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New Book On Indian Ghosts & Monsters

Delightful! I know there is a rich mythology around the bungalows and rest-houses of India.

So rich that I have never been able to track down the one that kept me awake as a kid.

There are several rest-house tales which revolve around suicides and corpses stashed in roof-spaces. Scary how many there are!

Signs of a British bad conscience or brute realism?

The elusive tale is of a skeletal figure, which used to appear on a verandah repeatedly, hauling himself up by a rope to the roof-space.

Not until his corpse was discovered, could he find rest.

Rudyard Kipling and Bithia Mary Croker, the most obvious sources, have many analogous tales but not the one I remember! :confused:
 
Wow! Fabulous sounding book, thank you, Lordmongrove!

The article mentions not only a universe of ghosts and haunters, but other obscure and juicy sounding fare as well, like Tamil pulp fiction, and “. . . unpublished dissertations written in French containing translations of some 11th century Burmese Buddhist manuscripts.” I love all these rarely trodden literary and folkloric pathways!
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Delightful! I know there is a rich mythology around the bungalows and rest-houses of India.

So rich that I have never been able to track down the one that kept me awake as a kid.

There are several rest-house tales which revolve around suicides and corpses stashed in roof-spaces. Scary how many there are!

Signs of a British bad conscience or brute realism?...
Click to expand...

Or simple practicality? In buildings which generally had no cellars, attics, upper floors or staircases (the loci of so many tales of house related spookiness) the roof space was maybe the most eldritch corner of the property. They were apparently also a gathering place for snakes, which can't have done much to allay their domestic infamy. (I think sheets of canvas were sometimes fixed to the ceiling to catch falling snakes - which kind of puts scooping the odd house spider out of the bath into perspective.)

...The elusive tale is of a skeletal figure, which used to appear on a verandah repeatedly, hauling himself up by a rope to the roof-space.

Not until his corpse was discovered, could he find rest.

Rudyard Kipling and Bithia Mary Croker, the most obvious sources, have many analogous tales but not the one I remember! :confused:
Click to expand...

The Return of Imray, maybe? I love that story, not least for the way the sense of supernatural dread is somehow made worse by being somewhat downplayed; the sense that people often went a bit weird in India, where weird things happened as a matter of course anyway - so let's not get overly excited about it, shall we.

There is a tantalising, but never really expanded upon, reference to a very odd happening in a bungalow in one of Jim Corbett's autobiographical books. I've read most of his available writing and never found any details, unfortunately - but it has always stuck with me, as Corbett has to have been one of the most unflappable of individuals to have walked the earth (he hunted man-eaters), so for the experience to even register is some indication of its potential interest.

It's also just struck me that the book, Tracking the Weretiger: Supernatural Man-Eaters of India, China and Southeast Asia (by Patrick Newman) effectively ties together the two subjects of man-eaters and the supernatural that I've alluded to above. It's a thoroughly absorbing read - and one I would thoroughly recommend. Having picked up the odd resonance, I later re-read it alongside the Derek Brockis translation of Abbé Pierre Pourcher's The Beast of Gevaudan. Despite the very clear and significant differences in time and place it really was quite interesting how often those resonances occurred.

By coincidence within the last two days I have listened to a relation of the experiences of an Indian family at an old hill station hotel - I think on the Anything Ghost podcast.
 
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