Not everyone believes in spirits and the other world. But DEEBASHREE MOHANTY spoke to some professionals who have experienced such graphic episodes in their life that it made them believers of the paranormal activity. They tell you how their deceased loved ones would constantly keep in touch either through personal communications or by way of physical wounds that never heal. They show you empirical evidence of being possessed. They have seen their loved ones alive and walking after their death. Twentysix of them are due to appear on a real life show to be aired on Sony Entertainment from today
Bangalore. Five years ago. It was a rainy October evening and Nisha, a physiotherapist, was pacing up and down. Tired of waiting for her husband Raj to return from work, she dozed off on the dining table. A little past 11 pm, she woke up to the clutter of spoons and ladles and saw her husband serving her food. He was completely drenched due to rain but he was heating food in the microwave. He seemed to be in a hurry. He sat down next to her with a dinner plate in his hands and told her all was not well. That something had happened to him. That he may have to leave her and their daughter. It was unfortunate, he said, but she would have to let him go.
Shocked but angry, Nisha started shouting at her husband. She thought he was playing a prank. He then tore a piece of paper from a notebook and wrote down a friend’s landline number asking Nisha to contact his family and let them know that something miserable had happened.
Just then Nisha’s mother stormed into the dining hall. She had just received a call about a terrible car accident on Kanakpura road in which both occupants had died on the spot. The occupants were Raj and his friend.
A shocked Nisha couldn’t believe her ears, just seconds back Raj was with her, talking to her, serving dinner. The dinner plate he had given her was still warm. But there was no one in the room when she looked back. She rushed to the accident site, only to find her husband lying mangled, in a pool of blood, dead!
Half-an-hour later she was back home. Everyone around her was crying inconsolably but her eyes were fixated at the pool of water that had gathered around her dining chair. She remembers how a drenched Raj was standing there earlier. On the table was that piece of paper which Raj had scribbled the number on. She knew he was there, somewhere, watching her.
“I have been communicating with him for five years. When the contact happens, I go into a trance. My limbs don’t move. Eyes are fixed on Raj. Every episode varies from five to 15 minutes. Initially, I could just see his shadow and hear voices. But the vision and the audio got clearer with every episode. later, I could feel him physically too. Raj would talk about his world, how he was finally at peace. He used to say his world was very bright and clean. Everyone had a job but no monetary transactions. Everyone was happy and punctual. He begged me to stop crying and to move on. That was the only way, he said, he would feel free. He didn’t want to communicate with me but felt guilty enough to come every time I shed a tear,” Nisha says.
After her husband’s death, she quit physiotherapy and took up a job in a reputed IT firm in the Human Resources Department. The communication with her husband stopped two years ago. The last time, he made her a cup of tea and kissed her one last goodbye.
But Nisha has been getting another visitor. Her father, who passed away two years ago due to an ailment, keeps this communication line open. “After Raj, I was completely dependent on my family, emotionally and financially. My father was a constant support. When he died, I turned into a nervous wreck. Everything fell apart. One afternoon, I just couldn’t bear the loss and started weeping. My father appeared that day. I could only hear his voice. He sounded disturbed. He spoke with me about life and death and how the latter is as much a reality as life. After a few weeks, I started seeing his apparition and a month later, he was standing in person next to me. He would sometimes travel with me to office too,” Nisha says, adding that, strangely, during the episode, she didn’t feel scared or unhappy.
Being a science student, she didn’t want to believe in after-life and spirits and she thought it was just a bad dream. But when she started getting unexplained scratch wounds on her body that wouldn’t heal easily, she realised something was amiss. The scratches meant someone was pulling her or someone wanted to enter her world. The pain was unbearable and the wounds were getting bigger.
“I was in Mangalore with family friends and we were having cups of tea over gossip. Out of nowhere, there was a cloudburst. We all hurried downstairs. I was making way for the children and the elders. As I was about to lock the door behind me, I felt someone pulling me towards the terrace with great force. I couldn’t move. My relatives started shouting at me for not getting out of the rain. That very instance, someone let go of me and I fell backwards. later that night, I discovered fresh scratch marks on my inner wrist. There was an impression of three fingers. I decided to get help,” Nisha recalls. She met Gaurav Tiwari, founder of the Paranormal Society of India, at a workshop in Bangalore and told him what she was going through. It was through his sessions that she got better. Today, she is happy to be sharing her story on Bhoot Aaya on Sony.
“We get a lot of victims who say they can feel paranormal activities around them. But almost 70 per cent of the times it is just a state of their minds. But there is a 30 per cent possibility that what they see and hear could be from the other world. Nisha did communicate with her husband and father. We have documented proof to suggest that. Nisha was mentally very strong but when both her husband and father passed away she slipped into trauma,” Tiwari explains.
He tells you that a spirit will only establish contact with a human body if that person is approachable and needs to be contacted. There are times when a failed communication has led to the death of a victim. But Nisha was strong so the spirits couldn’t take control of her.
