7 writers of ghost stories in India to read to ring in Halloween 2023

Both Mani Kaul's 'Duvidha' (1973) and Amol Palekar's 'Paheli' (2005), a love story of a woman and a male ghost, were adapted from Vijayan Detha's Rajasthani story Duvidha (The Dilemma).

You must heard of Assam’s puwali bhoot, an army of small ghosts that likes stealing food from the hands of children; the knowledgeable brahmadwoitto, the ghost of a Bengali Brahmin; Kerala’s kuttichathan, a friendly ghost; Bihar’s dwarf ghost Gutiya Deo; Dakan Sakan, a shapeless ghost from Punjab… There are ghosts. And more ghosts in Indian literature — and whispers.

On Halloween, here’s a look at some of the best writers of ghost stories from India:

Satyajit Ray

Not often talked of but there was more to Satyajit Ray than unforgettable films and detective fiction. The tall auteur could also send a cold blood droplet down the spine. Remember that scene in Monihara (the only horror film that Ray directed) when a skeletal female hand holds a shining necklace; or when the Bhut-er Raja (king of the ghosts) appears in Goopy Gone Bagha Byne and dances along with his band of ghosts? In his stories, there are  haunted houses, vampires, skeletons, demons. Indigo (Penguin India) is a collection of stories about the supernatural, the peculiar and the inexplicable — in Big Bill, Tulsi Babu picks up a newly-hatched chick from a forest and brings it home only to find it growing bigger and fiercer by the day; in Khagam, a man kills a sadhu’s deadly pet snake and invites a curse which brings about horrifying changes in his body; Ashamanja Babu does not know what to do when his pet dog suddenly begins to laugh, and Mr Shasmal, who is visited one night by all the creatures he has ever killed. There’s more to Ray’s ghostly tales. Read them for a cold blood droplet down the spine.

Vijaydan Detha

Fondly called Bijji, Vijaydan Detha is undoubtedly the most important writer of Rajasthani prose in the 20th century. Best known for his 14-volume masterpiece Baatan Ri Phulwari (Garden of Tales), Detha melds the magic of folklore and fable by traversing the arid landscape of Rajasthan that is inhabited by greedy rich and oppressed poor, the saint and sinner, and populated by skeletal trees, chatty animals, whistling wind and pounding rain, insecure deities, and a lot of ghosts. There’s the princess who betrays her husband after falling in love with a cobra (Press the Sap, Light the Lamp), two friends who are deceitfully tied into a same-sex marriage by their parents (Two Lives), coy bride who cannot resist the charms of a traveller (Lajwanti), and beautiful women trapped in a palace in the clouds (Aasmaan Jogi). Detha’s stories (he has written 800 of them) have been staged as plays and made into movies, the most famous being Duvidha (The Dilemma), which has been adapted by Mani Kaul into Duvidha (1973) and Amol Palekar into the Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee-starrer Paheli (2005), in which a ghost falls in love with a newly married woman.

Riksundar Banerjee

Riksundar Banerjee confesses that he does not believe in ghosts but he certainly is academically ghost-inclined. His PhD thesis focused on the transition of ghosts in literature through time and most of his books are, well, ‘ghostly’. Chhaya Sorir is a collection of ghost stories in Bengali, translated into English as Haunted Places of India (Aleph Book Company), it details some of the spookiest places in India including the abandoned village of Kuldhara, the deadly NH-33, a portal to the unknown in Hahim, the infamous Khooni Nala. But if you were to know all about ghosts and their characteristics, pick up The Book of Indian Ghosts (Aleph Book Company) in which Banerjee alphabetically lists 84 kinds of ghosts - there’s Aacheri, a child ghost from Sikkim who haunts other children and makes them sick; completely harmless Barul forms an eddy and swirls around; Chedipe kills it victims by sucking their blood or having sex with its victim until their bodies can take it no longer; Dakan Sakan is a shapeless ghost from Punjab; Gutiya Deo is a Bihari dwarf ghost; Supurs, a teenaged ghost that attacks young girls; Zoting, found in the Konkan area, is a quiet, harmless ghost with no head and lean limbs. That really is a thesaurus of ghosts!

S Mukerji

“I do not know whether writing ghost stories is a mistake,” S Mukerji wrote in the Preface to Indian Ghost Stories (1914). “…ghost stories are a source of pleasure, and are read as a pastime and are often vastly enjoyed, because though the reader is a bit afraid of what he does not know, still he likes to be assured that ghosts do not in reality exist,” says Mukerji and sets the tone for the 1914 book that chronicles ghostly sightings in India from post-1857 British India. The stories in this book include His dead wife's photograph, The major's lease, The open door, What Uncle saw… A few stories also have drawings of the what probably was the ‘ghost path’.

Rudyard Kipling

When we talk Kipling, it is often about Kim, Mowgli and The Jungle Book. But Kipling also dabbled in horror stories depicting the life of colonial men and women on the sub-continent, the grass widows, the common soldier or officer doing his duty in the heat and loneliness, some adulterers or suicides. The touch of Indian macabre in Kipling’s horror stories is often described as ‘Imperial Gothic’, where the surroundings and strangeness of India invades the lives of the British in India. There’s the The Mark of the Beast (1890) in which Fleete, who knows little of India or Indians, gets drunk at the Club on New Year’s Eve, and on the way home desecrates a temple of Hanuman. Soon, Fleete starts to behave like a man possessed, gnawing raw meat, grovelling in the earth of the garden, and howling like a wolf. The Phantom Rickshaw is about a female apparition haunting the streets of Shimla while in My Own True Ghost Story (1888), he relates an actual event that took place in a run-down dak-bungalow in British India. In Kipling’s greatest ghost story They (1904) the narrator sees the ghost of the children in the house, only he can see the ghost, no one else can.

K Hari Kumar

There is so much horror in K Hari Kumar’s books that he has earned the sobriquet aka Horror Kumar. Hari has written 50 horror short stories that were published in his India’s Most Haunted (HarperCollins India, 2019), often called the biggest collection of horror short stories based on real haunted places written by a solo author in a single volume. The book was listed among HarperCollins’s 100 best books (all-time) written by Indian writers. He is the first Indian writer to be listed on Amazon.com's global bestsellers list in the horror category. His 2018 psychological thriller, The Other Side of Her, spawned the acclaimed Hindi language web-series called Bhram (2019); he has also written the story and screenplay for Malayalam film E.

Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond once famously said that while he does not believe in ghosts, he sees them all the time — in the woods, in a bar, in a crowd outside a cinema. Not surprising, then, that in his stories, ghosts, djinns, witches, phantoms, and the occasional monster — are as real as the people he writes about. So, if you like a scream, read The Shadow on the Wall, a book with 21 of Bond's scariest tales has chance encounters with hill spirits, djinns, laughing skulls, and Mussoorie’s Bhoot-Aunty. The Face in the Dark & Other Haunting begins with a story set in a pine forest outside Shimla, and ends with the macabre Night of the Millennium, where the scene of the action is an abandoned cemetery. Bond’s other books in this genre are The Horror Omnibus, The Laughing Skull, Captain Young’s Ghost — Ghostly Tales from the Indian Hills, The Empty House.