We could hear him going along the dining hall to the head of the stairs.

Then we heard him shriek. We all rushed out. The lighted lantern was there at the head of the stairs and our fellow guest at the bottom.

Kallu had vanished.

We rushed down, picked up our friend and carried him upstairs. He said that Kallu had given him a push and he had fallen down. Fortunately he was not hurt. We called the servants and they all came, Kallu among them. He denied having come with a lantern or having pushed our friend down the stairs. The other servants corroborated his statement. They a.s.sured us that Kallu had never left the room in which they all were.

We were satisfied that this was also a ghostly trick.

At about seven in the morning when our hosts came we were glad to bid good-bye to the haunted house with our bones whole.

The funniest thing was that only those of my fellow guests had the worst of it who had denied the existence of Ghosts. Those of us who had kept respectfully silent had not been touched.

Those who had received a blow or two averred that the blows could not have been given by invisible hands inasmuch as the blows were too substantial. But all of us were certain that it was no trick played by a human being.

The pa.s.sing horses and the whispering pa.s.sers-by had given us a queer creepy sensation.

In this connection may be mentioned a few haunted houses in other parts of India. There are one or two very well-known haunted houses in Calcutta.

The "Hastings House" is one of them. It is situated at Alipore in the Southern suburb of Calcutta. This is a big palatial building now owned by the Government of Bengal. At one time it was the private residence of the Governor-General of India whose name it bears. At present it is used as the "State Guest House" in which the Indian Chiefs are put up when they come to pay official visits to His Excellency in Calcutta. It appears that in a lane not very far from this house was fought the celebrated duel between Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of India and Sir Philip Francis, a Member of his Council and the reputed author of the "Letters of Junius."

While living in this house Warren Hastings married Baroness Imhoff sometime during the first fortnight of August about 140 years ago. "The event was celebrated by great festivities"; and, as expected, the bride came home in a splendid equipage. It is said that this scene is re-enacted on the anniversary of the wedding by supernatural agency and a ghostly carriage duly enters the gate in the evening once every year.

The clatter of hoofs and the rattle of iron-tyred wheels are distinctly heard advancing up to the portico; then there is the sound of the opening and closing of the carriage door, and lastly the carriage proceeds onwards, but it does not come out from under the porch. It vanishes mysteriously.

To-day is the 15th of August and this famous equipage must have glided in and out to the utter bewilderment of watchful eyes and ears within the last fortnight.[2]

There is another well-known ghostly house in Calcutta in which the only trouble is that its windows in the first floor bedrooms open at night spontaneously.

People have slept at night for a reward in this house closing the windows with their own hands and have waked up at night shivering with cold to find all the windows open.

Once a body of soldiers went to pa.s.s a night in this house with a view to solve the mystery. They all sat in a room fully determined not to sleep but see what happened; and thus went on chatting till it was about midnight. There was a big lamp burning on a table around which they were seated. All of a sudden there was a loud click--the lamp went out and all the windows opened simultaneously. The next minute the lamp was alight again. The occupants of the room looked at their watches; it was about 1 A.M. The next night they sat up again and one of them with a revolver. At about one in the morning this particular individual pointed his revolver at one of the windows. As soon as the lamp went out this man pulled the trigger five times and there were five reports. The windows, however, opened and the lamp was alight again as on the previous night. They all rushed to the window to see if any damage had been done by the bullets.

The five bullets were found in the room but from their appearance it seemed as if they had struck nothing, evidently the bullets would have been changed in shape if they had impinged upon any hard substance. But then this was another enigma. How did the bullets come back? No man could have put the bullets there from before, (for they were still hot when discovered) or could have guessed the bore of the revolver that was going to be used.

On the third night to make a.s.surance doubly sure, these soldiers were again present in the room, but on this occasion they had loaded their revolver with marked bullets.

As it neared one o'clock, one of them pointed the revolver at the window. He had decided to pull the trigger as soon as the lamp would go out. But he could not. As soon as the lamp went out this soldier received a sharp cut on his wrist with a cane and the revolver fell clattering on the floor. The invisible hand had left its mark behind which his companions saw after the lamp was alight again.

Many people have subsequently tried to solve the mystery but never succeeded.

The house remained untenanted for a long time and finally it was rented by an Australian horse dealer who however did not venture to occupy the building itself, and contented himself with erecting his stables and offices in the compound where he is not molested by the unearthly visitors.

