Hostel days. So full of freedom and bliss, right?
Anyone who has lived away from home in a hostel will testify to the fact that no matter how cruel the wardens may have been, hostel life was one hell of an experience. Fighting for the bathroom, hiding your goodies stash, chilling with friends after the lights were out and sharing ghost stories in the dead of the night. Oooohhh…I just got the chills.
Every hostel had its own share of spooky stories. Some of them might even have started as a rumour, but others, not so much.
We asked people to share spooky stories from their hostel life. And believe you me, this shit is real and super scary! Proceed at your own risk:
1.
“All the other hostels on campus had functional basement floors. Ours was the only building with an abandoned basement. Looked pretty much the same as all the others, with rooms and all, except no one ever went there and they used it to store stuff.
Turns out, a girl from the year before mine had died in her bed after a long battle with food poisoning. She used to live in one of the rooms in the basement.
I thought it was pretty extreme for people to just abandon the floor right after that. So when I was there, they got the basement cleaned out. Shit you not, the floor was full of snakes. Like we had been living above a den of snakes for months. They weren’t venomous, but it was scary nonetheless.”
2.
“The Loyola Hostel is next to the Nungambakkam railway station. Once a woman committed suicide on the tracks and her body was there for a few hours until the cops came to claim it. They say her ghost is still there on those tracks, waiting for hostellers going to the loo late at night.
You could see her body from just one room. Mine. And the loo was right next to where her body was found.”
3.
“So my roommate entered our room in the night and I wasn’t at my desk or in my bed. Then she saw that the bathroom door was half open, but it was dark inside. She called out my name, and from inside the loo, someone replied ‘Hmm’, and the door creaked slightly so she believed I was inside. She left the room and suddenly saw that I was out in the corridor coming back to my room.”
” My hostel was in the middle of a jungle in Gandhinagar. At around 2 AM, a friend from the room next to mine came to my room, sobbing. She told us that they (she & her roommate), very clearly, heard a girl crying at their window. We were on the first floor and there was no way someone could be at the window. My roommate and I went to their room. The lights and fan were switched off and I actually heard the sobbing too, only for a few seconds. Their window faced the jungle.”
5.
“I went to FTII, Pune. There was an old sound studio, which students used to mix and edit music and sound for their films, back in the day. Once a student was doing the same at around 1-1:30 at night. While listening to the dialogues on the clip, he heard a line, which was not a part of the film, and which they never recorded.
The line was, ‘I miss this place’.
He quickly went to the projector and checked the sound negatives, but no such waveform was to be seen on the negative. So, he replaced it, went back and played it again. He heard the same line again. He checked one more time but there was nothing! He got shit scared, turned off all the systems and went back to his room.
The next morning, he came back to check the sound and everything was fine. No extra sound was heard.
FTII is a 50 year old institute, prior to which it was Prabhat Studio. Many people have worked and died on the job there, so they believe that people don’t wanna leave this place, even after death.”
6.
“During my hostel days, my friend and I hung out in my room a lot. After she retreated to her own room each night, I usually forgot to lock my door. One night around 2 AM, in my stupor, I heard the door creak. I shrugged it off thinking my friend was messing with me, so I called out to her. But even after a few minutes, the incessant creaking did not stop. So I stood up and walked towards the door. To my horror, I saw a silhouette swoosh by. I also suddenly realized that it was not windy at all, which could have explained the creaking. I nearly crapped my pants (and to think I love horror movies and swear by Stephen King). Naturally, I ran out screaming through the hallway, and did not sleep in my room that night.”
7.
“So my friends in the guy’s hostel planned to do the Planchet. A few days back from then, a middle-aged man in the neighboring area had died and all of us at the hostel knew about it. So apparently, during the Planchet session, the soul of that man visited us. These guys started communicating with him. The soul said, ‘I will not go back, I want to take revenge. My son killed me for property. I want to teach all of them a lesson. My family betrayed me. You have to help me avenge them.’ My friends were shit scared. One of them tried to reason with him, ‘Sir, we are so sorry, it’s not in our capacity to help you here, we are just students, we are sorry for the loss but we really can’t help.’ But the soul was too stubborn. Thankfully, one of my friends knew how to send the soul away if it’s determined to stay. So he somehow managed to order him to go back.”
8.
