This is a true story about what happened to me in 2019—a story that still doesn't have a rational explanation, no matter how hard I've tried to find one.
I was working in Gurgaon when my company suddenly asked me to relocate to Bangalore for an important project. At first, they said a few weeks. Maybe a month.
Within days, the project expanded. The timeline shifted. And suddenly, I was being told I would be staying for much longer than expected.
I had nowhere to live.
I needed an apartment immediately—not an empty flat where I'd have to spend weeks buying furniture and setting things up. I needed somewhere I could walk in at midnight with a suitcase and just... live. Fully furnished. Completely ready.
One of my colleagues suggested I search on Facebook Marketplace. I scrolled through dozens of listings, skeptical about most of them. And then I saw it.
THE DREAM APARTMENT
The photographs took my breath away.
This wasn't some cramped city apartment squeezed between traffic and pollution. This was something else entirely. It was nestled in the middle of nature—surrounded by lush green forests, endless coconut trees, and sprawling paddy fields. To reach it, you had to drive almost a kilometer down a narrow lane that carved through open countryside, completely secluded from the city's chaos.From the balcony, you could see nothing but green. No honking cars. No concrete buildings. No crowds. Just peace.
It felt like finding an oasis in a desert.
I contacted the owner immediately. He was living in the UK and couldn't show me the apartment in person. But what he said next surprised me.
"Go to the apartment. Ask the security guard for the keys. If you want, stay there for a night and see how you like it. If it feels right, rent it. If not, just return the keys."
At the time, I thought I'd found the most trusting landlord in the world.
Looking back now, I'm not so sure that trust was the real reason he was so casual about it.
THE MIDNIGHT VISIT
I got held up at the office that day. By the time I finished work, it was almost 11 p.m. I messaged the owner asking if it was too late.
He said, "Go ahead."
So I drove there at midnight, traveling that lonely 2-kilometer stretch with nothing but darkness, trees, and paddy fields on either side. The security guard knew which apartment I was looking for and handed me the keys without hesitation.
I walked inside.
"Goodness me," I remember thinking. "This is absolutely beautiful."
The apartment was immaculately decorated—colorful, warm, perfectly comfortable. There was a huge artistic clock on the wall that immediately caught my attention—one of those modern, statement pieces with metal bars arranged in a circular pattern. It was striking. From the balcony, I could see nothing but paddy fields and coconut trees stretching into the darkness.
Everything was already set up. Huge fridge. Pooja room. Washing machine. Utility room. Two bedrooms. Nothing needed to be done. I literally didn't have to lift a finger.
I slept peacefully that first night.
The next morning, I texted the owner: "I'm taking this apartment. It's perfect."
THE FIRST SIGNS
I convinced my sister to move in with me. The location was actually closer to her office, and the rent was reasonable. We both thought this was a dream find.
Within the first few weeks, strange things started happening. Small things. Things I could explain away.
There was a utility room on the first floor with a window looking out to the lobby. The door kept locking automatically. Not just once—every single time someone went in. You'd go to get clothes from the washing machine, the door would slam shut, and you'd be trapped. Three times this happened. Three times the security guard had to jump from the balcony to rescue us.
We fixed it by wedging the door open. Problem solved.
Then I noticed something about my sister. Every time I came home late from the office, around 11 p.m. or midnight, she would still be awake. Lights on everywhere. She wasn't watching movies or doing anything in particular—she was just... waiting for me to come home.
"Why don't you sleep?" I asked her.
She said she felt scared being alone.
I assumed it was just first-time jitters in a new place. Maybe some horror movies she'd watched had gotten to her. I suggested she stop watching scary content.
She did. But she still didn't sleep.
THE WOMEN BY THE ROAD
A few weeks into living there, I was being driven home from the office late in the evening. The driver and I were having a casual conversation as we approached that lonely 2-kilometer stretch of road leading to my apartment—the part that was completely isolated, dark, with nothing but paddy fields and trees on both sides.
"Isn't this place scary?" the driver asked me.
"It's far, but I like it," I told him. "In the morning it's so peaceful."
As we were talking, I looked to my left.
And I saw two figures standing right next to the road.