There is another ghostly house and it is in the United Provinces. The name of the town has been intentionally omitted. Various people saw numerous things in that house but a correct report never came. Once a friend of mine pa.s.sed a night in that house. He told me what he had seen. Most wonderful! And I have no reason to disbelieve him.

"I went to pa.s.s a night in that house and I had only a comfortable chair, a small table and a few magazines besides a loaded revolver. I had taken care to load that revolver myself so that there might be no trick and I had given everybody to understand that.

"I began well. The night was cool and pleasant. The lamp bright--the chair comfortable and the magazine which I took up--interesting.

"But at about midnight I began to feel rather uneasy.

"At one in the morning I should probably have left the place if I had not been afraid of friends whose servants I knew were watching the house and its front door.

"At half past one I heard a peculiar sigh of pain in the next room.

'This is rather interesting,' I thought. To face something tangible is comparatively easy; to wait for the unknown is much more difficult. I took out the revolver from my pocket and examined it. It looked quite all right--this small piece of metal which could have killed six men in half a minute. Then I waited--for what--well.

"A couple of minutes of suspense and the sigh was repeated. I went to the door dividing the two rooms and pushed it open. A long thick ray of light at once penetrated the darkness, and I walked into the other room.

It was only partially light. But after a minute I could see all the corners. There was nothing in that room.

"I waited for a minute or two. Then I heard the sigh in the room which I had left. I came back,--stopped--rubbed my eyes--.

"Sitting in the chair which I had vacated not two minutes ago was a young girl calm, fair, beautiful with that painful expression on her face which could be more easily imagined than described. I had heard of her. So many others who had came to pa.s.s a night in that house had seen her and described her (and I had disbelieved).

"Well--there she sat, calm, sad, beautiful, in my chair. If I had come in five minutes later I might have found her reading the magazine which I had left open, face downwards. When I was well within the room she stood up facing me and I stopped. The revolver fell from my hand. She smiled a sad sweet smile. How beautiful she was!

"Then she spoke. A modern ghost speaking like Hamlet's father, just think of that!

"'You will probably wonder why I am here--I shall tell you, I was murdered--by my own father.... I was a young widow living in this house which belonged to my father I became unchaste and to save his own name he poisoned me when I was _enceinte_--another week and I should have become a mother; but he poisoned me and my innocent child died too--it would have been such a beautiful baby--and you would probably want to kiss it'

and horror of horrors, she took out the child from her womb and showed it to me. She began to move in my direction with the child in her arms saying--'You will like to kiss it.'

"I don't know whether I shouted--but I fainted.

"When I recovered consciousness it was broad day-light, and I was lying on the floor, with the revolver by my side. I picked it up and slowly walked out of the house with as much dignity as I could command. At the door I met one of my friends to whom I told a lie that I had seen nothing.--It is the first time that I have told you what I saw at the place.

"The Ghostly woman spoke the language of the part of the country in which the Ghostly house is situate."

The friend who told me this story is a responsible Government official and will not make a wrong statement. What has been written above has been confirmed by others--who had pa.s.sed nights in that Ghostly house; but they had generally shouted for help and fainted at the sight of the ghost, and so they had not heard her story from her lips as reproduced here.

The house still exists, but it is now a dilapidated old affair, and the roof and the doors and windows are so bad that people don't care to go and pa.s.s a night there.

There is also a haunted house in a.s.sam. In this house a certain gentleman committed suicide by cutting his own throat with a razor.

You often see him sitting on a cot in the verandah heaving deep sighs.

Mention of this house has been made in a book called "Tales from the Tiger Land" published in England. The Author says he has pa.s.sed a night in the house in question and testifies to the accuracy of all the rumours that are current.

Talking about haunted houses reminds me of a haunted tank. I was visiting a friend of mine in the interior of Bengal during our annual summer holidays when I was yet a student. This friend of mine was the son of a rich man and in the village had a large ancestral house where his people usually resided. It was the first week of June when I reached my friend's house. I was informed that among other things of interest, which were, however, very few in that particular part of the country, there was a large Pukka tank belonging to my friend's people which was haunted.

What kind of Ghost lived in the tank or near it n.o.body could say, but what everybody knew was this, that on _Jaistha Shukla Ekadashi_ (that is on the eleventh day after the new moon in the month of Jaistha) that occurs about the middle of June, the Ghost comes to bathe in the tank at about midnight.

Of course, Jaistha Shukla Ekadashi was only 3 days off, and I decided to prolong my stay at my friend's place, so that I too might have a look at the Ghost's bath.

On the eventful day I resolved to pa.s.s the night with my friend and two other intrepid souls, near the tank.