The House in Kuldhara That Wasn't Empty

I didn't see a ghost in Kuldhara.

I think I would have preferred that.

A ghost is something you can run from. You see it, your mind panics, and your body understands what to do.

What happened to me in that village was worse because for a few minutes, nothing looked frightening at all.

It looked normal.

I was in Jaisalmer with my cousin Raghav in November. On our second afternoon, we drove out to Kuldhara.

I already knew the stories.

An abandoned village. Empty houses. A curse. People claiming to hear voices after dark.

Standard haunted-place material.

When we arrived, however, Kuldhara wasn't scary.

It was hot.

There were tourists taking photographs, children running between the ruins and guides repeating the same stories to different groups. Somewhere near the entrance, somebody was selling bottled water.

Raghav looked at me and laughed.

"Very haunted."

We spent perhaps an hour walking around.

The farther we moved from the busier section, though, the quieter it became.

Kuldhara has hundreds of ruined structures, and after a while they begin to look similar—sandstone walls, open courtyards, broken staircases leading nowhere.

I was taking photographs when I noticed one house that seemed unusually intact.

It stood at the end of a narrow lane.

The doorway was low enough that I had to bend slightly to enter.

Inside was a small courtyard.

There were three rooms.

Two had collapsed roofs.

The third had a wooden door.

That bothered me immediately.

Almost everything around us was stone.

But this door looked old and dark, with a metal ring hanging from it.

"Raghav?"

No answer.

I assumed he was photographing something outside.

I pushed the door.

It opened easily.

The room behind it was completely dark.

Then I smelled food.

Not something rotten.

Fresh food.

Ghee. Roasted cumin. Something cooking over a fire.

I actually smiled because my first thought was that there must be a restaurant or house behind the ruins.

Then I heard a woman speak.

I couldn't understand every word, but she sounded annoyed.

A man answered her.

Then a child laughed.

Three people.

A family.

The voices were coming from the other side of the room.

My eyes adjusted slowly.

There was another doorway ahead.

Yellow light came through it.

I walked towards it.

And stepped into a kitchen.

Not a ruined kitchen.

A real one.

A small flame burned beneath a blackened metal pot. Brass utensils hung from the wall. There were rotis stacked on a cloth beside the fire.

A woman sat with her back towards me.

Beside her, a boy was eating.

Across from them sat an elderly man.

For two or three seconds, nobody noticed me.

Then the old man looked up.

He didn't appear frightened.

He appeared confused.

He said something I didn't understand.

The woman turned.

She stared at my clothes.

Then at the phone in my hand.

The little boy stopped eating.

I remember saying, "Sorry."

Nobody responded.

Then the woman asked me something.

I understood only two words.

"Kaun ho?"

Who are you?

I backed towards the doorway.

The old man stood.

And suddenly all three began speaking at once.

Not shouting.

Questioning me.

Who was I?

Where had I come from?

Why was I inside their house?

I turned around and walked quickly back through the dark room.

I reached the wooden door.

Opened it.

And stopped.

Kuldhara was gone.

Outside was a village.

Not ruins.

A village.

The lane was crowded with people.

Women carrying metal vessels. Children running barefoot between houses. Two men unloading sacks from an animal cart.

Every building I had seen broken minutes earlier had walls and roofs.

Smoke rose from cooking fires.

I couldn't move.

Then someone grabbed my shoulder.

I screamed.

It was Raghav.

I was back inside the ruined house.

The room behind me was empty.

No kitchen.

No fire.

No family.

Just a collapsed sandstone wall.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked.

I couldn't answer.

He told me he'd been searching for me for nearly fifteen minutes.

I said that was impossible.

I had been inside for maybe three.

Then I asked him about the wooden door.

"What wooden door?"

I turned around.

There wasn't one.

The entrance behind us was an open stone doorway.

Nothing was attached to it.

I showed him exactly where I had walked.

He thought the heat had gotten to me.

I probably would have believed the same thing.

Then my phone vibrated.

A video had been recorded.

Eleven minutes and fourteen seconds.

I hadn't started any video.

We stood together and watched it.

The screen was almost completely black.

Apparently my phone had been recording while I was inside the room.

For the first minute, there was only the sound of my footsteps.

Then the voices started.

A woman.

A man.

A child.

Raghav stopped smiling.

Around four minutes into the recording, the woman clearly asked:

"Kaun ho?"

Then came my voice.

"Sorry."

For several minutes, the conversation continued.

And then, near the end, something happened that I had no memory of.

The little boy began crying.

The old man said something repeatedly.

Raghav replayed that section three times.

Neither of us understood it.

That evening, back in Jaisalmer, we played the recording for the elderly owner of our guesthouse.

He listened without interrupting.

When it finished, he asked us where we had recorded it.

"Kuldhara."

He immediately handed the phone back.

"What was the old man saying?" I asked.

The owner stared at me for a moment.

Then he translated it.

"He is telling you to leave."

"Why?"

The man looked uncomfortable.

I played the final section again.

This time he translated everything.

The old man's voice was saying:

"Go before the houses become empty."

Again.

And again.

"Go before the houses become empty."

I still have that recording.

I've never uploaded it anywhere.

I haven't even listened to the whole thing again.

But occasionally, when someone tells me Kuldhara is just a collection of abandoned ruins surrounded by exaggerated ghost stories, I think about that kitchen.

The warm rotis.

The brass utensils.

The little boy staring at my phone.

And something else I didn't notice until months later.

During those eleven minutes of audio, you can hear dozens of people outside the house.

Talking.

Walking.

Living.

Then, at exactly 7 minutes and 36 seconds, every voice in the village stops at the same time.

There is silence for about four seconds.

And somewhere very close to my phone, a woman whispers:

"They've come."

I have never been able to convince myself to find out who she meant.