KP website focuses on city’s haunted houses with a peek into history of colonial bldgs
Times of India | 5 February 2024
Kolkata: The city police on Sunday shared with citizens a set of ghost stories that goes beyond being just urban myths, along with some incidents recorded in police documents, on its Facebook page.
The post included tales from Garstin Place, Writers’ Buildings and National Library. Now only a memory, the building at 1, Garstin Place became the birthplace of radio in Bengal in 1927.
Stories from Writers’ Buildings and National Library followed — the tales even naming the influential people of this city who documented these. They included various Bengali celebrities, including the likes of Birendra Krishna Bhadra, Debabrata Biswas and Soumitra Chatterjee, encountering ghostly spirits at Garstin Place.
Interestingly, the write-up comes with a brief history of each of the “haunted” buildings which cops feel will allow readers to “put things into perspective”.
P Banerjee, the European programming in charge, was frightened out of his wits in 1945 (or ’46) on a Dec night, as he stepped out on to the balcony for a smoke at Garstin Place and witnessed a chair being hurled by an invisible entity across the lounge. Somehow, he managed to use a nearby telephone to summon some of his colleagues.
Eventually, none of the staff were willing to stay alone at the building after 8 pm. Two of the accounts included were of a tall European man who roamed the corridors, glaring at employees, and another European man ‘without eyes’, who scared a woman announcer into resigning after she encountered him at a studio one night.
History of Kolkata says that the place where Writers’ Buildings is now located, was once a graveyard.
The post said the plot of land served as a burial ground for young clerks originally housed on the ground floor of the old Fort William, which is where the GPO stands today.
In 1762, an epidemic hit Calcutta, resulting in death of more than 800 Englishmen and women, many of whom were laid to rest at Garstin Place.
The National Library building in Alipore is yet another “haunted” spot, where people have reportedly seen a lady in white and even heard the sound of horses’ hooves.
The stories are not surprising, say cops, when one considers its history, especially the supposed duel in 1769 when Warren Hastings had challenged his legal officer, Philip Francis.
Two centuries later, on a full moon night, when watchman Beerbahadur was on duty on the western lawn on the National Library campus, he would see a palanquin cross the grounds. Inside the carriage lay a white young man with blood dripping from his hand, leaving a trail of red on the pale moonlit lawn, the post said.
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