but through varying weather which sumptuously reminded me of the ambience in the film ‘Sleepy Hallow’. “The house we live in now was initially a school” he said, unprovoked.

“Why did you buy a school for a house? You are only two people?”

“We got it cheap from the government because the owner of the school committed suicide due to boredom and loneliness” he said. As an Indian, I did not know that the house whose owner is suicidal will be sold for such affordable cheap price! I did not ask him the details about the suicide—when, where, how?

We reached Sami’s house at 8 in the night, wherein it was summer lights, which was equivalent to a cloudy 3pm in Bengaluru. We had a sauna-bath, which for me meant displaying myself nude in front of strangers, since smoke and not water is used in such a bath! It also includes a ritual of inserting one’s body inside minus 12 degree cold water, either in a small pond or even in the Baltic Sea, if at all it flows next to your house. The house was an ex-school, a public building, rather than a modified-school. Something eerie was already in the air, which I realized later, since Sami told me the story of its owner’s suicide, later at night, before I fell asleep, when we had that above mentioned dialogue.

After dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Sami, after sauna with only Mr. Sami, I was shown into the congested dark room on the first floor and they both stayed on the expansive ground floor. It was used as dark room since Sami was a negative-photographer. The room was big enough to contain a bed. Just below the roof, on all three sides were dark curtains suspended from the ceiling. The drive, sauna bath, Hindi bath and the dinner made me very sleepy. He came in thrice in a stretch of forty five minutes with three different excuses, after saying goodbye to me. The first time he came in was to give me a bottle of water to drink, the third time he came in was to say good night.

The night was like a dull day since it was summer. There was so much of melancholic light that I had to close my eyes with the blinder that they usually give in airplanes. However that made me very uneasy because I always felt that I was flying in my dreams, even while sleeping on a bed!

Sami woke me up for brunch, since it was pretty late in the morning. Sami, his wife Lea and I ate sumptuously while he asked me to ensure whether I slept really well. I said I slept well, since I was tired.

“Both the times I came, I saw that you were very comfortable?!” he wanted to make sure of a “yes” from my side.

“Yeah, but what was the screens above hiding?” I insisted. He removed them later to show the taxidermist expertise – an actual tiger, a lion and an elephant were all there above me, while I was asleep, as I had slept amidst them! His dad was an American taxidermist with the Mysore maharaja and Sami visited Mysore almost annually.

“But where are the people? Often I believe since I came into Finland that I have been just roaming and meandering through a film-set like that of ‘True Man Show’? Sami laughed and he had to explain the context to his professor wife. If there were three hundred people per square kilometer, in remote Indian areas, there were only sixteen people in the thickly populated Helsinki! The signs were becoming too obvious for me to ignore!

 “But are you sure you came in to my room only twice?” I was very particular. Sami said “Yes. Once to give you water and then to make sure you are asleep. Sorry for the second visit” he was apologetic without really getting what I was driving at. Something conclusively bothered me all through since I clearly remembered that Sami came in thrice into my room the previous night. The third visit, which was actually the second one, was very distinct. He had brought in a small neem plant sapling to show it to me. He had said that it was the only bevu, a neem plant in the whole of Finland and he had brought it all the way from Mysore. I informed him that the neem leaves are used for curing small pox, chicken pox and for even warding off a haunting. He had made an unusual face of disgust, which was very un-Samy-like and left me on my own then. The next day morning, he had not mentioned about this particular visit with the neem. It was like someone had torn off that second page from a three page story.

Samy called me when my train, which was almost empty, was about to leave. “You know what Anil, a neem plant I had brought all the way from Mysore, which I had firmly fixed onto my kitchen window with wires is missing since today morning. It’s very strange; we never moved it since I brought it to Finland last summer. An Indian comes into my house and an Indian plant is gone! Neem is supposed to ward off evil, but neem itself is warded off by an Indian. That’s very strange!!”

All signs that I had sensed in that journey fell into places—the asphalt machine, the hanger-like readymade walls, the melancholy in the air, the taxidermist room, the neemed-expression of Sami’s second visit.

“Tell me something Sami. Be frank. Where exactly did the owner of the school commit suicide?”

“Well, it was from the very bed you had slept yesterday night. Since you told me that you are an atheist, I thought it did not really matter to you as to where you slept!!” he said.

“Dear Sami, from today onwards, I am no more an atheist, but an Agnostic” I said. He asked me what it means. I said I will explain, but when I meet him in person, at Helsinki.