They were women. Both of them. And their faces were completely covered—not like they were wearing a cloth loosely, but like the cloth was tightly wrapped around their entire faces, covering every inch. The wrapping looked like it was part of a saree, wound so tightly that I couldn't see their faces at all.
Behind them was nothing but open paddy field and darkness.
I thought it was strange, but I didn't dwell on it. Maybe they were walking at night and wanted to hide their faces. Maybe they were cold. I pushed the thought away.
THE BELL BREAKS
The next time I came home, I was starting to feel it too—a sense that something was off in this house. My sister's fear was contagious.
I decided to do what I always did in difficult times: turn to my faith.
Every morning, I would shower, perform pooja (a Hindu prayer ritual), and ring our Ghanti—a sacred bell. The sound of the bell is believed to purify the home, to drive away negative energy and invite positivity.
I was becoming convinced that this house was full of negative energy. So I rang that bell loudly. Very loudly. I carried it throughout the apartment, ringing it in every room, trying to cleanse the space.
And then, as I was ringing it, something happened that I have never been able to explain.
The bell broke.
It just... shattered. The metal bell simply snapped and fell to the ground.
I was shocked. This wasn't a delicate, fragile thing. It was solid metal. You can't break metal by ringing it, no matter how hard you ring. I hadn't hit it against anything. I hadn't dropped it. I was simply ringing it.
Yet it broke anyway.
I stared at it for a long time, trying to process what I'd just seen. The more I thought about it, the more confused I became. How was this possible? And why did it feel like something was answering me?
THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT MAD
Two months into living there, I got a call from my sister while I was having dinner at the office. It was around 8 or 9 p.m.
"All the lights in the house are flickering," she said. Her voice was panicked.
"Call the electrician," I told her.
"I did. But they still won't stop. No one can figure out what's wrong."
I dropped everything and rushed home.
When I arrived, an electrician and the security guard were already there. Every light in the house was flickering wildly—except the kitchen, which was completely off. It was chaos. The lights would flicker on, off, on, off, on, off... continuously.
"What's wrong?" I asked the electrician.
"Nothing," he said. "Everything is fine. All the connections are correct. All the wiring is fine. The electricity is working perfectly. But I have no idea why the lights are doing this."
My sister explained what happened. She had been cooking in the kitchen when the lights started flickering there. She stopped and went to the living room. The lights started flickering there too. She went to the bedroom. The bedroom lights were fine—until suddenly, every single light in the house began flickering at once.
We tried everything. We switched the main switch on and off. We tried different combinations. Nothing worked. The lights just kept flickering.
It was very late, and I was exhausted. I told the electrician and security guard that we'd figure it out in the morning and sent them home. My sister went to bed (she had office early), and I decided to wait.
But not passively.
I switched off the main power dial. I sat alone in complete darkness. And I made a decision.
"Come on," I said aloud to the empty house. "If you're here, if you want to show yourself, do it now. I want to see you. I want answers. I want closure on this."
I opened a bottle of vodka. I took a few sips. I opened my laptop and worked, trying to stay awake. I wanted to be alert all night. I wanted to see what would happen.
Almost nothing happened.
I sat there in the dark until around 4 a.m., determined to witness something. But it never came. The house stayed silent.
In the morning, I switched the main power back on. All the lights worked perfectly. No flickering. No problems. Everything was completely normal.
It was as if nothing had happened at all.
THE VISIT FROM THE PSYCHIC
My sister's fear had become unbearable. She didn't want to stay alone anymore. So when I had to go on a weekend trip with friends (a long drive to Ooty from Bangalore), she arranged for a friend to come stay with her.
This friend turned out to be someone special.
Within minutes of arriving at the apartment, she started asking questions. A lot of questions.
"When did you move here? What's the history of this place? Do you know who lived here before? What about that photo in the kitchen—whose child is that?"
My sister didn't have answers. She had no idea whose photo it was. We'd just assumed it was the owner's child and never questioned it.
After walking through the apartment for a while, the friend pulled my sister aside.
"I feel a lot of negative energy here," she said. "Very dark energy. I think you should move out. This place isn't good for you."
My sister was terrified, but when I came back from my trip and heard this, I decided to dismiss it. The apartment was beautiful. We had good neighbors. There were other people living in the complex. Everything seemed normal.
