by Shalu Sharma
My mother and I held down the store as best as we could so that my father could stay in the hospital with Amit. Dad refused to leave the room; he slept in a chair next to Amit’s bed. He was afraid that Amit would wake up, cry out for his granddad, and be afraid if he was not there. My father began to look old, worn out and it was breaking my heart.
Amit was the light of his life and my father was helpless to save him. Doctors were helpless to save him and we could do nothing but watch as a five year old boy got weaker and thinner every day. We were losing Amit! Still, my father never stopped telling him stories and never stopped reading to him, determined that Amit could hear his voice and that it would somehow bring him through the darkness and back to the light.
One day, there was a problem at the shop and I needed dad to come handle it. I left for the hospital and upon entering the room; I could see that my father was praying while holding Amit’s hand. I paused, not wanting to interrupt. When I saw that he was done, I told my dad that he was needed at the shop and that I would watch Amit.
My father nodded, kissed Amit on the cheek and then he kissed me on the cheek and said, “I love you very much.”
“I know,” I replied, “I love you too. I will be here when you return.”
“He will wake up tonight,” my father said and left. It dawned on me that my father no longer looked as old and tired as he had been. He looked like a man who had just gotten a huge weight off of his shoulders. I glanced at Amit and took his hand, wondering why my father was so certain that Amit was going to be waking up tonight.” He had not said it in a hopeful way but rather as if it was a fact, something he knew for certain.
Around midnight, I woke up from my spot in the chair to hear sounds of movement. Amit was moving! I called for the doctor, who came running. Amit was out of the coma and his fever was lowering. He was not having any seizures and his eyes looked bright.
“Grandpa kept the monsters from getting me,” Amit said and I hugged him tightly, crying. My father would be so happy that Amit was awake and getting better.
I called home, and got my mother, who was crying. “Your father,” she said, “died, about two hours ago.” I sat there, stunned. Two hours ago was when Amit woke up. There is no doubt in my mind that my father made a pact with God. My father traded his life for Amit’s life and God accepted the offer. There is no other explanation for how Amit was suddenly able to wake up when he had been at death’s door.
My father had known when he left that he had made a pact. He knew Amit would wake up because God had told him so when my father offered to trade his life for his grandson, to give Amit the chance of a long and happy life.
***
Amit today has now grown up and has become a doctor and works as heart surgeon in a hospital in Delhi. He loves his job and is extremely kind hearted individual. God bless him.
Ghost Near The Bedside
Although I had a few paranormal experiences but I tend to keep an open mind. I do not completely dismiss it outright like some people do but at the same time, I do believe that many of the strange happenings can be explained. If there are ghosts then there have to be God as well. I always think that opened closets can be explained by drafts while noises and creaks and groans in a house could be attributed to ghosts. But I would like to keep my options open and not run to the ghost busters as soon as I hear a creak in the house.
When I was living in Delhi, I received an email that ended up setting off a chain of events that shook me completely upside down. I received an email from a friend of a friend. I knew her vaguely as I had met her once or twice at my friend’s house. The email sounded distressing and seemed as if she wanted my help. My friend had told her about a couple of my personal paranormal experiences and she wanted me to help her and come up with a rational explanation.
***
The email went like this:
I am begging for your help. I know that we have only met in passing but I need your help. I am at the point right now where either I am going crazy or my house is haunted. My husband thinks I am crazy and he may be right. My marriage is crumbling because he does not see what I see. I need validation that I am not crazy or if I am, then I need help. Either way, I am afraid and at the moment alone.
Let me explain what is happening. We moved into this house about three months ago. The house was about twenty years old and in good condition. When asked about the prior tenant, the property agent simply said that they left and offered no more information. There was no indication that there was anything unusual about the house, none at all.
I did notice that I was not sleeping well. Normally I sleep very soundly but I found that I tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable and would sometimes have the feeling of suffocating. Soon, I started waking up in the middle of the night, usually around 2 am and even though the house was quiet, I had a deeply uncomfortable feeling. I felt dread and fear and would shake and cry.
My husband told me that it was just the stress of moving because he slept like a rock and he felt nothing ominous in the middle of the night as I did. Then, I started to see her. I would wake up and see a woman, with untied hair, but her face all in shadows, just a black shadow where her face should be but I always got the impression that she was looking at me. She would be standing by the side of the bed and when I woke up, she would turn and walk into the wall. Right into the cabinet in the wall!
Surely by now you must think that I am mad and I half fear that I may be. Night after night, I see her. My husband, he never sees her. He is fed up with me waking up screaming and pointing to a figure that he never sees.
Please, I beg of you. My husband is away on business for a week, come to the house. Please see if you can see anything or if I am crazy. God only knows if I am really seeing this woman or not!