” I was in Class 9 and my room faced the basketball court. I was told to never look out the window into the court at night because a lady in white roams around. I got my room changed as soon as possible. I wanted a view. ”
“One of my seniors was coming back to the NIFT hostel from the NID campus (Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar) at 1 AM on his bike. There’s a flyover that he’s supposed to take. He stopped right before it to pee under a tree.
Once he was on top of the flyover, he could feel his bike getting heavy as if someone was sitting behind him. From the corner of his eye, he peeked into the rearview mirror, and saw the shoulder of a person in a half-sleeve white shirt. He freaked out but didn’t really know what to do. He didn’t dare look back so he just sped his bike at full speed and as soon as he was at the bottom of the flyover, there was a herd of buffaloes in front of him on the fucking road, at 1 AM! He somehow managed to ride past them and reach the hostel safely. We were shocked to see him. His face was pale AF.”
” So this guy was doing his Masters from NID. They had a session where a guest faculty had come to teach them astral projection. The teacher told them to wander to wherever they wanted to be, to float through the air. Ajeet managed to do it and he (his soul) travelled to his family house in Bihar. When the whole session ended, the students were asked about what they saw. Ajeet said he saw his parents sitting in the drawing room. They had a guest over and they were talking over chai. His mother was wearing a new sweater that he’d never seen before.
The teacher asked him to call his parents and ask what’s up. He did. His dad answered. The phone was on speaker:
Ajeet: Hello, what’s happening. How’s mom?
Dad: All good, an uncle from work had come to visit us. We were just having tea.
Ajeet: That’s nice! It must be really cold in Bihar?
Dad: Yeah! Your mom and I went shopping yesterday, bought 2 sweaters for your mom.”
11.
“I had a really good friend in the hostel. She had lost her parents in an accident and it was their anniversary that day. She was really upset and was crying. To console her, we thought we’ll call their spirits and talk to them. So we set up an Ouija board. We wrote alphabets and numbers on a paper, got a coin and sat in a circle. I had my finger on the coin. As we started to call spirits, the coin began to move. The others told me not to move my finger. To everyone’s shock, it spelled out her father’s sister’s name. And no one among us ever knew their names. That was super freaky. ”
12.
“This happened when I was living at the hostel in Sophia High School, Mount Abu, Rajasthan. My friend and I decided to bunk class. Since we weren’t allowed to go out of the school, the huge washrooms would be our Mecca for gossip. The washrooms were very dingy and dungeon-like, descending towards the basement. I went inside a loo and my friend was waiting outside the door for me. Suddenly, the light went off and it became pitch dark. My friend said she would wait for outside, at the loo entrance. “Don’t worry Himanshi. I’ll call your name and you can follow my lead,” she said.
Just when I was figuring my way out, I bumped into someone and held ‘her’ arm. “Hello? Who is this? I can’t see you,” I asked the dark figure whose face I could not see, but got no response. I tried again: “Are you a junior? A senior? Have you also bunked class?”
“I kept asking, but my voice was the only one that I could hear. Why was she not replying to my repeated questions? I could hear her breathe, so I was sure somebody was there. I shook her arm vigorously, trying to get her to answer. It shook like there was no body attached to it!”
“A chill ran down my spine and I sprinted my way out howling, still trying to figure out what had just happened. There was nothing that could possibly be suspended right in the middle of the washroom. It was an arm. My friend waiting outside said she was standing there the whole time and that nobody had gone inside. Meanwhile, the lights came back. Still scared, I went inside with my friend, but there was no one inside. Not a single soul.”
13.
“I was in the second year of my college at St. Stephen’s, Delhi, and lived in a single seater room in the hostel. I am a night owl and usually don’t sleep before dusk. This one particular day, just when I was about to close my eyes, I saw a shadow pass by the window of my room. Seconds later, I felt someone sitting on my chest and pinning me down. Perplexed, I assembled some courage and after minutes of twitching, overpowered the body. I was terrified and moved out of the hostel soon.”
“Once, just to prove that we are badass, we visited the cemetery next to the hostel late at night. I just wanted to prove to others that there’s no such thing as ghosts. All the priests who died during their service are buried there. So I stood there while the others waited at a distance. Nothing happened, so I turned to the others to say it was no big deal until I turned just in time to see a face looking at me from behind the last tomb. For a fleeting second before it was gone. And that freaked the shit out of me.”
Arash Zulkarnain 