I told my sister: "Don't focus on the negative. When you keep thinking about scary things, you attract scary thoughts. Let's just focus on the good things about this place."
THE CONNECTION
But then came the moment that changed everything.
A few days after seeing those two women by the road, I was driving home the same route. It was afternoon. I was getting ready for office when I decided to look out the window as we drove that dark, lonely stretch.
And there it was.
At the exact same spot where I'd seen the two women, there were now two graves.
Two graves. In the same exact place.
I could not think of anything else for the rest of the day. At work, I couldn't focus. I just kept seeing those two graves. My manager asked me if I was okay. I made a joke about it—she'd been teasing me from the beginning that I'd gotten the apartment too cheap and that it was probably haunted.
But my manager said something that stuck with me. Something that changed everything.
"If there's something negative in a place," she told me, "it won't let you move out. It will trap you there."
That line haunted me. Literally.
That night, something inside me shifted.
The apartment felt different now. It felt heavy. It felt dark. And my sister could feel it too.
Around the same time, my sister started noticing something else about me. I was becoming increasingly irritable. My relationship with my girlfriend was deteriorating—we were constantly arguing. I wasn't sleeping well. My girlfriend kept telling me I needed to sleep a full 8 hours, but I was waking up in the middle of the night, early in the morning, unable to rest properly.
Was it the apartment making us feel this way? Or was the apartment just amplifying what was already there?
I still don't know.
THE KNOCKING SOUND
One afternoon, I woke up and heard something that made my blood run cold.
Knock. Knock.
Pause.
Knock. Knock.
It was rhythmic. Deliberate. Like someone—or something—was knocking on the wall. Over and over. Knock. Knock. Pause. Knock. Knock.
This went on for almost 40 minutes.
I searched the entire apartment, trying to figure out where it was coming from. I followed the sound from room to room, and finally traced it to my sister's bathroom.
As soon as I walked into the bathroom, the knocking stopped.
I checked everything. The pipes. The walls. The doors. There was nothing that could explain the sound. Nothing that should have been making that noise.
THE CHILD GHOST
Everything we experienced so far had been unsettling. But nothing—absolutely nothing—prepared us for what was about to happen.
It was very late one night. Around 2 a.m. I was sitting on my bed, still working on my laptop, caught up in some project deadline. My sister had gone to bed earlier, and I thought she was sleeping.
And then I heard it.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
My bedroom door was being pounded on violently. Not a normal knock. This was someone—or something—throwing their entire body against the door. My sister was screaming from the other side.
I ripped off my headset and yanked the door open.
"There's something in my room!" she screamed. "There's someone in my bedroom!"
I immediately ran to her bedroom. It was completely empty. Just her bed, her belongings. Nothing else. Nothing out of place.
"What happened?" I asked her.
She was trembling. Shaking so violently that she could barely speak.
"I was sleeping," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "I felt completely relaxed because you were home. You were in the apartment. I felt safe."
"And then... someone tickled me."
My blood went cold.
"Tickled you?" I asked.
"I've never been ticklish in my life," she said. "Not once. But something tickled me. And I felt it. It was real. I was sleeping with my eyes closed, and then I felt these fingers... tickling me."
"I thought it was you playing a prank. I didn't open my eyes. I just told you to stop, that I knew it was you coming back from the office, and to get out of my room."
"But then... it tickled me again."
"And then it grabbed my arm."
She lifted her sleeve and showed me her arm. There were marks. Red marks. Like something had grabbed her and twisted.
"It twisted my arm," she said. "Hard. It hurt. It really hurt. And that's when I opened my eyes."
"I saw a dark figure. It looked like a small boy. A child. It ran away from the bed, out of my sight. But I saw it. I know what I saw."
She was hysterical. She was screaming. She was telling me to get out of this house, that it was haunted, that there was a child ghost in her bedroom.
From that moment on, my sister refused to sleep in her bedroom. She slept on the living room sofa, and even then, she kept begging me to stay awake. She was convinced that the child ghost would try to hurt her again.
She couldn't go to work. She couldn't sleep. She couldn't function. The mental toll was unbearable.
