Almost all old colleges and universities have
haunted tales, shadowy memories or may be just weird rumours. I cannot tell for
certain whether it was a ghost or not but certainly it was something ghastly. It
happened in 2007, while I was graduating from one of the earliest Central Universities
of India. It was my first year and I was still trying to cope with the extreme
winter temperature. It was a chilling December night; and let me tell you,
whatever the temperature one is experiencing inside any city in general; in a university campus it further drops 2 to 3 degrees, due to all greeneries around. So, the
approximate temperature of that night in the hostel campus was not more than 5°Celcius.
It was past 2 o’clock and nature called me so loud that I had to go out quite
unwillingly. As said earlier, being a very old institution, the architecture
was obviously very old, which included huge pillars, garden area surrounded by
rooms on all sides and broad, long corridors leading to the common wash-rooms.
Mine was the second-last room which made it even more pathetic to walk all the
way to the end of the corridor covering an L shaped path. My pace reduced when
I saw someone sitting in the garden at that hour covering herself from top to
bottom in a white cloth or a shawl. The outline of the figure seemed like, she
was sitting, with both her legs folded toward herself, head down, in such a way
that it was touching both the knees and arms wrapped around them. At first
I thought it was one of the many JULIETs in our hostel, engaging in romance;
but to my utter astonishment, she was still sitting there on my way back, not
moving an inch. I took the other corridor to see her from the front but there
was nothing to see as she was all wrapped up even from the front. It looked
like a mummy, for a split second I wanted to go down to the centre of the
garden to investigate, but as soon as the adjective mummy came to my mind, I was the least curious human on earth. I hurried
back to my room, into my cosy bed. How can someone sit like that in such an
hour of this wintry night, without even moving an inch? Even breathing needs
certain proportion of body’s displacement. Either she was too a dedicated lover
having a spat or someone who couldn’t feel the chill. As soon as the latter
part of the sentence struck my head, I had got a chill running down my spine,
like the one's I used to read in books.
The next morning,
when I narrated the entire episode to some of my friends, they too seemed
terrified. And to all my surprise, during our regular hostel attendance that
night, our warden told us never to roam around alone at night, for certain
security reasons. I tried to think of some reasons but could not find any. It
was hard to find a reason when you are surrounded by so many high wired walls.
Later, as years
passed by, many stories came on to surface like, there was a clinic adjacent to
the first year’s hostel and the garden was the place where several infants were
buried. Once, it is said that, during the construction of the hostels,
skeletons of children were found underneath the soil of present day’s garden,
which gave birth to several stories after that.
….I believe,
sometimes the best way out, is not to over-think something. After that night, I
did the same… rather, didn’t.
StayBlessed!
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