Indian Ghosts & Legends

New-South-Welshman

Just tonight, I saw a dark figure out of the corner of my eye while watching TV, and it kind of freaked me out a bit. Anyway, this sparked the memory of ghost stories while I was in India, and how many people I met in the rural areas (and a few in Delhi) telling me about ghosts, and ghost stories which they all think is absolutely true. I enjoyed all these stories quite alot, they scared me, but I love being scared.

I was freaked out by many legends in India, such as witches whose feet are pointed backwards, ghosts sitting on high branches in mango trees watching you in the middle of the night, and ghostly carriages in villages.

I was wondering if you fellow I-Miker's have any stories, or have heard places you have been to which you think is haunted in India? Have you been to any places where the locals have insisted to keep a superstitious ritual to ward off evil? Ventured into places where you which made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? Please tell us your story.

__________________
Mr. Burns "Non-violence never solved anything!"

PeakXV

It's a great thread topic. Not sure how many "average travellers" would put alot of thought to it ... but if there was ever a land that had ghosts - India would be it.

In William Dalrymple's film documentary "City of Djinns" he interviews Dr Jaffrey who states that Djinns are like ordinary people with the exception that they have no shadow. After hearing that I have found myself looking for shawdowless people in Old Delhi - haven't spotted anyone to date!

In "The Temple Tiger" Jim Corbett describes a hillman named Bala Singh who "swallowed the demon of Trisul". He was perfectly fine and in excellent physical condition .... and then quickly died.

Corbett was quite bewildered and unnerved by the episode and although he tried to have Bala Singh examined ... they could find nothing at all wrong with him ........

__________________
We shall not cease from exploration and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started ...and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot

Don't go to India ~ Pre-trip Warnings & Misconceptions?

IndeGuru

Once on a business trip, came back to my room after dinner, just before going to bed was watching History Channel on TV, they were showing making of 'The Exorcist' They had the author talking who first wrote the book, the author mentioned that this was based on true incident that happened in mid west of US, they then had a clipping showing an interview with the father who performed the exorcism on the boy(it was a boy but in the movie they showed a girl) I was really scared, i wanted to change the channel but just could not, a could not sleep for the next 2 days i was in that room. Though i have no personal experiences but i know there are few things that are unexplained...

New-South-Welshman

When I was travelling rural India in 2004, I was told not to swim at particular points in a certain river, because that's where certain people drowned, and they told me that the ghosts of the people who drowned there, are looking for "friends", so the ghosts drown them. I didn't really believe it, but it sure freaked me out a bit, so I ended up not swimming in any part of the river.

Back in Australia, I remember back in 1996, when I was 11 years old, and seeing an Indian woman in a blue sari standing outside my bedroom door staring at me. Being 11, I screamed my lungs out for my dad and explained what I just had seen. That was just the beginning of odd events that started happening around my house. They seemed to have died down around 6 months ago, but I don't get scared like I used to.

IndeGuru

Sure you were not imagining? Where did the woman spring up from, that too out side your bedroom door? Where did she go after you screamed?? What was she like?

New-South-Welshman

Well. It was a balmy sumemrs night and my bed was diagonal to the door. As I said, I left the bedroom door open so there would be good ventilation. Anyway, I had this habit of waking up in the middle of the night and getting myself a glass of chocolate milk, and then head back to bed. Anyway, it was that time of early morning again and I woke up pretty groggy, and rubbed my eyes and was about to get out of bed. Anyway, I saw my mum standing outside my door staring at me, but then it just hit me. Why would my mum be wearing a sari, in the middle of the night, and just stare at me. At first I told her if she could get me a glass of milk, but she just stood there and continued staring. At this point I got a bit nervious, and realised that it wasn't my mum. I yelled for my dad and put the blanket over my head and waited until my dad got to my room. He got there what seemed to be ten minutes later to me, and he shook me asking me what was wrong, and I told him exactly what I saw, so that night I slept in my parents bed.

What the "ghost" was like. Well, it was around 5'2", had a sari on, but she had part of her sari over her head. It was a royal blue sari with a red, what looked like rose, border. She had her hands infront of her and her face, I couldn't really focus in on that. That was the weird thing. I could make out the border of her sari, but not the face, which should of been alot more easy to describe. Anyway, that was the first of my ghostly encounters. Who would of thought, an Indian ghost?