The decision to snap this two-way communication was Nisha’s idea when she saw her daughter reacting to the episodes. Her father made a last communication with her in April this year. “There was family pressure to sell the house that my father had left for me. My sisters wanted to divide the money. But that was the only security I had so I hung on to it. There were terrible fights and I was very depressed. My father came that night and said he was sorry,” she recalls.
Was it possible that other spirits, too, would want to communicate through herIJ “It depends on how traumatised the victim was when people around her died. Two-way communication can attract other entities also but if the person is focussed and has a will power then he/she will unconsciously not let that happen,” says Tiwari.
Guwahati. Ranjita nicknamed Mansi. three years back. It was sometime in January when Mansi’s mind was diverted by two classmates who were talking about a planchet call. She was taken in by the phenomenon and wanted to experiment. She waited for an opportunity for the house to be left to her. That happened in the first week of May when her parents and siblings were out and Mansi tried planchette calling.
She locked herself in her bedroom and ensured it was pitch dark before she started the chant. For an hour and a half nothing happened, no one came. Disappointed, she abandoned the process and went about doing her chores. But that night, something else happened.
While she was in the washroom, Mansi felt some deep breathing, as if someone was in pain. Frightened, she tried to open the door and run away but to her horror the door was locked from outside. She remained in the washroom for three hours before being found. She had passed out by then and doesn’t remember what she saw or felt. The next morning, she woke up with 103 degree Celsius fever which wouldn’t go. It continued for a few days and she had to be hospitalised.
“We had no idea what was happening to me. I had to drop out of school and my health was failing me. One night, I planned to try the planchet again. I felt a similar presence. Scared, I abandoned the process and returned to bed. Next day onwards things started getting worse. Birds would be found dead near our home. A constant stink would emanate from the bathroom and I would feel very heavy all the time,” she recalls.
Mansi is a senior employee at an MNC bank but she still gets the shivers when she recalls the fallout of her planchette adventurism. Thirteen day after the second attempt, Mansi was hospitalised again and she slipped into a coma for a few days. The doctors and given up. But all of a sudden her vital signs started returning and she was well again.
Mansi shifted to Delhi to pursue her studies but the spirit followed her there too. “My roommate left within a week. She says I used to sleepwalk and speak in my dreams about someone who had killed me. And, I would always cook for one extra person! I was feeling lonely and very depressed. I fell in love with Jagdish and we got married a couple of years ago. I told him everything about that planchette calls. He wouldn’t believe me. But there were problems from day one. He saw shadows. At times he would see another face on me. And even Jagdish started keeping bad health,” she tells you. It was then that she decided enough was enough and contacted Tiwari.
Tiwari cured her after a few sessions. “It is a process that is followed in every planchette call. If you have called in a spirit, you must let it go as well. Mansi established contact with the other world but she did not let it go. So the spirit hung around. She is lucky that it was not a negative spirit or she was as good as dead,” he says.
There have been many cases that he has dealt with but one incident rattled his entire team. A Bhojpuri filmmaker had contacted his organisation to investigate a happening at his Mumbai home. It was a very powerful evil spirit that he encountered there.
“The filmmaker and his wife were harassed physically by a bunch of children who had been murdered in that area. We managed to capture apparitions in the camera and also weird sounds emanating from the house. It was a tortured spirit. There was a strange burning sensation under my sleeve and when I removed my shirt, there was ample evidence everywhere that the filmmaker was living with a bunch of harassed souls. They had scratched me all over. I still have that wound,” he concludes, adding that he is excited about Bhoot Aaya to air on Sony at 11 pm.
The spell
He was a smart, popular and enterprising boy. A woman’s man but least interested in them. He had to move to shift from city to city in pursuit of a career. After two years, he returned to his hometown and fell very ill. His condition deteriorated and he turned into a disheveled, depressive young man. He let job opportunities and marriage proposals go past him. In the course of time, he realised that he was under the spell of a woman. This woman had died a few months before and her body was found in a decomposed state after a few days. The boy’s birth charts explained that he was in a mahadasha — a most destructive period wherein the person is open to all kinds of metaphysical threats and attacks. The boy was being attacked by no ordinary spirit, but by one who had studied and practised black magic. And the worst was that the boy’s mahadasha would end only after seven years. His planets also do not have any control over these circumstances, till now. Watch out for this story in Bhoot Aaya on Sony Entertainment.
Mangalik
Another story is about a Mangalik girl who falls in love with a Punjabi boy, belonging to a rich and influential family. Following the ancient tradition, families get their kundalis matched and are told that she is a ghor mangalik. In order to evade the ill effects of being manglik the girl was married off to a Peepal tree.
However, the Peepal tree she got married to apparently housed a male ghost who started considering her his wife. Unexplained episodes started happening in her life.
Small but strange hindrances start happening to her marriage preparations and arrangements. After some time, the ghost revealed and declared the girl as his rightful wife.
The story will be on Sony TV this week.
