belief

It was the year 2004, and I had set up my own bootstrapped venture, an Executive Search Firm. Our first office was in a fairly old bungalow in the heart of South Delhi.

I had leased the entire ground floor of this bungalow, spread over an area of 3000 sq. ft. with an additional front lawn and a back courtyard. Outside the house was an old Banyan tree adjacent to the main gate, with aerial pop roots hanging from the branches, giving an eerie look and feel to the whole house. The first floor with terrace had the landlord’s family: a husband, wife, child and his elderly mother.

The ground floor of the house that we occupied had three fairly large rooms with an attached bath in each. There was an even larger drawing and dining area. Doors of some of the washrooms, especially the one in front of the house, tended to make a creaking sound whenever the wind blew. In this place I occupied one room at the back of the house from where I used to work and I had a team of three girls: Raj, Swati & Rupa who would sit and work in the adjacent room. There was also an old chap Kartik who was the office help. His job was to manage the pantry, lay out the lunch, supervise the cleaner who would come once a day and open & close the office.

The business was doing well and all was hunky dory till a series of strange events happened. Initially these were minor things.  A couple of the girls complained that after lunch when they went back to their workstations, all the windows tabs in their computers they had kept open while searching for profiles on job sites, had been closed. Another girl complained that though she had switched off the light and fan switches in their room before coming to the dining hall for lunch, they had all been mysteriously switched on when they went back. I made light of all this and told them that they were getting absent minded. However, after a while, they got it into their heads that this was all down to a ghost. They were also convinced it was a female ghost who was not bothering me but only the girls, as everything happened to them and not to me. I refused to buy into this line of thought.

Then something even more mysterious happened. It was a bright sunny afternoon in the month of June, when one of my team members Swati was discussing something with me in my room. The doorbell rang. In those days we were recruiting for our own team and we used to call candidates over to the office for an interview. The candidate would be attended to by the office boy, given a job application form and after they filled that out, Kartik would bring the candidate’s resumé and form in to me. I would send one of the girls to do the first round of interviews and if they cleared that, I would meet the candidate.

I asked Swati if she could see who the candidate was, as although the drawing room was a little far off, there was a direct line of sight from the place where she was standing in my room. She described that the girl was looking away toward the French windows overlooking the lawn and was wearing high heels and a salwar kameez. She added that she looked smart enough, and that she would meet her once Kartik had got her to finish the formalities. We then went back to our discussion.

After 10 minutes, I suddenly reminded Swati that Kartik had not yet come in with the candidate’s form. She called out and Kartik came in from the back courtyard which had an entry from the room where the girls used to sit and work. We asked him what had happened and why he hadn’t brought in the girl’s form and resumé. He asked – which girl? Swati and I looked at each other. I asked Kartik had he not opened the door when the bell rang? He said he never heard the bell ring and that he was in the back courtyard anyway. We immediately went to the drawing room and there was no one there. I was stunned! I thought I had heard the bell ring and so had Swati. Besides, she had vividly described the girl. We did not know what to make of it.

However, when I discussed  this with Raj and Rupa separately, they speculated that since Swati had recently been through a bereavement and been quite distressed, that maybe she had hallucinated the episode. Although I was not fully convinced, I thought I had what could be the best explanation under the given circumstances.

A few days later, I was talking to the girls in the room where they used to work. All the girls at that time had Personal Computers on which they worked. To ensure an uninterrupted power supply in the event of a power failure, all PC’s had a Battery Backup Device attached to them. While talking to them I walked across to the window in the room where the curtains were a little out of place. I was adjusting the curtain when all of a sudden Swati’s PCs Battery Backup Device started beeping. She looked at me in alarm. I looked at the power plug to which the battery backup device was connected on the wall which was located just below the curtain and I noticed that the switch was off. I told her that maybe the switch had shut off when I was adjusting the curtain and there was nothing to be alarmed about.

That night I was at home when at around 10 pm Swati called and her first question was – ‘Sir, what’s the backup time of the Battery Backup Device?’ At that instant, a shiver ran through me as I realised that the device had, at the very least, a 15 minute backup. It was fairly new, so its in-built alarm would not beep unless it ran out of power. If  by my moving the curtain I had inadvertently switched off the main switch from which the device was drawing power, the beeping sound could not possibly have started that soon. Swati had been working on her machine all morning, and the power backup device had beeped only when I was in the room that afternoon. Both of us realised that no logical explanations were working. She insisted I speak to the landlords about any unnatural deaths in the house.

I briefed the landlord the next day and he said he had no clue why these things were happening. He said that only his father had passed away in this house but, there was no reason why he would be spooking us. It was then that Rupa in my team disclosed some more details about the area where this house was located.

Apparently, just across the road from our house was a 5 star hotel that had been built adjacent to an old graveyard that had been there for centuries. She had worked in that hotel for a short while before she joined our firm. She said that many guests and staff in that hotel had reported hearing eerie screams on the upper floors quite frequently during the night. It had come to such a stage that hotel staff had refused to go to the upper floors late in the night. She also pointed out the Banyan tree outside our office. Banyan trees in India are associated with the God Yama, or the God of Death. The tree is often planted outside villages in India near crematoriums. It is believed to be the abode of ghosts.

Upon hearing all of this, my entire team and I decided that it would be difficult to work from there any more. We frantically searched for an alternate location and within a week shifted out.

I do not know whether the house was truly haunted or not, but our experience there was spooky enough that even now, reminiscing about these incidents sends chills down my spine.

 

 

Shantanu resides in New Delhi, India and holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics as well as a Master’s degree in Business Administration.

He had a successful Corporate Stint in the Human Resources Function and became a Head  of HR at the age of 25 in a Manufacturing Multinational. He worked in various sectors subsequently as a Head HR, before setting up his own Executive Search Firm in 2004 that now has a presence in multiple cities across India. He is also a guest judge and speaker in various management forums & institutes in India.

He lost his father at the age of ten to a genetic disease that later affected him and his sister as well. He had multiple surgeries and a near death experience and survived to tell the tale both literally and figuratively. He wrote a book on how he overcame the disease describing his whole experience and the same is available on Amazon globally. He unfortunately lost his sister to the disease too.

He is a workaholic, likes traveling, is an amateur photographer, likes reading & writing occasionally, is an exercise freak and also has interests in the areas of Science, Arts and Politics.

He can be reached on :-

Twitter : @ShantanuSaha1

Instagram : @shantanusaha1

Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/shantanusaha/