It was the first year of undergrad, circa 1997 I think. I was in college at Adhiyamaan Engineering College in Hosur, Tamil Nadu. This college was far enough away from home to warrant staying at the college dorm. The girls’ dorm interestingly wasn’t located on-campus. It was in a smallish apartment complex downtown. We had the entire complex to ourselves i.e. the college had leased out the entire complex for their women students. There were two floors, a U-shaped setting with a central area to congregate. There was an in-house security guard who was more an old grandpa just passing his retirement years helping out around the facility. He also morphed into janitor, technician, mechanic and errand man depending on what the situation called for. He lived in a single room out-house within the facility.
It was about half way through our first year of undergrad where we had gotten somewhat accustomed to the rules, the settings and the way of living in a dorm with roommates, an extremely strict female warden and seniors who hardly liked you. It was going as well as it could. Then one day, like any bored teenager, we started talking about ghosts and hauntings. Not sure what triggered this conversation or why but it wasn’t exactly the weekend. Mid-week and we decided to keep spinning the ghost stories and scaring ourselves witless.
Our dorm ‘room’ was really a two-bedroom apartment with double-decker beds everywhere. As many as can fit into those rooms. So we weren’t exactly a lonely bunch. I was in the main living room which fit 9 girls total. The other two bedrooms fit a total of 8 girls. And we had all psyched ourselves into a frenzy over ghosts and wanderings. The picture below shows the door to enter the apartment and the window right next to it. The stacked beds are also visible on either sides. Now imagine the same thing behind the photographer and you’ve go the entire living room pictured. We are all (except for the one girl Shubha sitting on the top bunk to the right) sitting on the single cot place across the width of the room right smack in the center between the other beds. That was my bed. The main advantage of my cot was it was directly below the ceiling fan. The major disadvantage was I had zero privacy. It was the sofa of that room. Still had fun being in that dorm room for the first year of college life!
One girl then claimed that the apartments we lived in were frequented by a lone wandering lady in the middle of the night. Hearsay from some seniors who lived there before our time. Of course, no one in the apartment had first hand info or experience. But that was sufficient to get everyone interested. She also claimed that the onsite security guard/old man had attempted to make first contact with the woman by trying to talk to her at which point she simply vanished. To top it off, the girl seemed sure that someone had left their apartment window open and the wandering lady tried to reach in. Almost like a butterfly.. pursue it and it keeps flying away from you, ignore it and it will try and land on your shoulder. (See how poetic I can be occasionally? I reserve it for ghost ladies primarily!) Anyway, back to the story.
After hearing this story, we all really felt we had no choice but to confirm this rather odd event. And without much arguing or mutual convincing being required, we all assigned ourselves time slots to stay up that very night to keep watch outside the single window in our apartment that was right next to the front door. We assigned a team of three or four taking turns through the night to keep watch. It was the most thrilling and anticipatory event during my entire stay there thus far. And, we did what any self-loving, smart teenager would do. We kept the window open to see if we could lure said lady our way. I know.. teenagers!
I volunteered for the second shift (around midnight). But given the pure adrenaline and anticipation we all felt, none of the girls really bothered to sleep. The entire apartment was awake and eagerly awaiting a glimpse of the lady. The clock ticked on. The night wore on. Early wee hours of the morning creeped in. Guess what happened?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing happened.
No one really saw or heard anything untoward. No arms reaching inside the window. No sign of random wandering lady. The sun rose and daylight broke through.
Although we had all gotten caught up in the thrill of the possibility of a ghost sighting, we were also secretly hoping we would never encounter the lady. Scared but curious was how we all felt.
We unwillingly went about getting ready for the day ahead with nothing to report or show for staying awake all night on an adrenaline-high driven purely by our imagination. I was inwardly happy nothing untoward happened given that I still had 3 more years of college and dorm experience left there 🙂
In hindsight, it was a great example of how a good team should work. We had an assignment. We understood our roles. We delegated responsibilities within the team. We stayed punctual and also available to support other team members should the need arise. We collected data that clearly showed no evidence of a claim. Although the ending was hardly as exciting as we had hoped, we all executed our parts flawlessly.
The rest of the school year at that dorm was uneventful in many ways. There were of course some distinct, opulent moments during my time, 3 years to be exact, at this off-campus college dorm. But those are best left for another blog post.
I hope you enjoyed reading this rather unfulfilling, snooze of a ghost story 🙂 If you made it all the way here to the end, kudos!
Also, in case you were wondering, the last semester of my education at Adhiyamaan, they build up an on-campus girls’ dormitory and moved all the students back there. I never got to stay there but it must have been a trip! A dorm in the middle of nowhere (the university was built well away from town/civilization). Wonder how many ghost stories the kids would have concocted up there?!
Have you had such interesting encounters with the potential for being great tales for later in life? If so, do share in the comments below! And since it was fun reminiscing something so out of ordinary from so many decades ago, I thought I’ll add another picture from class to the mix.. it was taken on Women’s day – The only day we wore saris to school 🙂 You can easily spot me in the picture if you knew I was the giggling kind back in the day!
For more such reads, check out my other blog posts here: Schacklefree blog home