Spirit of Havelock

Spooky India stuff from my old website:

In Alipore (Calcutta) late one sultry evening in October 1999, I sat on a balcony with Sonia - my then fiancée. We were peacefully talking, when my eye was caught by a reddish light slowly descending from the clouds, straight down into the city. It probably took about thirty seconds to land - whereabouts I cannot say, for it simply disappeared behind some distant buildings.
This I thought was a curious event. I spent about 20 years of my life living quite close to Heathrow Airport, (the world's busiest) and I am well accustomed to seeing aeroplanes land. I knew well that sometimes, at night, when an aircraft comes in directly in front of an observer, it can appear as if the lights are descending vertically from the sky - and I presumed that this was the case now. I put the matter out of my mind, even though I was sure there was no airport in that direction.
About three minutes later I saw another identical light appear from the clouds and do exactly the same thing - but land in another part of the city! This was even harder to explain, I knew helicopters in the process of landing did not behave like this, and besides, Calcutta was not graced with so many airports. UFO's over Calcutta? Well, I suppose not, but ridiculous it may be - I saw what I saw.
'What on earth were those?' asked Sonia.
'I'm not too sure, helicopters I suppose, only...' I slouched further into the deck chair. 'I don't really see how they could be... that's very strange isn't it?'
'I wonder if there's going to be another one?'
'You know, where I come from, they say when you see stuff like that, such things are UFO's driven by Aliens', I said with a smirk. 'Little grey coloured dwarfs with big heads and bug eyes.'
'Yes, we've got those back home as well,' said Sonia, in a cool matter of fact manner, referring to the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya.
'You've got Aliens back home?'
'No, Ash coloured dwarfs - everybody knows about them.'

I do not have any great convictions regarding this subject, but I must admit that this conversation - coming so soon after the unexplained lights descending into Calcutta, was leaving me a little spooked. 'How do you mean - do they land and come out?'
'They're called bwoit. They live in a forest down in a valley near Cherrapunji. Nobody likes going down there. People get stones thrown at them, but they can't see who's doing it! The little people are seen sometimes. There are lights down there every now and then - strings of them. Why do they stay down there though? It's so damp. Why don't they come into the towns?'
It was strange the way she was discussing this - as if she were referring to the occupants of a neighbouring village and not to... well - bwoit!!

I had been to many countries and had been told stories about UFO's before. For example, I lived in Montevideo for three years. I taught English to a bank executive who once gave me a blackened stone, which he said had been picked up by him personally from a circle burnt into the ground: a spot where witnesses had said a UFO landed. Another pupil of mine claimed to have seen a UFO one night whilst sat on a beach making zigzag movements in the sky - but this was the first time I had heard, first-hand, of the famous little grey beings.

Sightings of UFO’s over Calcutta are not exactly commonplace, but they do occur. At 7.20 pm on March 3, 2002, Mr. Aninda Dutta reported that driving from Bidhan Nagar towards the airport his wife’s attention was drawn to a bright motionless light in the sky – ‘twenty times brighter than the brightest star which was visible’. At first he tought it was an airvraft comimg into land, and waited for the bright red and green blinking lights on the wing tips to come into view, or at least he expected to hear the sound of helicopter rotar blades to be heard – yet there was nothing. This object was definitely unearthly – it was probably the planet Venus that sometimes shines most vividly in the night’s sky, but other incidendts around the airport are less easily explained, such as in 1977


In 2000 I saw this Cjerrapunji valley. It is steep, quite inaccessible, densely forested and appallingly damp - indeed, the area is in the Guiness Book of Records as being the rainiest place on Earth! It looked like a dangerous locality to go exploring; real ankle breaking country. There is also the problem of wild animals, which is no joke - elephants and Asian Rhinos still roam in this sparsely populated state. No - as crazy as I am, I was not about to go into this slippery deep craggy valley, in search of mystical magical dwarfs!
But what of such legends in Northeast India? UFO's excite little curiosity in this country, perhaps most people have more pressing issues to worry about, or maybe they are just taken so much for granted. The Hindu religion clearly states that other more advanced beings exist on separate material planets - and a devout Hindu reasons: 'they come and have a peak at us now again in their vehicles - so what!' The standard opinion is that such aliens are often demonic in nature and are best avoided and ignored.
The Ao Nagas of Nagaland believe in a prolific spirit world, principle amongst the lesser spirits are the sky folk (kotakr) and the aonglamla, a dwarf creature with extremely long hair that is occasionally sighted in the jungles and near streams – to see one is actually considered quite unlucky, as it is thought that sickness will follow any sighting.
Oddly enough there are certain parallels between Naga folk tales and ufology. On May 4 1969, a Brazilian soldier called Jose Antonio da Silva was reportedly abducted by creatures that could be described as aonglamla. This distressing event reputedly happened whilst Private da Silva was fishing by the banks of a quiet lagoon, which fits in with the Ao sightings. The beings were described as being 4 feet tall with waist length hair, deep set eyes somewhat larger than a human's, pale skin and mouths rather similar to those of a fish. Australia’s Sun Herald of Jan 26 1969 reported that a craft, twelve metres in diameter and three metres high was seen by a man. He approached the craft and saw a being about 1.67mts tall, with long hair and youngish features, wearing silver coloured clothes!
As for the aonglamla making people ill, it is interesting to note that during the best documented UFO sighting ever, over Mexico City on August 6 1997, some of the witnesses are said to have fallen sick soon afterwards.

Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose - J. B. S. Haldane

UFO sighting in West Bengal - 1852!

In a book from 19th Century Calcutta, entitled The Good Old Days of Honourable John Company I found a curious entry regarding 'four officers who have given their names' who saw a strange light in the night sky. The writer of the report, Lieutenant Mc Leod gave such a precise description as to the object's location and movements that we may conclude he was an artillery officer or a naval lieutenant. In consideration of this report, 'we therefore must accept as fact what we might otherwise have treated as an illusion of the imagination.'
As in that era there existed no flying aircraft, the sighting is put down to a rare natural phenomenon, the object being described as a 'star' for want of a better word.

One evening during April 1852, an hour and a half after sunset, the atmosphere being perfectly clear, and without clouds, and no moon shining, a little haze only, low in the horizon, three of us, Lieutenants Machell, Turnbull, and myself (Mc Leod), saw a star in the W. move and undergo sundry eccentric motions. When first noticed, it was at an elevation of about 12 deg. above the horizon, and its direction from us was about W, 10 deg. S. We imagined it must be an optical illusion, but each of us then looked at it from a fixed position, and brought it on line with some fixed object. The star sometimes dropped down some distance and went off in a zigzag direction, and at times remained stationary. It also varied much in brilliancy and colour, sometimes becoming quite bright, at other times scarcely perceptible. When it approached the horizon, we generally lost sight of it altogether, which may possibly be accounted for, by its getting obscured in the haze. The star once or twice moved to the right; but during the half hour we continued to observe it , it had moved considerably to the left of our position, or to the south, over a space of 8 degrees or more. It described no regular motion, and went off by fits and starts, and varied from its original position in the heavens considerably, as I tested by forming a triangle with it and two other fixed stars. Its velocity too was different at different times.

The Mande Burung

In February 2002 Mr. Nebilson Sangma was out hunting in the sparsely populated West Garo Hills when he stumbled across the Meghalayan Yeti known as the Mande Burung which had last been spotted in 1992. The Mande Burung is one of those giant hairy man-beasts, such as the Yowie of Australia, Bigfoot, or the Mapinguary of Brazil.
According to the Straits Times of Singapore (March 22, 2002) Mr. Nebilson Sangma was quoted as saying: “After overcoming the initial shock, my brother and I observed the gigantic hairy creature for three consecutive days from afar.”
Ten years previously, wildlife experts and biologists had already discovered footprints measuring 50 centimeters (20 inches) in length within the same area - the foothills of a peak in the Nobrek National Park.
This time the creature had gone so far as to erect a hut for itself, conveniently located in a banana grove. According to Mr. Sangma, the creature walked upright like a man and would come into view from time-to-time to feast on the surrounding bananas. After a few a video camera was brought in – but by this time the shy creature had gone and they could only film its house. Yeah right!
As suspect as this may seem, there are a few interesting observations – firstly if these individuals had been interested in pulling off a hoax, why did they not go the Full Yeti Monty and dress one of their number in hairy animal skins and produce a shaky and distant film footage to support their ruse. Secondly, why did they immediately go to the local forest and wildlife officials to report a strange gorilla-like animal, instead of the media? These were indeed strange acts for a pair of supposed practicle-jokers.
The divisional forest officer for the West Garo Hills, Mr. W.G. Momin, thought that they had simply spotted a bear that had somehow got into the area from the distant Himalayan forests to the north, but Mr. Sangma would have noner of it: 'Having read books and watched television, I can differentiate between animals.'

