Ghost Stories Real: What Followed Us Home from the Bamboo Grove

This true ghost story from a Noakhali village happened to my family in December 2019, and none of us has been able to explain it since. We had talked about spending a winter in the village for years, but every time something came up and the trip was cancelled. This time everyone really wanted to go, so I kept pushing my father until he finally agreed. I had grown up in Dhaka and had hardly ever seen village life.

A Winter Trip to the Village

We left in the morning in a rented microbus, and by the time we reached Noakhali it was almost evening. Nobody had eaten all day, so we went straight to a small hotel. Sitting together and eating in a village hotel was a lot of fun. You don’t get that kind of feeling in Dhaka.

After the meal we went to my aunt’s house, my father’s sister, whom we call Fupi. You step through the gate and the house is on your right, a three-room house. Straight ahead is a pond, with the kitchen beside it, then the poultry shed and the bamboo grove. In front of the pond, two trees stand side by side, and someone had tied a small swing between them for the children. We were all tired that night. The grown-ups slept in the big room, while I slept in Fupi’s room with my cousin sister Aliya and her five-year-old son.

The next morning, after breakfast, we went out to look around the village. It had been so many years that I hardly recognised anyone. My uncles and aunts invited us over, and the houses were all close together, so we went from one to the next. At one aunt’s house she fried some popcorn and tel pitha for us. Village pitha in winter tastes different from anything else. I liked it so much that I asked Mom to take a few home for me. By then it was nearly dusk.

We left in a hurry, without drinking water or wiping our hands, and went to another aunt’s house. The path ran under big old trees, and all of us were a little scared. Since childhood I had heard that it isn’t wise to walk village paths like that at that hour. I am telling you this because it happened to me, and every word of it is true.

The Video in the Bamboo Grove

After dinner we went back to Fupi’s house. Everyone had already eaten, so nobody ate again. People from Dhaka sleep late, and nobody felt sleepy, so the whole family sat in the yard talking. I stayed in the room at first because of the cold, chatting with friends on my phone. Then I thought it was silly to come all this way and sit on my phone, so I went out to join them.

My cousin’s wife was on the swing, laughing and playing with the children. I asked her to give me a turn. I was wearing an all-black dress and my long hair was tied up. Sitting there in the dark, I must have looked quite scary, because my cousin, my mama’s son, started filming me. He wanted to make a horror-style video. He watched a lot of videos about jinn and knew plenty about such things, so he had lots of ideas. Seeing him film made me look even more like a ghost, so Mom untied my hair. We decided to do it a bit differently, and I was made to stand in the bamboo grove with my hair open while the video began.

He filmed the whole house without any trouble. But every time the camera came to me, my face would not show clearly. It wouldn’t focus. He wiped the lens again and again and tried once more, and each time he failed to capture my face. I think he understood something then, because he moved me away from that spot. None of us knew why this was happening.

Mom stood where I had been standing, and he told her he’d take a photo to see how it came out. When he looked at it, none of us could have imagined what he saw. You know how old paper photographs get white marks if you keep them for years? There was something white like that behind Mom, a white mark you couldn’t make out clearly. A phone camera shouldn’t make marks like that these days. My cousin looked at it, pulled all of us away from there, and we were terrified. Nothing like this had ever happened to us in Dhaka, which made it even scarier. We started reciting Ayatul Kursi. Almost the whole family was there, my parents, two aunts, my older cousins, Fupi and her son, and the children.

The Longest Night

My cousin sat down on a chair, thinking about the photo with his wife beside him, and I stood behind them. That was when I saw Aliya apu staring at our little cousin on the swing, reciting Ayatul Kursi without taking her eyes off her. I made a small joke and said, “Look, Aliya apu is scared.” About five seconds later, she was rushing toward my cousin with her eyes wide, signalling him to go inside the house. None of us understood why she was acting like that. He didn’t understand either, but he stood up from the chair and began to recite Ayatul Kursi softly. The moment he started, she burst into loud crying and began making strange noises. Everyone was frightened.

I get scared easily, so I ran to the room, where my father and my brother-in-law were sitting and talking. I told them Aliya apu was behaving strangely. They thought she might be ill or hurt. Just then my cousin came in, holding her up while she cried and made those sounds. As they came through the door, I saw a black cat walk past the front of the gate to the other side. We had walked all over the village that day and I hadn’t seen a single cat. I love cats and always look for them wherever I go. Where did this one come from so late at night? We had all been outside together for hours and nobody had seen it.

