Dark Mysteries review: Heebie jeebies, because truth is stranger than fiction

A scene from 'Dark Mysteries' on discovery+ (Image: screen grab)

No matter how educated you are, how rational you claim to be, there’s something about stories of sorcery, witches, tall ghosts with lights, people possessed, places that repel visitors, shamans, tantrics, temples for exorcism and events that are inexplicable have always fascinated us. discovery+ should air these six episodes called Dark Mysteries with a disclaimer: do not watch when you’re alone and if it’s late into the night.

Seemingly innocuous, the first episode of Dark Mysteries starts off with two stories of reincarnation. Of course, we’ve all had a great laugh at men trying to evade taxes by claiming to be the reincarnation of Radha. We’ve all laughed also at news articles about men who claim to have been kidnapped by aliens and lost all memory just to evade being caught in an extramarital affair. So when two kids insist that they are different and seem to want to meet their real family, you think they’re doing that to avoid homework.

But there are two kids who remember more than just their names from a past life. They remember horrific details about how they lost their lives and things you’d know only if you were a part of the family. Hard to believe, but there they are! This story takes us to two separate villages in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

It’s the second episode that begins to take you to places you’d best stay away from. It takes you to the hills near Dehradun: Lambi Dehar Mines, and to Srinagar’s Dal Lake. You’ve been to Srinagar and perhaps even stayed in a houseboat. But did you know strange deaths have happened in this beautiful lake? Imagine hearing about something strange upturning a boat and people being sucked into the depths? Or a strange apparition of a tall man draped in white staring at your boat… And Mussoorie and Dehradun hills? How many times has one driven down from Delhi on those winding roads? But there are abandoned buildings of an abandoned mine inhabited by ghosts of miners and the ghost of a woman? Imagine that a man trained in paranormal things Akshay Sthalekar feels like something is pushing him away from this evil, sad place?

The third episode is about two abandoned places: Kuldhara in Rajasthan and Talakadu in Karnataka. How do you apologise for a woman who was chased for her jewellery by soldiers and she vanished into the river after cursing? This episode will make you think hard about curses and picking up mementos from places that have history. Remember reading the TinTin comic called Seven Crystal Balls where the Rascar Capac mummy curses the archaeologists who dug up the tomb? But this is real, and a historian and archaeologist from Aligarh Muslim University, Dr Rezavi, knows that there’s something bad in the abandoned village that they brought back when they did not heed the warning about not touching a single stone from Kuldhara. Also, movie-mad people will love the fact that there really lived a person called Zalim Singh.

The fourth episode will remind you about little newspaper ads you have seen or posters stuck on walls and trains about Baba Bengali and black magic. This episode is scary, so make sure there are no kids watching the show. Purulia in West Bengal has cases of women suffering from strange afflictions and only a visit and efforts by Tantric priests have cured them of the black magic that binds them. What was horrible was a scene where the tantric priest performs some ceremony for the younger brother who had been cheated of ancestral property by his older brother, and surprise, the older brother when driving with his family dies in an accident. How matter of fact can you be?

There’s a temple in Bihar’s Chainpur in the fifth episode where they exorcise spirits that have possessed people’s bodies. This temple of ‘Baba Harsudham’ (actually pause the video and discover the name of the temple is ‘Baba Harsu Brahm Dham’. Perhaps the very non-Indian voiceover and the writer did not get it right). The priests there help a singer get back her voice and help a young man driven crazy by spirits occupying his body. The second part of the episode is about shamans in Uttarakhand who solve local problems.

Last (in the first instalment) but not the least is the story of black magic to harm people. One is in Aligarh where an entire family of an up and coming businessman suffers because someone is jealous of his success. He’s Muslim and the maulana helps him figure out how the black magic was done. He also takes heed of the warning given to him by an Aghori ascetic. A young woman attends the funeral prayer in her own home and the spirit of the dead relative enters her body making her fragile and weak. But the explanation that the healer offers: the body is now occupied by not just dead grandmother but others as well.

I still shiver when imagining how so many weird things surround us, and so much hostility exists in our world. I just hope we try to not harm others and only encounter mysteries like these on television rather than in real life.

(discovery+ aired four episodes on February 11; episode 5 will drop on February 18 and the sixth episode on February 25, 2022)