SPOOKY TALES

Ghostly incidents that turned ghastly





Those days when we were juniors in college and were undergoing ragging, we used to hear about some extreme instances of ragging resulting in the death of the junior. One such case related to quite a common form of ragging.

Nailed to death

The seniors took the junior to a cemetery late one night and left him there. He was asked to hammer a nail into one of the tombs there. The seniors withdrew and vanished from the scene. It was pitch dark and the tombstones stood out in darker silhouettes.

The junior was quite bold though his heart was banging away at double the normal speed. He squatted next to a grave, held the nail over it and started hammering on it. In a few moments his fear had increased and he started imagining eerie noises which were of course in his imagination only, but scary nevertheless.

Finally the nail started going in, and soon it had gone up to its head. With great relief the boy got up hurriedly and tried to dash off. But something seemed to be holding him back. The now terrified youngster tried again and again to go off, but he was held back. Now panic seized him. He yelled and screamed and tried to run, failed and collapsed on the ground. The senior who had heard his screams came with torches and found him unconscious.

They also saw the reason why he was held back – he had nailed his shirt into the tomb. They rushed him to the hospital where he was declared dead. Silly pranks sometimes lead to tragedy.

In another case of ragging going awry, a medical college junior was told by his seniors that he should spend one night (11 pm to 4 am) in the mortuary with a few dead bodies for company. At exactly 11 pm the seniors took him to the mortuary and left him there. There was a comfortable chair for him to relax on. Nearby on a large table lay the corpses covered in white sheets.

A dead signal

He took a look at them, and there was nothing there to upset him since he had seen dead bodies in the lab. So he made himself comfortable on the chair and started reading the book he had brought with him. It was a thrilling book and he soon got absorbed in it. Occasionally he glanced at the corpses and they lay quietly, silent as all corpses.

He heard a clock striking twelve, then one, two and three. At quarter to four he rose and stretched himself. Happening to glance at the dead bodies he was shocked to find one of them winking at him. He looked carefully, and again it winked. He screamed and was about to rush out of the room when the corpse raised its arm and gestured to him to stop. That was the last straw. He collapsed and his heart stopped.

Later, it came to be known that the ‘dead body’ was a senior student who had played dead. This was another case of a student prank going awry. When we first heard this story told to us by some of our seniors we were moved to pity over the junior who had lost his life when there were just fifteen minutes or so left for him to complete his time and go free. And we also admired the guts of the senior who lay for so long among dead bodies without moving.

There were also a number of other stories about zombies and ghouls and flying spirits. All of them were scary, and after a long night of such story telling, we found it rather difficult to go to sleep. But then we were young and resilient.

And so life went on with the usual zest and enjoyment.



J.VASANTHAN


(e-mail: jvasanthan@sancharnet.in)
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