Possession is a crime :)
Herne the Hunter
From the cluster of supernatural hunter stories.
Hunter stories have a wide range across the world. They span the range from individual narratives, oral or written, of the ghost revenant at one end, to the Wild Hunt in the myths of Europe at the other.
At the individual level, the hunter stories include stories about (mostly) hunters and (some) other people entering the forest being killed by animals, and coming back as ghosts, to either benign (warning) or malafide purpose.
The begho bhut (tiger ghost) of the Sundarbans is in the latter category, since its aim is to ensure that others too, are killed by tigers in the delta forests of South Bengal. This sort of individual supernatural story occupies one end of the supernatural hunter spectrum.
At the other end is the chaos of the Wild Hunt in Europe, once led by Odin, which has in legend included at various times Valkyrie and fairies. These are not the prettified fairies of fairy tales, but the terrifying, powerful figures of old folktale, the types of beings that would fit right into the Wild Hunt.
It is notable that the Wild Hunt was also supposed to have a warning function, like Herne, below.
On fear, darkness, and ghost
Fear is a multi-faceted, heterogeneous, insidious thing, perhaps because it is rooted in those aspects of human existence and understanding into which we prefer not to delve too deep. This is a reflection of the nature of investigations into fear, as much as it is a reflection of those aspects of fear which may well be in the realm of unassailable truth, if one is to judge from the standpoint of their brick-steadiness in the common understanding.
Take death. Fear of death is one of the commonest fears in humankind. But the fear of death is not a single fear– it is an amalgamation of a variety of other fears, only three of which are the fear of the unknown, the fear of causing grief to loved ones, and the fear of ended consciousness. Not one fear at all, but a kind of loose braid of different things of which to be afraid, winding indefinitely into the dark tunnel of the future.
Many are afraid of water, some of the sky, or ceiling fan, falling on their heads. Snakes, rodents, insects, crossing fast roads, other people’s opinions, identity, the future, too much fried food, change and growth, and so many more things– I could go on, but this is an endless list.
Fear has also been found to be an effective way to sell things, so if you would like to list your nearby fears, do spend some time watching local advertising.
Nonwithstanding these multiple, and apparently monetizable fears that haunt us, death, and the dark, remain the most significant and commonly occuring human fears. These two may be considered analogous concepts, broadly clustered under the unknown. The unknown, the uncertain, the unformed things that you may suddenly touch while feeling your way through unfamiliar, lightless territory, this is the stuff of which our fears and nightmares are made.
If death, and the dark are two points of a fear triangle, ghosts fit neatly into the third point. Ghosts are death and dark made tangible, narratively real, clothed in ecto-flesh and standing at the foot of your hotel bed at night.
The fear of the past showing up in the present is only part of the fear of ghost. Ghosts have functions, and forms, and territory. Arguably, many of us will end up as ghost (a compelling idea), they intrude from death and darkness into our world of light, and they bring fear, terror, uncertainty, the unknown, all as one big primal package. They remind us that the passage in the light is only temporary, and that this, too, shall pass. A memento mori to top all possible memento mori.
If ghosts did not exist, we would have to invent them.
#ghost #ghosts #dark #darkness #fear #death #unknown #uncertain #ghoststory #paranormal #supernatural
The man who wrote Bengal’s first ghost stories in English
By Yajnaseni Chakraborty
A poor Brahmin driven out of his own home by a ghost who impersonates him. Four friends who learn the art of transforming bones into living, breathing beings. A clever barber who ‘bags’ a ghost and makes it do his bidding. All this and much more is to be found within the pages of Folk-Tales of Bengal (1883), possibly among the earliest published anthologies of supernatural stories in Bengal’s popular culture, uniquely written in English, by a Bengali.
The writer in question was, of course, Rev. Lal Behari Dey, the Bengali boy from Bardhaman who converted to Christianity under the guidance of Alexander Duff, going on to become a reverend and missionary of the Free Church of Scotland.
Obviously, however, this wasn’t his only identity. Entrusted with the job of teaching English in government-run colleges in Berhampore and Hooghly, he joined Berhampore Collegiate School as Principal in 1867, and later joined Hooghly Mohsin College as a professor of English in 1872. By any standards, his knowledge of the English language was as deep as his love for English literature, and yet he never lost sight of his roots, or of the stories from rural Bengal that had so entranced him in his childhood.
Thus was born Folk-Tales of Bengal, comprising stories which had been handed down through generations, but which nobody had bothered to systematically compile until then. Uniquely, all the stories in the book, published by Macmillan and Co., belong in the realm of the supernatural, and are embellished with outstanding illustrations by noted English artist Warwick Goble, added on in 1912. If nothing else, this value addition attests to the popularity of a book published nearly three decades previously.