Ghosts & Evil Spirits

"Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room." - Henry Scott Holland

All tribal peoples have tales of various spirits and apparitions. As there are an immense number of tribes in the northeast, it corresponds that there are an immense number of legends. In ancient Assam, Kamakhya was a goddess of ghosts and spirits, who was worshipped in a smasana or cremation ground.
My favourite ghost-related traditions of this area are those that belong to the Nagas, amongst whom, if a tiger was shot, the animal's body was actually brought into the village and buried. The killer was hailed as a great man, but upon his death a dog had to be killed in order that its ghost would frighten away the ghost of the tiger, which would vengefully wait for a rematch with its slayer. Some of these Naga ghosts, it is said, can be heard talking like men and calling out people's names but when one goes to where the sound comes from there is nothing. It is very unlucky indeed to hear one's name called by one of these spirits. The Tseminyu group have a special term, Ramme, for spirits which appear at night as vague black shapes, ' like bears.' To these beings is attributed that very disagreeable type of nightmare in which the victim cannot move. It is believed that when a man has one of these dreams an evil spirit is lying on him, and would hold him down and suffocate him were it not that these spirits are like men, but not quite complete. They lack thumbs and cannot adequately throttle their pray, giving the victim time to wake up before being strangled!
This type of nightmare, whereby a strong malign presence is felt accompanied by a sensation of pressure and paralysis, is often referred to as ‘Old Hag’ in English. It is often preceded by an audible hallucination of somebody or something having entered the room. The Jews called this visitation Lilith, the hairy night creature. The Babylonians called it Lilitu, the demoness of the wind, who seduced men at night. Jung believed it was a racial memory implanted in our genes eons ago when our ancestors were in a murky cave and panicked at the presence of a predator. It is probably responsible for an outbreak of mass panic that occurred in the Nalbari district of Lower Assam where an outlandish wolf-like creature was reportedly on the prowl. Villagers said that the monster had a furry body, looked like a bear and evaporated when rays of light were directed towards it; which sounds as if they were jumping at shadows.
The police and Dr. Karuna Kanta Patgiri were sent to the area and interviewed 16 different victims of these attacks. The incidents seem to have all the hallmarks of ‘Old Hag’ - the victims had been asleep when the ‘attacks’ took place. ‘The people said they first heard a noise on the tin roof of their houses, following which they felt that something was trying to clutch them with sharp nails. But every person admitted they were half-asleep when they experienced this,’ the report said - or then again, perhaps it was the Mande Burung!

Tribal beliefs, foolish or otherwise, are positively manipulated by various government authorities in the Northeast. A number of local authorities have categorized a few ecologically valuable sites as ‘haunted’ or ‘sacred’ to avoid tribal people hunting or cutting down trees or hunting in those areas. It may be deceptive but it is effective, cheap and harmless. In Nagaland mythical monsters, the authorities say, lurk in the hills – or at least they lurk upon the forested hills where logging has become illegal. In Meghalaya the authorities were worried about a cave full of bats – the bat saviour turned out to be a wood godling called Ryngkiew who they said haunted the Pdah Kyndeng Phud Umngei forest, where the cave was to be found. Thanks to Ryngkiew the bats were left alone. Arunachal Pradesh Education Minister Dera Natung even went so far as publishing booklets that specifically document harrowing instances of supernatural attack against individuals illegally fishing in Bek Senyik - an endangered lake in East Kameng district. The local Nishi tribe have been informed that the demonic eels that their ancestors spoke have been proven to actually exist and that they should steer clear of this significant bio diversity zone. Likewise in Assam the authorities are recruiting 'dainis' or witches into the field of environmental protection.

oOo

Calcutta's most famous ghost was that of Hastings himself. Some evenings the deceased Governor-General was said to drive up Alipore Avenue in a coach and upon alighting walked through his old house, seemingly in search of something important. Curiously, the following advertisement was placed by Hastings in a Calcutta newspaper on September 6th, 1787:

An old Black Wood Bureau, the property of Warren Hastings Esqr., containing, amongst other
things, two small miniature pictures and some private papers, was about the time of his departure from Bengal either stolen from his house on the Esplanade, or by mistake sold at the auction of his effects : This is to give notice that Mr. Larkins and Mr. Thompson will pay the sum of two thousand
sicca rupees to any person who shall give them such information as shall enable them to recover the contents of the bureau. What was in the bureau to make Hastings offer such a small fortune for its return? Did his ghost return to Calcutta to search for his miniature pictures and private papers?

