By Imdadul Islam
(Murshidabad, India)

It was a freezing cold evening. I was coming back home with my two friends Badal and Rakib from a marriage ceremony of our close friend Mridul’s elder sister Barnali. But, during our journey towards home to ride bicycles it abruptly began to rain cat and dog while we were inside of a field, far away from our hamlet Ram Rohim Pally and it was also a jungle area. Two sides of the road were full of thick custard apple, teak and other wild trees. Except that, it was hard to recognise the big and old trees which were squeezed with various kinds of the wild creeper plants.The rainy atmosphere was utterly unexpected at that wintry period of time, albeit the sky was cloudy and it had been giving a signal of damp weather for a few days.

By the by, at that very time we saw an old desolated house beside the road in a wild ambiance. We had to get there to be escaped from being soaked by the rain falling. As the ceaseless rain dropping had been continuing for a long time, we had to spend the night there in that house to be more and more frightened.

The house had a reputation as haunted one. We saw there multiple rooms, unused for a long period of time and these were almost ravaged and unfigured. We heard from our elder family members that all the men, women and their children who lived there in that house were died of a dreadful epidemic disease before almost one hundred years and the owner of the house was a tyrant land lord. Now it’s abandoned and almost destructive one.

Most of the people believe that the spirits of that tyrant land lord’s family members come and go there now and then even in the day times as well. But we had to stay there all over the night. Although we were not faced there anything extraordinary matters, at 10:30 p.m. we had been listening to a loud echoing sound in one of the rooms of the building like the babies’ crying just before the beginning of a gust wind.

To hear such screaming Badal hugged me suddenly in fear and I followed Rakib was also whispering to say repeatedly ghosts and ghosts with trembling. Being disappointed I was appeasing them to say not to be frightened, but the circumstances reminisced me the so called story of the house and all my hairs of the body also erected.

But I tried to manage me and them as well. As it is known to me that there is nothing as ghost in this epoch of science , at that very time I offered them to go to the room from where the ghostly sound was coming just after collection of a strict gallantry. But they were not agreed. Besides, when finally I alone started to go towards the room and already reached there , I looked at my back side and saw Rakib and Badal had also followed me on. I thanked them and tried to search the space, source of the cackling sound with a small torch.The torch which was my all time fellow was providing a highly keen light, albeit it was very small. Just at that time the sound came once again and helped me to detect the location. Then I saw there three or four eaglets with a gigantic mother eagle inside of a big and broken ventilator of a room and the room was just in the middle of the house. The ruddy eyes of the mother eagle was luminously sparkling against the light of my torch.I did never see such a big eagle and its big eyes till then. I made me sanguine that the cackling sound was of course coming from them as the chilly wind of that stormy night was striking them badly.

But it’s regrettable enough when I turned to them at my back side to see their condition. I saw that Badal was utterly wobbling to be scared and falling down on the ground to close his two eyes. Rakib told me, ” oh! everything is just for you, if you didn’t come to be a spy we were safe with this nervous friend… Now manage him”. I said to Rakib , ” it was totally unknown to me my friend, it was totally… that Badal would be so nervous.”

At all events, after a long time Badal came in normal sense with our care of splashing rain water on his face and eyes as well as massaging his glacial feet and palms when we felt that it was dawn and the rain falling was stopped. Regaining his sense Badal suddenly said to us, ” are we safe my brothers?”

I humorously answered him, ” yes, we are safe Mr Nervous man , but please tell us how many ghosts did you see here in this haunted house?”
Then he also told me with a faint smiling , ” no one my boss, but some gigantic eagles and eaglets stricken with a ghostly storm “.