My association with ghosts and haunted places go back to my childhood when I was the butt of most scares by men and ghosts alike but the most humorous of such incidents occurred during my first year at college.
Sandipani  Sadan as our first year hostel was called was a newly built one and we were the first batch of students to occupy it. I was allotted room119 along with three others Vicky, Sriram and the wicked lady of our room. Little were we to know the wicked lady would start her mischief on the first night of our stay, probably her way of welcoming us. Neither were we to know the very mischief we started hating, we would end up loving and would cherish all our life.
It was around 1:40Am, the room was awash with the silvery white ghostly light of the moon and it was really quite outside broken only with the occasional screeching of the crickets when Vicky’s sudden screaming and flailing of hands pierced the still air of the night. We woke up with apprehension and switched on the lights only to find Vicky sweating profusely and screaming “not a dream! Not a dream! Someone was strangling me”. We groaned inwardly, and as for my opinion of Vicky, I had better opinion of my aunt who claimed the UFO’s were coming to take her away. What else could I think of a person who claims he was strangulated inside a locked room on our first night together?
Things would have passed and I would have spent my days in obscurity if the second incident had not occurred.  It occurred hardly a week after the first incident and this time I was the target of Miss.Wicked Lady’s love.
I still remember the night, Wednesday the 10th, for I was made to run naked around the senior’s hostel in the name of ragging. Trust me it was no pleasant sight and the seniors are still trying to erase my image off their minds, but at 82 kg how else would I look.
Coming back to the heroine of our story, that night past 1 O’ clock I had the scare of my life. It was a starless night and one could hear the lone wails of a dog on a night were mist hung like heavy curtain and the darkness was total. At exactly 1:40, the same time as the previous incident, I had a horrible feeling of being locked inside a dangerous looking room, probably just a dream, but it was so realistic that I started screaming and unlike Vicky started banging at the door shouting for help. My screams must have woken up my roommates for only after they switched on the lights, I came back to my senses. I explained to them my dream of being locked inside a dangerous looking room and how it had been so realistic, that  I had started shouting. All this explanation was done in a tone hardly more audible and less spooky than a sick old woman’s was and I do not know whether my voice or my dream did it but everyone was spooked, but something was clear, my screams had been intertwined with real agony, and my description of the dream was graphic in detail. Later that night only one thing was on everyone’s mind, where the two 1:40 incidents just bizarre coincidences or were they linked in some strange way?
What started as scares soon turned to hilarity and gave us popularity. However, it all occurred after the third and final scare, after which the poor ghost was reduced to an object of ridicule.
 The scare took place on the last week of July. It was a lazy Saturday morning and I was slowly coming out of my sleep when I noticed Vicky was furiously rubbing his face and looking at it in the mirror. Vicky was beauty conscious, after all he was our college Romeo and trust me I had never found him that very exciting (or wasn’t I supposed to) but the girls flocked him. When he smiles, they swoon; I tried it once and I still have the bump on my head.  In fact my relationship with girls had deteriorated to such an extent in my years at school that the last time I had done something resembling a conversation with a girl had been when I had asked for a pencil and that had been two months back. Coming back, even for Vicky the action was a little too much and I was about to give him an understanding of how guys like me felt about him when I noticed that his face was covered with scratch marks all over  them. They were not too deep nor were they bleeding but there they were as a testimony to the existence of another world. However, engineers do not buy the explanation of a ghost and we decided to sleuth out the matter. Had Vicky or any of us had scratched his face in our sleep; but none of us had any nails, they were neatly cut (it was parents visiting day the day before, and obviously we looked our best cleaned and spruced like a pig looking its best on the village fair day and all other days having its snout in something else) . If neither of us had done it, could someone else from outside the room done it?  However, how could anyone have done it the night before when the room was locked from inside? With our collective brains doing something it hadn’t done even for our board exams, working, we still could find no plausible solution for the nail marks. What we did come up it was foolish at its best and idiotic at its worst but the explanation served two purposes, give some explanation to the bizarre happenings and two, rocket us to stardom.
Here are our collective findings and conclusions:
1.) The hostel was newly constructed but our room alone had a photo of goddess ‘Banari Amman’ on one of the walls. The temple of goddess ‘Banari Amman’ is the place where the possessed are brought since it is believed the goddess has the power to drive spirits out of possessed people and usually her photo is kept in rooms believed to be dwelled by spirits.
2.)  There were nails at unwanted places in the room and nails are believed to drive away evil spirits.
Why would these be in a newly constructed room? Our conclusion was that the workers who had constructed the room must have done these things after subjected to a series of bizarre events.
Until this, the lady ruled but after the third incident we ruled and Sriram was the architect behind it. His wicked brain started to work in unexpected directions and he decided to turn the incidents and presence of the photo and the nails as pointers to possession of the room by a ghost and decided if it were a female ghost, it would lend an aura of romance. Thus, we spread that the room was haunted and whoever entered the room was subjected to the eccentricities of Sriram. Whenever anyone entered the room Sriram would mumble something inaudible and tap the persons head with a lemon placed before the goddess and put a tilak on the persons forehead. The eccentricity brought popularity, the hostelites started to believe in the ghost stories, and soon the room became a discussion place for all kinds of strange encounters and ghostly incidents, and usually the timid Vicky was at the receiving end of any practical ghost joke that was played.
There were dares and scares, the brave were dared to spend the night in our room and then once anyone took the dare we racked our brains to scare the hell out of him. Our popularity spread to such extent that even the non-hostellers took the challenge.
Overnight from being, those guys in room 119 we became the hottest commodity in our hostel. I even took it a step further and claimed the lady was in love with me and most of the times ended up pink faced when they asked me how I would spend our honeymoon, but nevertheless, she was my lady love.
By this time the phenomenon of haunted rooms was so catching on that the inmates of another claimed theirs was haunted too and went one step further to prove it. They performed the bizarre yet fabled candle method to talk to the spirits and do not ask what happened; thereafter they stuck to talking with only humans. But whoever tried our stunt we were still the originals and if someone questioned our story, Sriram would spend a lot of energy telling them something gross that most of them would end up crying mommy in their sleeps.
Life was good, we were popular, I finally had a girlfriend, and we even made money from our bets. But all good things in life, even ghosts are short-lived.
Ghosts have their own sense of modesty. They pull up their pants; gather their belongings and fighting falling tears leave the place once they realize you are making a mockery of them. I suppose Neha must have felt the same way too, as we affectionately called our ghost, for the incidents stopped as suddenly as they started.

Three years have gone since. Now Sriram is our college newspaper editor and his newspaper columns are such a rage. Vicky has progressed to such a level that even a few teachers have fallen for him. As for me Neha has been the only girlfriend( if I could call her that)  I had ever had, ghost or human. And we still have not forgotten her.