After the Hasting's mansion, the most haunted house in Calcutta was reputedly on Theatre Road where, strangely enough, there was no theatre. The road gained its name because the Theatre of Calcutta was located here from 1813 to 1839. According to Montague Massey's Recollections of Calcutta for Over Half a Century (1918): strange occurrences became so 'sinister and uncanny' at No. 5 Theatre Road, that despite its good location, nobody would live there. For many years the afflicted property was allowed to tumble to pieces. Just after the First World War the building was extensively renovated. Soon afterwards Massey wrote: 'If all I hear is correct it has already been let twice, but the would-be tenants cannot get a single servant to venture near the place, so how it will end remains to be seen.'
At Garden Reach there is another haunted locality. A once fashionable riverside location amongst the British, it was also the last residence of the deposed king of Oudh who was followed there by a multitude of his followers in 1857, uprooted by the rebellion of that year. They settled down in a beautiful house once owned by Sir Lawrence Peel (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1848 - 1855). After Garden Reach had become the residence of 'natives' the upper-class Europeans moved elsewhere. The king had a flamboyant personality: he wrote sexually explicit songs and had floors of beaten silver installed in his home.
The opening of the Suez Canal caused the once influential and powerful Oriental Steam Navigation Company to uproot itself from stylish Garden Reach and move to Bombay. Then (calamity of all calamities) the locality became the headquarters of the foreign coolie emigration agencies. When the king died, his enormous band of followers disbanded, and certain Jute Mills took advantage of the new land on offer. Huge and unsightly Tidal Docks and connected wharfs were then erected and the area's charm fell into history. Many decades after the death of the king, when the area had turned into an Industrial eyesore, it was said that within the old palace's outbuildings the sound of the ankle bells could be often be heard, resonating from the delicate invisible feet of long dead royal courtesans.
Whilst mousing around on the internet I found the following Calcutta-related submission sent by a Ms. Christina Gomes to the Archive X website. Apparently ‘a long time ago’ before her father got married, he had decided to enter into the priesthood.
One night he was awoken by the clattering and rattling of plates and cuttlery. He felt quite perturbed by the unexpected cacophony but the other priests did not seem at all troubled. When he enquired about the strange event, he was told that the preist house was allegedly built over a cemetery. The resident priests assumed that the spirits would get annoyed occasionally, which explained the crashing noises. Since her father was new to the job and not yet a priest, he was determined to try and prove to everybody that no gang of "poltergeists" produced this regular disturbance, for he was convinced that the noises had a far more mundane explanation.
One night when the hubbub was in full swing, he descended the stairway to the kitchen and saw all the tableware bashing into each other seemingly of its own accord. He was naturally terrified and flew back up the stairs, ascensding two or three steps at a time, then hid in the bathroom – only to be confronted by the ghostly disembodied head of a hag!
Some time later he was sound asleep in the boarding school students’ dormitory. It was a sweltering night, and they were all under mosquito nets. In the small hours of the morning her father heard the same raucous noise eminating from the kitchen, but this time thought better of it than to investigate as he had since come to terms with the ghostly occurance along with his priestly colleagues - the only difficulty was that the children got really scared.
So he went to check up on them, hoping to calm and reassure these young boys, but to his surprise he found each bed to be empty; until that is he came to the corner of the room to find them huddled up in a bunch with a single mosquito net covering them. On enquiring as to why they had done such a thing, they replied that they had seen a witch’s head in the room! Christina concludes her story: ‘From those and other experiences in that priest house, my dad decided to give up priesthood and begin a normal life without any unexplainable happenings.’
Building upon graveyards is considered as distasteful and eerie in India as elsewhere, but in the more populous states it is often unavoidable. In March 2003, at Rohiam village (near Beldaur) in Bihar, local resident Chowkidar Paltu Paswan thought he had purchased an excellent block of land and was proud to start work on the construction of his new home.
As digging commenced they quickly unearthed a human skull, the workermen freaked-out and the police were called in. The officers began supervise further digging. They found another cranium, and then another, until they had collected almost fifty. The spooked workers told poor Chowkidar what he could do with his job and walked off site. “This must have been a cursed place. I have to think again about building a house here. I cannot allow 50 ghosts to breathe down my neck,” he reportedly said. Experts dated the skulls to around about AD 1800.

