Horrific Hauntings : Coorg Diaries Part II

Read the first part here

My grandma had experienced a lot of frightening experiences in that house but due to her age, she was able to remember only two such occurrences. I will be sharing those in this post and the next one so please visit tomorrow as well.

She along with her family used to visit Coorg for her vacations when she was young and every time they visited, she used to stay in the exact same house we had stayed in last night. This was her first visit after the suicide of the plantation worker I had mentioned in the previous part. She vaguely remembers being around 12 when this happened. It was the start of her spring break and they started from Connor at around 6 in the morning via public transport as planned. After switching buses in between and taking breaks they reached Coorg at around 8 pm. My grandma was elated to meet her cousins whom she loved a lot but her parents who were already exhausted by the tiring journey went to sleep even without supper. As all young kids do, my grandma along with her cousins decided to play hide and seek, which later turned out to be a decision that would haunt her even in her sixties.

She was the seeker in the first game and the game went smoothly as she remembers. She found all her cousins and the next game started. During the second game, she hid inside a small room that was being used as a storage room and it had no lights. 

She heard the sound of someone moving and it gave her a feeling that someone else was sharing the room with her. Being an innocent kid, she thought it was one of her cousins hiding along with her and whispered stay silent to which she heard a “Hmmmm’’ in a voice which was like that of an older woman. Startled by what she heard, she turned to see who it was but to her surprise she saw no one. After a few minutes, she was able to feel something breathing on her neck which was enough to make her run out of that room. While running away, she heard a lady scream “HOGABEDA” from that room which she says, she did not understand what it meant back then.

She ran to her uncle with tear-filled eyes and explained what had happened to which he laughed and ridiculed her saying she got scared by the sound made by rodents and the wind that passed through the door crevices. When she asked him the meaning of “HOGABEDA” (which means don’t go) his tone changed, and asked her not to go near the store room again and promised her he would check. After everything that happened that day, she along with her cousins decided to sleep together and the only room that was big enough to accommodate all of them was present in the house where we had stayed. She slept after chit-chatting for a while and was woken up later that night by the voice of her uncle. She heard her uncle calling her loud asking her to lock the rosters which they were growing. She was confused as she remembered locking up the roosters before lying down and with sleepy eyes and an unclear mind, she unlatched the house door and went out of the house.

To her surprise, not just her uncle but no one else was present outside and the roosters were locked as they should. She turned to get back inside the house with an annoyed face only for it to lock itself. She was able to hear a voice whisper “I told you not to go, didn’t I?” in her ear in Kannada which she did not understand back then, but just the tone of that whisper was enough to make her understand what the intentions of the whisperer were. She ran on the dark, mist-filled roads as fast as she could only to be stopped by a woman who appeared like a plantation worker.

The woman, who was turning away from my grandma asked her why she was running so fast to which she started telling her what had happened. The woman slowly turned her head to reveal her face which appeared pale white in color with bloody eyes and a cut tongue. My grandma shouted as loud as she could at this sight and blacked out. Her relatives had apparently rushed out hearing her screams and found her unconscious body near the hut which belonged to the plantation worker I had mentioned in the previous part. They bought her back into the house only to find her temperature spiking. She was later admitted to a nearby hospital as no matter what they did her temperature did not normalize.

My grandma recovered physically in half a week but she was left mentally scarred for life from that incident. You can read her second story and what happened on the last day of our trip here.