In the preface to Folk-Tales of Bengal, Rev. Dey mentions a certain Captain R. C. Temple, of the Bengal Staff Corps, who “wrote to me to say how interesting it would be to get a collection of those unwritten stories which old women in India recite to little children in the evenings, and to ask whether I could not make such a collection”. Understandably, perhaps, the book is dedicated to Temple.
As a genre, the supernatural has long been part of Bengali popular culture, so much so that ghosts and demonic creatures were the principal influences on the oral storytelling tradition, which explains Rev. Dey’s focus on them. And it has become one of the most popular segments of Bengali literature in subsequent times, too, right from Rabindranath Tagore to Sunil Ganguly.
However, Dey’s work remains unique in that it was written in a language, and in an era, when most Bengalis were not at all comfortable with any language other than their own. Which would also indicate that he was probably targeting a non-Indian readership. As he himself wrote in the preface, he was looking to the Mährchen of the Brothers Grimm, Dasent’s Norse Tales, Arnason’s Icelandic Stories, and Campbell’s Highland Stories for inspiration.
In his own words, “I believed that the collection suggested would be a contribution, however slight, to that daily increasing literature of folk-lore and comparative mythology which, like comparative philosophy, proves that the swarthy and half-naked peasant on the banks of the Ganges is a cousin, albeit of the hundredth remove, to the fair-skinned and well-dressed Englishman on the banks of the Thames…”
Whether Rev. Dey succeeded in his endeavour to establish a kinship between the half-naked peasant and the Englishman, the fascinating stories which he narrated have immeasurably enriched the documentation of Bengal’s rural culture. That he achieved this while writing in English merely enhances his credit.
Such was his attention to detail that he remembered to add the age old rhyme of ‘Amaar kotha ti phurolo/ Note gachh ti murolo…’ to the end of each story, translating it as, ‘Thus my story endeth/ The Natiya-thorn withereth…’
No better way to end!
https://www.getbengal.com/details/the-man-who-wrote-down-bengals-first-ghost-stories-in-english
Ghost at the gym
Stronger arms at the Rani Jhansi park, Karolbagh, New Delhi
Oh no, a ghost! Goodbye
Don’t follow the ghost lights
Spontaneous night lights appear in wetlands across the world, in places where human-made night-lighting still has low reach. This phenomenon has existed for a very long time, given its place in the folklore of several cultures.
The centuries of human understanding that preceded discussions of bioluminescence, lit methane and organic decay have been populated by narrative understandings of this phenomenon. These are folk tellings that made sense to people for who, the end of daylight each evening meant being swallowed by an unrelenting darkness, relieved only by the meagre light that human endeavour could produce.
It is no wonder that the imaginations of such people should inscribe meaning into strange and unpredictable lights in the great darkness. In the Sundarbans, the vast delta forests through which the enormous river Ganga falls into the Bay of Bengal, these lights are called aleya. Aleya are commonly understood to be the souls of those who died in the marshland or forest. The souls are trapped, and, angry at their usually violent deaths, and the fact that they are unable to move on, they want to lure other unwary travellers to their deaths. If you follow the lights, you may never be heard of again.
In this understanding, the aleya structurally falls into the revenant, or return, paradigm in a wider area of the paranormal. However, the revenant paradigm is populated by ghosts that wait generations for revenge—a very personal motivation. In the context of such tellings, the aleya can be better compared to the sirens of Greek mythology. They sang their songs, and if you were caught unaware, well, then, that’s your story. As the stories tell it, the aleya is, by and large, impersonal.
The two common folkloric qualities of these lights as they are seen in different cultures around the world, appear to be the following- first, that they are impersonal, and second, that they are attractive, in the sense that they attract people to them. The Jack o lantern is literally Jack carrying a lantern through the night—and who can resist following a man with a lantern when all the other paths are dark?
English folklore advices you not to follow the will o the wisp. They inscribed the idea of something that you follow to your peril, and made a literary trope out of it. Finnish folklore talks of the virvatuli, which has a creation myth remarkably like the aleya of the Sundarbans, and a spin that makes them possible keepers of treasure—a characteristic shared by werelights in Mexico. In parts of Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, the luz mala or evil light populate folktales with examples of what not to do if you’re walking in the dark and there are unknown lights in the distance.
The werelight myths are an interesting inversion of the rhetorical function of light. Light is invested with so many positive qualities— home, love, warmth. Darkness is considered it’s opposite—cold, remote. You move towards the light, you see the light, you are bathed in the light. But in the werelight myths, it is the light that will get you in trouble. So stay quiet and still in the dark night, and there is a chance that you may be safe.
