Darna Zaroori Hain

I have been part of many ghost story telling groups. I loved the group for telling stories that were mostly true and about places that one knew.

My first such group happen to be the family as a kid. It was in the native place where all the children would gather and sit around the entrance of the cowshed in the dark and a cousin or sister would narrate the stories which sometimes were from books. If the story was not scary the surrounding certainly was. The native house is built in the mountains secluded where there are no neighbors nearby and sometimes the silence can be deafening.

Imagine what would happen if one has wake up in the middle of the night and has to pay a visit to the toilet which was built a few paces away from the house with a torch in hand to show the way.

The second group included building friends where we even went ahead and tried calling the spirits through the Ouija board which did not worked out sadly. I came across the third group when I started working. The stories rocked and they were of places that I knew.

We would switch off all the lights except the one where we formed a circle and used to tell stories to each other. I too told a few. One of the incidents that I recall is that after having the ghost story session, we all left for the canteen except for one girl who decided to stay back alone in the night. Sometime later we saw her running towards us; she seemed to have got scared staying alone. The men’s loo was supposed to be haunted, but I never saw anything when I was alone.

The fourth group formed when I ended up working on weekend’s night. One particular incident though had me in splits.

There were four of us from one process and two other (a guy and girl) from another who were seated away from us. They did the shifts for a long time before ours started. The girl’s workstation was next to the window and we had heard talks about her seeing someone outside window. She would never stay back alone even if the colleague went for a loo break.

The four of us started talking about ghost stories and then roped in the guy from the other process too, while the girl was at her workstation. He had a lot of personal experiences in this area. We called the girl to join too which she did later on. After sometime as the story telling came to a halt, the girl went back to her workstation. She was about to sit when the lights over her workstation flickered for a moment. The lights in the department would remain switched off except for the area where we worked was kept on (we kind of liked this arrangement instead of having all the lights switched on).

After that she ran like hell screaming “MUMMY” as we watched her coming towards us. We all were laughing while droplets of tears came out of her eyes. A sight I still remember!!

Somehow I feel that I have imbibed the principle of “Darna Mana Hain” though I do feel that one in a while “Darna Zaroori Hain”. What do you think?

P.S. The post was not sponsored by RGV, I won’t mind if he showed me the money. Thought this post would be apt after trying my hand at a horror fiction. The horror movies of today’s time suck big time.