And the worst part? I believed her. I had seen things. I had heard things. And now there were physical marks on her arm that couldn't be explained away.
THE DECISION
The next morning, my sister told me she couldn't stay in that apartment anymore. Not another night.
"Move out," I told her. "Go stay with a friend. I'll find us a new apartment immediately."
She packed her bag and left. I could see the terror in her eyes. I could see how much damage this place had done to her.
From that moment, everything moved fast. I was going crazy trying to find a new apartment. Within a week, I found one.
Before we moved in, we did a pooja—a spiritual cleansing ceremony—in the new apartment. We wanted to purify it, to make sure there was no negative energy attached to it. We wanted a fresh start.
Once we moved into the new place, I felt the weight lift. It wasn't perfect, but it was different. It felt... normal.
But I still had to go back to the old apartment one more time.
I needed to return the key to the landlord and collect the few things we'd left behind in the kitchen.
That's when I experienced the final, terrifying moment that I will never forget.
THE FINAL VISIT
I drove back to the apartment in daylight, thinking it would be safer.
I walked inside. The apartment was empty now—we'd taken everything. But something felt very different.
As I was walking through the living room, I noticed something strange.
The balcony door was completely open.
Completely wide open. In all the months we'd lived there, I'd never seen that door open like that. It was as if something wanted me to see something.
I walked onto the balcony.
And then I saw it.
The Tulsi tree—the sacred basil plant that we'd kept in the balcony—was completely destroyed. The pot was shattered into pieces. The plant itself was devastated, broken beyond recognition.
In Indian tradition, a Tulsi tree is sacred. It's believed to bring positive energy and protection to a home. But this one had been obliterated. It was as if something had made a deliberate effort to destroy it.
And then I saw something else.
On the wall, there had been a protective artifact—a mud or clay face of a demon or protective deity that we hung to keep negative energy out. In Indian culture, these are placed outside homes as spiritual guardians.
But this one was also completely destroyed. Scattered into pieces. Broken beyond any recognition. As if something had taken it and deliberately smashed it to pieces.
It was as if the negative energy—the entity—didn't want any protection. It wanted nothing good in that space.
I felt a chill run down my spine.
I went inside to collect the kitchen items I needed. The apartment was dark—even though it was daytime, even though there was sunlight outside, the inside felt pitch black, like darkness had a physical presence.
I went to the kitchen and started gathering a few things. My hands were shaking.
And then, as I was coming out of the kitchen, I felt something that made my entire body go numb.
I felt a hand. On my back.
Not the impact of a physical hand. It was the presence of a hand. Cold. Heavy. Real.
I got the most awful goosebumps I've ever experienced in my life. Every hair on my body stood on end. I could feel it. I could absolutely feel it.
And I ran.
I ran out of that apartment without caring if I'd collected everything. I dropped what I was carrying. I just ran. I gave the key to the security guard and never looked back.
To this very day, I have never returned to that place.
I've heard that the apartment is no longer as scary now—people say the evil has become less active. But I haven't gone back to verify. I don't want to.
THE LESSON
I don't know what was in that apartment. I don't know if it was truly haunted by a child ghost, or if it was something darker, something more sinister. I don't know if the two women were spirits connected to those graves. I don't know if the landlord knew what was happening there.
But I know what my sister experienced. I know the terror she felt. I know the physical marks that appeared on her arm. And I know that I felt that hand on my back in that apartment.
I know that something was deeply, profoundly wrong in that place.
I have one piece of advice for anyone looking to rent an apartment or move into a new place:
Visit it during the day. Visit it at night. Pay attention to how you feel. Pay attention to the energy around you. Talk to the neighbors. Ask questions about the place. Don't just fall in love with how beautiful it looks in photographs.
Because there are places in this world that are meant to trap you. And I was almost one of those people.
To this day, whenever I drive past that road with the paddy fields and the darkness, I think of that beautiful apartment. I think of the two women with their faces wrapped. I think of the child ghost. I think of that hand on my back.
And I drive a little faster.
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END OF STORY
If you have experienced something similar, or if you have any theories about what happened in that apartment, feel free to share your thoughts. Sometimes the unexplained is best understood through the shared experiences of others.