I was 10, when I realized there was something very wrong,
when everyone in the village would tell me not to venture outside our farmhouse
after 5 P.M every day. Here’s how it all began:
I’ve been born and bought up in Chennai, but we spent the
holidays in a small farmhouse belonging to a relative in a village near the Thanjavur
district, a village known as Umayalapuram. However, the location doesn’t matter,
here’s the most horrific thing that has ever happened to me..
Our holidays at Umayalapuram were pretty relaxing, but a
little boring. We had lush farms all around the farmhouse with fruit, vegetable
and grain crops all across, which was great for a child of 10 to explore every
day, but because of the vastness of the farms I was never allowed to wander off
too far. I had no friends of my age, as no children were allowed near the farm.
The farmers and the ladies at the village kept an eye on me whenever I was in
the farm; they’d be kind and sweet and offer me ladoos and mangoes as long as I
obeyed the rules and complain to my parents as soon as I turned into a brat.
They were over protective, and I never really found out why until much later.
There was this day, a nice Sunday afternoon, around 3 in the
noon when I decided to take a stroll all by myself. Girls my age would be happy
playing with their Barbie dolls, but there I was chasing butterflies and
dragonflies and fighting off imaginary dragons till exhaustion. I remember
finding a nice and cool green patch and lying down, and then remember walking
up in the dark to howling winds and not knowing where I was, the only thing
around me was the moonlight and the winds. It was dark, clammy and windy; even
if I had screamed nobody could have heard me. As I tried to wrack my brain and
think which direction led to the farmhouse, I heard it… a blood-curling scream
in two different directions, it didn’t sound like an animal or like a human, it
was… something else entirely and it sent chills down my spine. I tried running
away from it, but heard the noise from all directions. I suddenly came upon, a
barn of sorts. It was abandoned and heavily locked, however I found two loose
wooden planks and managed to rip them out and crawled inside.
Till today, I can never ever describe what I saw inside the
barn. It was dark, there were no lights but I could see several dozens of
wooden planks in different sizes because of the moonlight, the top of which
were nailed to the wall of the barn. They were glistening with oil, adorned
with jasmine flowers, sandal wood and kumkum. There was more, the jasmines and
the sandal could not hide the smell of something dank, pungent and rotting, it
was suffocating and it was making me want to retch. There was something sinister
about the wooden planks; I have never encountered a place as horribly evil and
dark as this. I could hear new screams, now louder and I also heard someone
heavily panting behind me. Through the stifling smell, noise and atmosphere I
heard a squeaking noise, I watched in horror as a nail slowly began thrusting itself
out of a plank. The nail unscrewed itself from the plank and fell down on the
damp floor, and almost instantly out of the corner of the barn a small and bright
orange ball rolled out, and I swear I saw someone or something move in the same
dark corner. I froze in horror for what seemed like an eternity, I instantly decided
that I would rather be outside with the screams rather than cooped up in here
with these dreadful planks (How I didn’t die from a heart attack I’ll never
know).I decided to make a run for it, I ran till I thought my feet would fall
off. An elderly lady caught me as I was running, and in my fear I thought she
was the screamer and decided to scream my head off. Finally my parents found
me, as they had all been searching for me in the farm, and had been calling out
my name; I had never been able to hear them because of the howling wind. They
rushed me into the farmhouse and after several hours of me crying incessantly
and having a nervous breakdown I told them what happened. My parents told me I
was imagining things, however their pale faces told me they were hiding
something from me and I hadn’t imagined a thing. We left the following day
never to return again to the farms. Soon, my relative sold our farmhouse and my
parents never went to the village or contacted the villagers.
After haggling with my parents for years, they decided to
tell me the truth about the barn when I was 20 years old.
About 100 years ago, several
rich families who owned a lot of land in the Ulayalapuram village had begun to
commit atrocities in the name of cast and money. They had shunned everyone
except people from their own cast as outsiders -tying them up with ropes, depriving
them food and water for days, letting small children starve to death and
plundering the innocent for money and land. The rich specifically focused on
making the children work to the point of exhaustion or killing them for
disobedience.
It is said that one
day the souls of the dead children began to attack the families slowly, and
drove them all insane. One day, the dead cornered the families inside the farm
and brutally murdered them all. The descendants of the family were all in grave
danger, and decided to leave the village. However, one by one they all died or
went insane. The dead souls needed new flesh to kill, and began to brutally
attack and kill the children of the village. Several prayers and poojas were
conducted to please the souls and leave the children be. The new leader of the
village begged the dead to stop the attacks and promised to give the souls what
the needed as long as they left the people alone. The dead agreed on one
condition, that all the souls will lay on a wooden plank and their heads be
nailed to a wooden plank. If the nails are removed either on purpose or by
accident, the souls will be free to attack and kill as please. The people of
Umayalapuram agreed, and all the souls were nailed to the planks. A pujari
comes in every week and baths the planks with sacred oils, holy water and pays his
respects. They are kept at the barn, out of the reach of people. My parents
told me they never believed the villagers, and went to the village because it
was a great place for a vacation. They had brushed off the stories as superstitions,
and until I told them what I saw they had never even heard a scream from the
barn.
If all this was true, Why wasn’t I hurt? Why was I still
alive? How did the nail unscrew itself? I know the questions, but I don’t think
I want to know anymore answers.
