Hostels, Ghost Stories.

I’ve been in a boarding school ever since class seven and I have six solid years of experience in listening to frequent bells, sharing a room with twenty other girls and eating mixtures of food from everyone’s home. So I can be of a help if you ever ran hungry in the middle of night, five hours after the usual dinner time in hostel. But that’s not what I am going to talk about. What has always amazed me rather than scared, were the various ghost stories in all the boarding schools I’ve been to. Now that’s very interesting because we always had somebody to blame on to when something unusual or even usual happened. If you fell over the stairs, you could say that a spirit just pushed you. If the door hinges creaked, you could say that there are spirits screeching between them. If somebody was ill, then it’s said that s/he has dirtied the ghosts’ dwellings or walked to the bathroom alone in the middle of the night. It was actually very fun to have somebody or many unseen “bodies” to blame onto when something happened and even when nothing happened. For when nothing happened, we’d retell what had happened and blame them again anyway.

In my middle school, we had this story that the hill on which our hostel stood was a graveyard before. There was also a cliff where we believed resided a woman from Tibet who owned a palace of treasures way beneath the cliff. The grandmother from a very wealthy house facing the cliff came to offer incense to the cliff every morning. We made ourselves understand that the woman in the cliff blesses the grandmother and hence the reason for her richness. Nobody dared walking alone or even making noises near the cliff. Sometimes, some people unintentionally shouted near the cliff and it appeared that they fell sick that very evening. Some people said they saw the woman and that she had just one eye like the cyclopes.

Then came my high school where people again said that our hostel stood on a graveyard. This time, I wasn’t sure whether it made sense because in Bhutan, people usually burn the dead. But again they said that it was a battle field. So they couldn’t burn everyone who died. My high school’s horror story was actually the deadliest I ever heard and saw. We actually “heard and saw” the evidences very clearly. Our hostels were nearly half a century old and we could see weird scribblings that people from seventies had done on the walls. What happened was that, a girl got pushed off the balcony when it was only her and there was no chance of falling by herself! At first, I thought somebody just hooked up another story like that of the shrieking beds in the rooms when nobody was there. But similar stories rumored the whole school that we actually had to consult some monasteries and perform rituals. The big story was about the old mango tree behind our hostels. We’ve been told that a palace of spirits have been dwelling under the tree ever since the school started! And since we forgot to clean under the tree, instead some people dumped their garbage there, the spirits got really furious.

Again, I didn’t want to believe all of them because if I did, I had had to live in fear throughout my school year. I pretended like I didn’t care about such stories but I honestly couldn’t sleep well for few nights.

The thing is, I am still not able to convince myself with these paranormal activities that go around us, or what they say they do. Well I am happy and also surprised that my college hostels have no horror stories, or may be I haven’t heard them yet. May be we are too much into science and maths that these horrific stories are blurred. May be the ghosts aren’t really interested in nerdy heads talking to you about how F equals M.

And from what I just wrote, I donot intend to hurt or indirectly hurt any readers in anyway. It’s one of those things I found interesting in my boarding life which would also make some amazing stories. Some people say we shouldn’t fear these so called “ghosts” and instead pity them because they have no actual body and power like us. I actually do want to pity them and not fear them because when I fear them, I really am scared. So this makes it really worse for a person who wants to hear and write horror stories but not get scared.