Customer Reviews

Indian Ghost Stories Second Edition

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A genuinely peculiar and delightful little book! I thought this free Kindle book might be a collection of Indian supernatural folklore, but nope. Published during the First World War, Indian Ghost Stories turns out to be a chatty and digressive account of "true" ghost stories the author either experienced or heard about from friends. It's loosely divided by type -- apparitions to the recently dead to their loved ones, harbingers of death, haunted places, offended ghosts who must be propitiated, and so forth. Within those categories, though, it rambles about, and the general effect is charming, as though you were sitting on the verandah with the author sipping chai and hearing about his friend from work who found a dead girl in his newly taken photograph ... his voice is very pleasant, and he approaches his subject matter with zest. He also includes a section of "ghost stories" that turned out to have very mundane (and amusing!) solutions.

Nothing is documented, although Mukerji includes excerpts of newspaper reports for some of the incidents. It would be fun to see if any of these are actually in the morgues of Kolkata or Banares newspapers.