Venkatesh K N. experienced and shares a reel like ghostly experience; a lonely street with no sign of anyone except a black cat crossing and the strange silence staring at you as you make your way through a graveyard.

Some days ago I was travelling in the night alone along the footpaths of Frazer town in Bangalore, however many do. There was no special importance for this travel apart from the point that I was going late, home of which I was getting used to these days. That day, obscured from my memory of calendar, is because I experienced a haunting experience of which I did not want to remember again. Most of the streets of Bangalore have street lights, but this particular road in Frazer Town running along the huge expanse of Christian cemetery is a road less travelled during night. I deliberately wanted to travel through this space because I was told this was such a haunting space and wanted to experience how was that feeling below my skin to experience of being hunted by ghost of which I did not believe in.

The darkness that occupied this particular road was so dark that even my shadow stopped following me. A surreal feeling preoccupied my mind. My shadow, projected by my presence in an oblique angle to me some times bigger and many times even smaller than me, had grown and conquered the whole space surrounding me, encapsulating its source-myself. I almost felt like a drug travelling inside capsule of infinite length, since I could not see any source of light anywhere. Apparently my mobile was also switched off.  I could not do anything.

But all this was tolerable as they were created in my mind, I could have thought of any other surreal metaphor. The scary part was when everything went out of control. My mind failed to control what was happening outside of it. There was a sudden breeze, a whistling sound screamed around me, as if I was on top of some mountain. This was not an appropriate space for this sound. The leaves that were lying lifelessly on ground of which I was not even aware off started to hit my face one by one, with this came the dust.  My knowledge about ghosts almost made me expect something in white to appear and haunt me. To my surprise this stereotype failed, it did not work. I had to walk for about a minute in the windy street of which I knew nothing because of my fear. Anything could happen here. An absurd Kafkaesque situation might be revealed in front of my blind eyes in such a network forsaken condition. There was no nostalgia here, everything was immediate, but the fear that I was coming to terms with would have been same even twenty to thirty years before. If this street is so deserted today it would have been even worse before. There would have been many people who would have faced similar fear. The fear that I was facing is new to me because I have not experienced this before, perhaps there were such spaces in Bangalore before it became ‘garden city’, ‘silicon city’ and other iconicity that it has gained now, where people feared to traverse.  There were many spaces near my house which was believed to be haunted during my father’s generation but now they have turned into residential layouts with families who find salvation by working in corporate companies.

What brings us back to the haunted street encapsulated by my shadow of which we had diverted from towards the dwindling haunted spaces, is the sudden sound of a tree branches brushing with each other that embraced my ears. I almost sensed that this sound was coming from by back. I just turned back to see the spectacle, I lost the sense of direction for a moment I did not know from where I turned. How much angle should I turn to come back to the same position? All my rationality was shattered at this moment. If someone would have walked in a white sari, I could have easily believed in ghost.  But still I sensed ghost in what was happening to my senses. Suddenly the sound of branches grew big and I heard a tree falling down.  I could not understand any social necessity from this tree fall. How can a tree fall? Can I be surrounded by a group of gundas who will hit any minute? Are they looking for my rationality to go null? Am I the guinea pig towards addition of a new ghost to the city?

I was scared I just could not walk a bit further, my legs started to shiver. I suddenly saw an arch kind of an entrance of which I was very glad and rushed to save myself from my fears and hid behind a bench. The tree was still falling, I never saw it, it was only the sound that narrated its existence. By listening to the sound I was calculating how the tree was collapsing- The transformation of life to death.

To my happiness a light lit in front of my eyes, a cat was playing with a torch. I took the torch and glanced at the place to get to know where I was. To glorify my horrific situation I was in graveyard. The first thing I saw was R.I.P. Everything just went up my nerves. I was so happy that I did not see my name below R.I.P. Some graves also had images of person buried.  Getting to know that I was somewhere in the graveyard, it became easy for me to fight the haunted location.  I took the torch and searched for the watchman’s house. I knocked the door opened in the most normal way possible. The watchman after recognizing my face not matching any of his familiarity he started shouting at me for disturbing his sleep. I just could not think why I had come here. Was I searching for a human presence? I could not grasp my actions. Any way I begged him to allow me to charge my cell phone for fifteen minutes. After my job was done I left the place. I called one of my friends to pick me up which he did. I returned to the place the day after it, everything was normal; there was no sign of a tree being felled. The watchman in the graveyard greeted me.