***
I read the email twice, curiously. I did not know what to think. Who thinks about ghosts going into a wall? My first thoughts were that it can’t really be a ghost but this email had so much emotion. I recalled the woman who had written it, she was always level headed and rational, so unlike the person portrayed in the email. I decided that I would go. I would prove to her that her bedside ghost did not exist and that she was suffering some sort of mental breakdown so that she could seek medical help.
I packed a bag and followed the directions to her house. She looked worn out when she opened the door. She had bags under her eyes, she looked pale and she trembled slightly and at every noise, she would jump.
“I will sleep in your bedroom,” I told her. She nodded and showed me the room. I noticed how her breathing increased as we entered the bedroom, just being in the room in the daytime scared her. Interesting! She certainly believed that there was a ghost in the room every night. I had already decided that it was probably a reflection off of some light through her bedroom.
That night, I made sure to close the shades so that no external light would shine through the window; I was still positive that she was only seeing reflected light and in her sleepy and anxious state, her brain was translating as a human figure with unbound hair. With my friend on the couch and with me in her bedroom, we went to bed.
It was dark when my eyes opened and I frowned. I do not typically wake up in the middle of the night but I had a tingling feeling all along my spine that I was not alone in the room. “Are you there,” I called out, expecting to see my friend in the doorway but instead of my friend, there was a figure.
I sat up with a gasp, a woman, not very tall was standing at the foot of the bed, and her hair was falling forward, putting her face in shadows. Her hands were at her sides, and I knew that she was looking at me, even though I could not see her face. I held my breath, stunned at what I was seeing and then, the figure just walked into the cabinet in the wall and was gone. I jumped out of bed and turned on the lights.
“Did you see her, “my friend said, “You saw her?” I was still staring at the wall, trying to find a rational explanation but my brain could not come up with one. I
could NOT explain what I had just seen. I pushed a lock of hair back off of my own face and realized that my hand was trembling. I was shaken up but determined to get to the bottom of this.
The next time, I went to bed armed with a flashlight. When I woke up, I could tell from the way the hair on my arms and the back of my neck was standing up that there was a presence in the room. I clicked on the flashlight and pointed the beam of light towards the foot of the bed.
You hear people say that they screamed in fear. Never had I screamed in fear until that night. As the light of the flashlight hit where the face should have been, there was just darkness that seemed to shift and move. I screamed and as I screamed, the figure screamed and rushed towards me!
Instead of attacking, the ghostly apparition went into the built-in wall cabinet, the same section of the wall that she always disappeared to and I felt myself sink to the floor. I could not spend another night there so I went back home, allowing my friend to come with me, at least until her husband got back. When he returned, I explained to him what I had seen, and pointed out the exact section of the wall.
He studied the cabinet in the wall, “this section of the wall is not flat; it is almost like it had been knocked down and was rebuilt.” He used a hammer to break out a section of the wall and then with a cry he pushed us out of the room. Unsure of what was going on, we sat in the living room while he called the police and told them that there was remnants of a skeleton in the wall.
I dared to peek around the corner, stuffed in the wall, was a skeleton. The tattered clothing was the exact same clothing that the ghost always wore and the straggly, thin strands of hair on the dried scalp were enough for me to tell that the ghost girl of the house was the ghost of whoever was in the cabinet.
“She was trying to tell us where to find her,” I said, still only half believing that I had witnesses the ghost of the poor dead girl. As it turns out, the couple that had lived in the house twenty years ago, only one of them had left the house. After the first year of moving in, the wife had disappeared and the husband told everybody that she had run away with another man.
After twenty years, he had left the house. It was only when my friend and her husband moved in that the ghost tried to communicate, and since it was a man who had killed her, she tried to show my friend where she was buried in the wall cabinet, only she could not speak.
As it turns out, those who see ghosts are not crazy and I no longer roll my eyes or try to find a rational explanation for things because I am a witness to the fact that not everything in this world can be logically explained.
Possession By A Dead Man’s Spirit
For many, possession is something that they see in the movies and they forget that it actually happens. I know it happens; I have seen it. The dead do talk and sometimes, they take over the living. Let me tell you my story and you can decide for yourself if you think possession is real or just something manufactured by the movie industry.
I loved when we visited my grandparents in the village. The village was very rural surrounded by paddy fields all around, it was a lovely place. My cousins and I would always have fun and the “pepal” tree in the courtyard was our favorite spot to play. One day, we were playing under the tree when we heard shouting and then a lot of voices. My uncle shouted for us and we came running, eager to see what was going on. Much of our family was there. My father and uncle were holding down a man - my granddad’s cow herder. In the villages, farmers who were slightly well off would have someone to herd their cows. My granddad had one too.
The cow herder was yelling incomprehensible things and his eyes were rolled up in his head so all we saw was the whites of his eyes. The man was thrashing around, shouting gibberish, trying to break free from my father and uncle. He would bend over backwards so far that I was sure that his spine would break. It did not seem humanly possible to bend the way he was trying to it.
We tried to catch some of what he was saying, but it was just shouted gibberish and some of it sounded like it was not words at all, just sounds and odd sounding syllables.
