Horrific Hauntings : Demons in the Family Roots

 Damodar, an extremely intelligent and friendly 10-year-old boy, was adopted by Mr and Mrs Ketkar just after his fourth birthday in May 1923. He gelled well with his new family and quickly became one of them. He was living the life any poor orphan would dream of until his 15-year-old biological elder brother named Krishna joined him in the summer of 1927.

Krishna Moves in with the Family

 When Dr Ketkar found Krishna, he was completely malnourished and lived in extremely bad conditions. Dr Ketkar figured out that he was being exploited and overworked in a tea shop and he arranged for Krishna to be put under the care of a clerk while attending school. This setup seemed to be successful for the first year but things would take an awkward turn from then onwards. On the very first day of his second year at school, while Krishna was walking on a corridor with a shovel in his hand, he suddenly blacked out. The very next moment, he found himself standing in a completely different spot without the shovel in his hand. Krishna was not able to comprehend what was going on around him and decided to seek the help of the clerk who was taking care of him.

 The clerk, however, did not take him seriously thinking that the boy was joking but as he kept telling him about the way he was getting teleported, he slowly started to believe him. Within a few weeks after this incident, the clerk reached out to Dr Ketkar and asked him to take Krishna off his custody as he felt that paranormal events were happening around the boy. Thus, feeling bad for the traumatized kid, Dr Ketkar decided to take him under his wing and took him to his house.

 Dr Ketkar’s house was being inhibited by him, his wife, his sister-in-law named Cohen, and Damodar before Krishna moved in and after he moved into the house, Dr Ketkar’s wife and sister-in-law started taking care of him on the basis of a repetitive schedule. The sisters initially thought that the creepiness that surrounded Krishna was because of his sleepwalking but, they would soon understand that their assumptions were wrong.

The Family witnesses the Paranormal

 One night in August 1927, while Cohen was observing Krishna sleep, she saw a 16-inch-long mirror get thrown off the wall above him. However, instead of crashing down, the mirror landed slowly as if something invisible was slowly placing it down. Cohen rushed to make sure that it was an accident and that the thread that connected the mirror to a nail must have worn off but when she gave it a closer look, she noticed that the thread was completely intact and the nail was still firmly present on the wall. This indicated that the mirror was intentionally removed from the nail on the wall but Cohen and Krishna were the only ones in the room where Cohen was watching it happen and Krishna was sound asleep throughout the incident. A couple of nights later, Cohen saw a heavy paperweight slowly descend through thin air and gently land on a glass table without any commotion. Even this time, the kid was fast asleep when this happened.

 The same week, the family were woken up by a deafening banging sound and it seemed to be coming from the room in which Krishna was sleeping. When they rushed to his room to see what caused the sound, they saw Krishna unconscious on the floor with the heavy wooden table he was sleeping on being turned 45 degrees towards him. He was surrounded by deranged furniture, books and apparel. When Dr Ketkar bought Krishna to his senses, he told Ketkar that something had thrown him off the bed and the impact he had while hitting the floor made him go unconscious.

 By the end of 1927, the story of the eerie events surrounding Krishna spread across his neighbourhood and the sceptical neighbours who thought that it was a hoax started asking him to stay with them during the nights but these stays would not last for more than a couple of days as the strangeness around him was too much for them. Things used to disappear around Krishna in broad daylight only to reappear at a completely different spot later. Also, coins used to sporadically fall out of thin air.

Haunting the Younger Brother

 In early 1928, the activities that surrounded Krishna started happening around his younger brother Damodar. One day, while Miss Cohn was enjoying her breakfast sitting at the dining table, Damodar’s ball came rolling from the dark hallway with extreme force and hit her hard on her ankle thus injuring her. Just a few days after this incident, his closet burst open and one of his toys flew past him and Miss Cohn with extreme force as if someone was trying to hurt them. Although creepy, these events did not cause any major harm but things escalated the very next day.

 The next day onwards, every time Damodar tried to eat or drink something, something invisible forcefully pulled them off him. No matter how hard he tried to grip these things, they still kept flying away from him. This went on for over seven days and the poor boy was left completely dehydrated and drained out of energy. Also, he was chased by something that threw his own toys at him with great force and it appeared as if this invisible entity was hell-bent on harming him.

An Uncanny Origin

 Trying to find a solution, Dr Ketkar dug deep into the brothers’ origins and his research told that losing their life to an unknown entity was not new to the brothers’ family. Damodar’s mother used to see phantoms and experience extreme paranormal activities around her. This led her deep into depression and she ended up killing herself by lighting herself on fire. A few months after her death, her elder son (Damodar’s and Krishna’s elder brother) started seeing the phantoms his mother saw and no matter how hard he tried, his guardian never believed him. With the paranormal events getting worse every day and him not getting any sort of help, the nine-year-old decided to kill himself instead of living with the trauma.

 Ever since then, Krishna inherited the demons from his family’s roots and started having sporadic unexplainable events which became a constant after his first teleportation experience. Strangely, with his brother still alive, this obscure entity started to traumatize Damodar.

From Bad to Worse

 On 12 August 1928, Mrs Ketkar saw the entities that were haunting her adopted sons for the first time. She was woken up in the middle of the night by extensive whispers and the moment she opened her eyes, she saw two huge shadowy figures staring right at her with their emotionless faces. These figures disappeared into thin air after making a few nonsensical whispers. From the next day onwards, Damodar started seeing these figures follow him from the moment he opened his eyes till he closed his eyes. He said that these figures had terrifying faces and they whispered terrible things in his ears.

 With time, Damodar started feeling hard pushes on his back while he stood near the stairs and he had to literally sit down to save himself. These pushes slowly evolved into getting thrown and levitated. These events were affecting the mental health of the kid and he started to get depressed just like his biological mom. Damodar was almost always frightened, grew extremely pale and started having issues with his physical health as well. Things got so bad that one day, his pulse was almost gone and a doctor had to be called to revive him. The doctors despite multiple check-ups were not able to find any underlying cause as Damodar appeared to be completely healthy both mentally and physically. Multiple exorcisms were performed on the kid but it only made things worse.  

 In April 1929, the entity grew even more violent as thick bite marks filled with thick bubbly saliva started appearing on Damodar’s neck, legs and hands. He was also brutally scratched by the entity which left his body covered with horrific bloody scratch marks. Damodar’s baby sister who was also adopted by the family just a few months back was strangled by this entity with her own hair and almost died.

 The events just did not stop there as the little girl’s thumb was being sporadically hit and cut by this entity, Damodar’s dress was being torn making audible tearing sounds while he still wore them and rusty blades were being thrown across the room to hurt Damodar.

Aftermath

 A couple of more exorcisms were performed but nothing seemed to help the boy nor find what had latched itself to him. There were multiple claims made by the exorcists but they remained just claims. The story of this terrible haunting appeared in the May 1930 issue of “The American Society of Psychical Research” and what happened to Damodar and his siblings after that stays a mystery.