While I was thinking about it, everyone started blaming me. Why did I go to the bamboo grove with my hair open? I said, “What did I do? You all told me to.” As soon as I said it, my cousin sister glared at me and snapped at me so loudly that I went quiet. I couldn’t say anything more. Everyone recited prayers and blew on her, and slowly she calmed down and fell asleep. Some neighbours had heard the shouting and came to ask if there was any problem. We told them nothing and sent them away. I was shaking badly and kept thinking something might happen to me. Since she had shouted at me like that, everyone was afraid, and they recited prayers and blew on me too.

My cousin’s wife was crying for him, afraid something might happen to him, since the idea had been his in the first place. She scolded him and told him not to do anything more. He said he would go outside and check. He had researched this kind of thing a lot. She begged him not to go, but he walked around the yard and came back, saying he’d seen nothing and that nothing would happen to him.

Then he told my parents and everyone else something about me that I still can’t explain. He said I live with a lot of depression, that I talk to the mirror when I’m alone at home, and that I should never be left alone. I had been scared before, but now I was more scared. How did he know? My parents were mostly out, so I really was alone at home, and I really did talk to the mirror. Only God and I were supposed to know that. My parents started worrying about me after that.

When it was time to sleep, I wanted to change my clothes, but I was shaking too much to go anywhere alone. The washroom was right in front of the bamboo grove, so Mom took me to another room and helped me change. I told her I had seen a black cat. Everyone said they hadn’t seen any cat, and that scared me even more. We all decided to sleep in the same room. It was winter, so nobody moved to another one. Not one of us could sleep that night, and it felt so long that we kept wondering why morning wasn’t coming.

I lay between Mom and one of my aunts, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept feeling that someone was calling me from outside, and my eyes kept going to the window. It felt like someone was standing there watching me. I sat up, and Mom, my cousin and his wife sat up too. When Mom asked what was wrong, I said I felt bad. My cousin told her to recite something in my ear, and she recited the whole of Surah Fatiha.

At some point I started hearing strange sounds. I suspected that someone was saying something to Mom, so I moved away from her to look at her. A faint red light was on in our room. I saw that Mom wasn’t letting go of my hand. She was holding it tightly, staring at me with her eyes wide, and pulling me toward her. I tried to free my hand and I screamed. My cousin switched on the light at once, and Mom let go of my hand. Everyone woke up, even my cousin sister. I was crying and telling them Mom had done that. She said, “I didn’t do anything.”

I moved away from Mom and went to another cousin sister, and they recited prayers and blew on me. They couldn’t calm me down at all. Seeing this, my father brought a sleeping pill and made me take it. Fupi’s son asked my father if he should bring a hujur, an Islamic religious teacher. My father said there was no need, because bringing one might make things different. Crying, I said I was going back to Dhaka the next day, and everyone agreed. I slept deeply because of the medicine, but the others couldn’t sleep all night.

It Followed Us Home

When I woke up in the morning, everything was normal. It didn’t feel like anything had happened the day before, and nobody mentioned it. I even wandered around in front of the bamboo grove again. After breakfast we left for Dhaka in the microbus. Because the night before had spoiled the trip, everyone was feeling low. But as we left the Noakhali road behind, a different kind of energy came over all of us, and the urge to go somewhere rose again. We hadn’t been able to enjoy Noakhali, and a cousin in Chittagong had been calling us, so we decided to go there.

In Chittagong, we all rested for the day, because we had to leave for Dhaka the next day. In the evening my cousin noticed that my eyes were red. He didn’t make much of it and thought I must be short of sleep. But I had taken a sleeping pill and slept well. I wasn’t tired at all.

At night I went to the room where Aliya apu was, to see everyone. The moment I walked in, she started making those strange sounds again and began reciting Surah loudly, which felt very unnatural. My cousin scolded her and told her to be quiet, and everything went back to normal. But I started crying again. Everyone was scared of me. I was shaking badly, and my father gave me another sleeping pill, and I fell asleep. The next day we all came back to Dhaka, and I thought everything would be fine once we were home.

It wasn’t. After coming back to Dhaka, I kept feeling that someone was with me, watching me all the time. My cousin sister was in the same state. One day I went to her house. She came and cried a lot, and said she couldn’t be normal like before. She always felt that someone was with her. I told her I felt the same. After that, my mami, my uncle’s wife, took both of us to a hujur.