“Go clear out a cot” my uncle shouted to us and we ran inside, clearing off a cot and moving it towards the center of the courtyard. My uncle shouted for us to get a rope and my cousin ran to get it, bringing it back quickly. Another man took the rope and my father and uncle tried to get the cow herder onto the cot but he fought against it.
It took three more men to help my father and my uncle to hold the cow herder down and then another person to tie him tightly to the cot. They tied him to the cot with his hands down by his sides so he could not reach out and grab anybody and his legs were tied so that he could not kick. The entire time, the cow herder jerked his head around, shouting, fighting his bonds and shaking the cot. I half feared that he would break free from the rope and attack us.
His eyes were still rolled up and then suddenly he went still. The silence was almost as bad as the shouting. His eyes went back to normal and he regarded us quietly.
“How did I get here,” he demanded, “Untie me at once. I wish to go home. What are you doing to me?”
Something was very wrong, the man was our cow herder but suddenly he seemed as if he did not know as at all.
“Who are you,” my uncle demanded to the man tied to the cot. The man gave his name, I cannot recall his name at this time but he was a man who lived a few houses away in the same village. He was not that well liked in the village, he had a reputation for being a bad man and we had always been cautioned to steer clear of him. He was a known gambler, and he had often cheated on his wife and often beat her. He also had a reputation for land grabbing and while not much is known about his past, it was known that he had left one village quickly after cheating several of the men in the village. The man had fled rather than take responsibility for his crimes.
The cow herder was no friend of this man but yet he claimed to be him. His entire demeanor had changed. The cow herder was a friendly man, with a kind face and expressive eyes. Now, his face was sullen, his brow was furrowed and his eyes were squinty. There was nothing friendly about his face, it looked mean and even evil. It was unnatural, seeing the cow herder, our friend, glaring at us.
My uncle told him that he was not the man from a few houses down that he was our cow herder and he just laughed.
“Not anymore,” he laughed. He then began to scream and curse, rocking the cot from side to side. I flattened myself against the wall, scared. My uncle and the adults went outside to discuss this very bizarre occurrence but I hung back, afraid to move. Finally, I got my courage up and started to inch towards the door and the movement caught the man’s eye.
“I’m scared,” he said, pleadingly. Indeed, his eyes shone with tears and he looked just as scared as I am sure that I looked. “Help me,” he said. I inched closer to him, and just as I was nearly to his side, his eyes rolled up and he wiggled one arm just enough to nearly grab me. I screamed and ran from the room. The cow herder continued to scream after me, words that made no sense but the look on his face was no longer scared, it was evil and it was a hungry look.
He shouted that he would be free again, that he had more life to experience, and we would not keep him. He actually moved the cot over to the other side of the room by his thrashing around. I stayed outside, peeking through the window or the door. I was terrified. The man who was shouting sounded nothing like the cow herder.
My uncle had concluded that the cow herder was possessed. Something had possessed him while he had been out in the field with the cows and my uncle had to perform a village exorcism ritual to get rid of the demon inside of the cow herder.
The exorcism was very strange, something that I had not seen before. My uncle stuffed red chilies into the ears of the cow herder, which made him howl in anger.
Using an old shoe, my uncle tried to force the cow herder to drink water from the shoe but the cow herder tried to spit it back out. Finally, my uncle forced him to drink the water. My uncle began to recite verses from the ho
ly Lord Hanuman Chalisa, and during these verses, the cow herders thrashing increased. He was now shouting threats to my uncle and to my granddad, and even to us children. The things that he said he would do to us were vile, evil things. The cow herder had a good, kind heart so we knew that that this was our evidence that he was possessed. Never would he harm any of us, or burn our house down to the ground as the demon was saying that he would do.
My uncle never lost any resolve to exorcise the cow herder, even though the threats grew more and more horrible. I was sobbing by this time, huddled with my other cousins. The cow herder had his eyes rolled back, straining against the ropes, the veins in his face and neck were so pronounced under his skin that I thought that they would burst through his skin.
My uncle then took some stones from the street and held them in his hand and he began to recite mantras for exorcising evil spirits. The first time he said it, the cow herder roared in rage, the demon within him recognized the mantras and it was fighting. He tried to shout over my uncle but my uncle recited the mantras in a steady voice, holding the tiny stones in his hand.
When he was done with the mantras, he said it again, still holding the stones. Over and over again my uncle said the mantras and with each recitation, the cow herder grew more violent, more enraged and the crude, violent threats that he were describing that he would do got worse and worse. I sat with my hands over my ears, trying to block out the sound of his voice but it did not work. His voice echoed in my head.
My uncle recited one special exorcism mantra one hundred and twenty one times and then when he had said it for the last time, he threw the tiny stones over the body of the cow herder. The cow herder’s body flexed so that his back was arched against the bonds as best as it could and he screamed, a primal rage of a scream and then he stopped screaming and sagged, limp against the cot.