Cases of modern hauntings crop up in the local press from time to time. For example on May 1st 2003, The Telegraph reported that Isolation Block-VIII at Beleghata's Infectious Diseases Hospital had one of two resident Bengali poltergeists. According to one group-D staffer who had been employed at ID Hospital for twenty years, the place was ‘infested with ghosts’ - which makes a welcome change from the usual infestations of mice and cockroaches at such places. The Telegraph quoted the hospital worker as saying: ‘Initially, group-D staff and, then, nurses and other paramedical staff started shying away from work there.’

pranavganesh

Though I am not exactly a daredevil.....
But I have stayed in many places which are believed to be haunted or at least their setting was somewhat spooky....and nowhere did I find anything "GHOSTLY"....

But my experience with something inexplicible happened in a multistorey of Navi Mumbai...

I was living for a brief while in a building in Koperkhariane near Vashi....

One day I returned to my building after seeing a film show in a local cinema hall at around 1 am in the night......and took the lift to my flat (it was on 5th floor)....(now my lift was a iron channel type and you could have seen both outside and inside the lift)

After reaching my flat....I got out of the lift... and started opening my flat which was bang opposite the lift..

And all of a sudden I looked back and saw a man in the lift....staring at me...with red eyes...

I thought it is somebody who is using the lift....and turned back....but then it occured to me that I was alone in the lift and the lift hasnt gone anyother floor so as to let anybody else board the lift...

I was stunned and looked back to ascertain who is in it.......and the moment i looked back I saw the lift was going down and i could nt have another look at the man...

The next morning I checked with the guard of the building....and he sais nobody entered or exited the building after me....

nicoel

it happened in maryland actually, in my home town. there are a lot of untrue, scary legends, like that yogurt makes you fat, or garlic is bad for you.

New-South-Welshman

In India, I've noticed that all supernatural people seem to have an odd feature, shadowless, or backwards feet.

Anyway, I heard a story of how there is a tunnel close to Shimla, near Borog, or something like that. The person who made the tunnel dug it from both sides of the hill, and when they didn't meet in the centre, he shot himself. This story was mentioned on Michael Palin's Himalaya, but not the ghost story. People say that Borog, if that was his name, haunts a place near the tunnel, and a train station close by, probably the one resembling his name. I heard this before I watched Himalaya and put the two together. They say that the ghost is residual, as in, it's like a video playing back over, from the actions when the ghost was living. They say he just walks from one side to the other and just vanishes. I don't know how much of it is true, but very interesting.

davey

I've stayed at the MPGH in Delhi there is no chance of Ghosts in that area due to the tapping of the security guard throughout the night with his bamboo stick, great stories though!

rangss

There are many ghosts on IM...well right now I can't see my feet

__________________
...and I took the road less travelled.

arunnegi

another interesting thing mentioned in Jim Corbett's The Temple Tiger" is about moving rays of lights. Basically during nights you can see rays of light moving parallel to each other splitting up and then again joining.

This phenomenon is observed a lot in kinnauri villages. My Dad as a youngster had witnessed this many times...one of my young cousin has also seen this. Villager attribute this to some superstition..one of the version that i heard was dead people walking on the opposite mountain with burning pots on their heads.

arunnegi

there's an ancient temple called Rangrik Tungma in charang village of kinnaur ( Tedong valley) As per legend tibetian robbers left their weapons there before being driven away. It is said that girls are not allowed to touch it. My cousin sis along with her friends trying to dismiss the belief picked them and played with it.
All of them came under a trance sort of thing and started acting weirdly..some started crying etc...this is a first hand account that i heard from her.

In Middle kinnaur and i guess upper kinnnaur too a lot of demons and supernatural things have names . For instance there is a fanmous demon called "deferento". Ask anyone from middle kinnaur and he should be able to tell. Deferento is known to travel from village to village and possess people...its is only after the local devtas intervene that he flees..in fact one thing i heard was that small times devtas cant tackle "deferento".

another supernatural being that i know off is the "ropotok"...it is like a ball of yarn that rolls and trips people during night. now thats a being with some sense of humour.

i'm sure some of the members out here would have heard. Uttam, Andreas anything on this???

machadinha

Deferento, eh. Sounds like some Latin-based name. A quick search would suggest the word today has medical connotations (probably to do with our "to differentiate." Or, to defer, if the two aren't related in the first place?)

Ropotok would seem to be of Eastern European origin, no idea what the word means. Both would be based on Romanic languages. You're sure no one was having you on there, perhaps with the aid of some local goodies?

__________________
Reading tips, all picked up at IndiaMike : INDAX's A Comprehensive Guide To India / Dinoj Surendran's Desi Humor / ITHVC on Culture Shock & Travel Health / JetLag Travel Guides For the Undiscerning Traveller / India Travel Links