There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses,
and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop
upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have
died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the
crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death
in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men
may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown
into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under
the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried.
These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not
attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have
frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of
both white and black.
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla,
not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree dak-bungalow on the Old
Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a White Lady is
supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one
of her houses "repeats" on autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible
horse-and-precipice accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has
been swept by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers'
Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose furniture is
guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with the weight of
Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur possesses houses that
none will willingly rent; and there is something--not fever--wrong with a big
bungalow in Allahabad.
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