#paranormal #supernatural #ghosts #willothewisp #jackolantern #deltafolktale #folktale #paranormalfolktale #dark #darkness #Indianfolktale #sundarbans #folktalesaroundtheworld
The Aleya of the Sundarbans, 1
Imagine this. You are a fisherman. You have a small hand-rowed boat, because that is the only kind of boat you can afford. Besides, even low-power motors scare the fish away, and you cannot afford to scare the fish. You earn from day-to-day, so you must catch as many fish as you can, everyday. Fortunately, fish are plenty where you live, which is on an island in the delta of a massive river. You have heard that the river starts in the faraway high mountains called the Himalayas, but you’ve never seen a mountain, so you don’t quite know how that is. Near where you live, in the Sundarbans, the river breaks into hundreds of tributaries and streamlets, winding its way between islands of mangrove trees and wild animals.
One of these animals is the mighty tiger, the king of the delta forest. It is said that the tiger always knows where you are, whether you can see it, or not. You are in trouble only if it shows itself, because then it has plans for you. Tigers can swim, too, through currents that even experienced swimmers find difficult, so when you are on your little boat in the shallow straits, between islands shadowed by dense thickets of mangrove, you must be very, very careful.
Tigers are a good reason to always finish packing up your nets and crab-pots before dusk. You have heard, all your life, that dark must not find you outside, on a boat, surrounded by water and marshland. You must be home, in the warmth of family and cookfires before darkness turns the world outside featurelessly black. In your world, the only light at night burns in homes. There are no real lights in the marsh forests.
But tigers are not the only things to fear outside, in the dark. You have heard stories of the ghost-lights that sometimes burn in the waterways and islands. They are not real, and you must not follow them. They are the spirits of fishermen who died there, and the spirits cannot move on. They are trapped in this world, sorrowful and angry, and since they cannot exact revenge on the things that killed them, they must exact it on the living. The only living who traverse the narrow streams after dark are fishermen who stayed out too long. You must never, ever, be one of those fishermen. You have heard the lights described, but never seen one, not clearly. The winking lights that you sometimes see between the roots of the mangrove are like large fireflies. They did not call out to you in any way, and you certainly felt no compulsion to follow them into the tangle of mangrove roots.
The tides are not always predictable. Sometimes, they roll in a little early, sometimes a little late. The monster of the open sea comes gushing in through the inlets and streams, drowning some of the further reaches altogether. Sometimes, high tide brings storms. Even where you set your nets and pots, further inland, your boat can get swept along as the channels fill. You usually get home before high tide, but when you get caught, you sit it out and hope that you will be able to find your way back, well before dark. That has always happened.
One evening, you are tired. The gush of seawater down the channel takes you unawares, and your net gets swept away by the tide. Your boat drifts down channels you have not seen before—there are always channels you have not seen before, and the landscape shifts during high tide. Rowing has no effect. It is getting dark, and you are getting worried.
The forest darkens around you, night sounds and deep shadow. The water is still reflecting the last light of the sky, so you know you still have a little light to get out of the forested areas. The only problem is that you are lost. Nothing looks familiar, no bend in the waterway or large clump of trees that you can steer by. It gets darker.
You try to steer by the moon and the stars, but there is nothing but darkness above and below you.
You keep rowing, exhausted, heartsick. There must be settlements nearby, even a few houses. You’ve been rowing for hours, and it feels as if the direction is roughly right. Then you see a light far away to your left, beyond a bend. It’s burning steadily, as if it could be from the open door of a hut— that’s what you see in your mind’s eye, an open door, lit from inside, water to drink, and food. You’ll row back home tomorrow morning.
Joy filling your heart, you turn towards the light. As you get closer, it goes out. There is complete darkness. Another light comes on, but this is a little further. You are not thinking now, just rowing towards the light, wherever it is. A little further, your mind says, a little further, and there will be light. And maybe, with the light, there will be home.
In the stories they tell, this is how those who see the Aleya of the Sundarbans die.
[Illustration by Rob Alexander and the Wizards of the Coast, 2004]
#ghost #ghosts #ghoststory #werelights #willothewisp #Sundarbans #folktale #legend #myth #tiger #aleya #ghostsofbengal #delicateecologybalance #cycloneamphan #fisherfolk #delta #deltaghosts
Agatha Christie, ghost, crime and India
From the article:
“Poirot solves the mystery of the protagonist’s killings in the novel, (but) Lady Garnett’s murder remains unsolved till date. She lurks through its rooms at night whispering, looking for her murderer. Many visitors have found their room doors open. Some claim to have seen her apparition walk through the corridors. Visitors who confronted her said that she checked them thoroughly before dissolving. The hotel shut down for many years until it was acquired and renovated by ITC Welcome Group Hotels in 2009.”
Seagulls are not just your garden-variety intimidators and food-thieves.
In our beliefs, crows carry the spirits of our ancestors. Ever seen a crow giving you the knowing, suspicious side-eye? Yeah, that’s because they really do know.
Ghosts of Bengal 