There are various types of stories which are frequently associated with educational institutes like colleges and universities. Thousands of pupils come in every year to study, to progress towards achieving their dreams, and they graduate after completing their education. The unspoken stories remain scattered across classrooms, corridors, canteens, libraries, and reading rooms. The primary difference between workplaces and educational institutes is that unlike workplaces, the faces around the campus change every year and the characters in the story are more numerous and diverse. Every institute has their own sad stories, funny tales, and gossips with a bit of both.
Madras Christian College’s story has an element of fear that stands out from regular ghost stories. This college is situated in Tambaram East in the district of Chengalpattu in Tamil Nadu. Tambaram lies close to the highway connecting Chennai and Trichy. This college is pretty old and it has gathered a lot of strange stories over time.
Reverend John Anderson was one of the Christian missionaries who came to India from Scotland. In 1837, he established the General Assembly School, which was later developed into this college. He had a significant impact in the spread of the study of the English language and development of general educational infrastructure across southern India. This government-sponsored college operates under the University of Madras. After a century of the college’s establishment, the Tambaram Conference was held here. Tambaram Conference was the Third World Missional Conference and after the event, the World Council of Churches was established.
Madras Christian College is known across the country for its high standard of education. People with a keen interest in paranormal activities, supernatural events, unexplained mysteries, maintain that most of the ghost stories that are famous are not based around some historical establishment, but around residences or somewhere an unnatural death occurred.
The Madras Christian College has a sad backstory. A student took his own life after facing a rejection. After his death his soul did not let go of the place so easily. Even to this day, it lets others know about its presence through several incidents on campus. A strange emptiness can be felt around the laboratories and libraries of this campus. These calm rooms with the aroma of the aging pages hold the memories from years of people coming in and going out.
Their presence remains with the lab instruments and the pages of the books. One of the laboratories of this college, too, has a story telling us about someone from the past. You can hear someone speaking very softly if you walk in here at night, and if you pay more attention, you will hear someone is reading out from a book. If you enter the room and try to locate the source of the voice, the sound stops. Perhaps that avid reader feels disturbed in the presence of somebody else.
If you still continue to look around, you will find nobody else in the room. The old lamps dimly light up the area in the dark of the night. A lot of people had held bets and visited this place, but none of them could stay for long, they all fled in fear.
Pupils in this college have heard sudden footsteps in the empty corridors at night, they have witnessed water faucets open right after they have come out of the washroom having closed them. Noticing the lights flickering in classrooms or restrooms, people tried to run out of these places and suddenly felt someone standing behind them. There are several trees and plants across the campus, some wild animals also roam around. In the half-dark, half-lit dusk people were scared of deer jumping around in the foliage and some of them spotted a strange creature who was half-deer, half-human.
People tend to develop rigid beliefs from repeatedly listening to stories and gossips. They begin to perceive normal events as paranormal. The experience of a young student from this college is not that kind of mistake. He was about to walk home after his day, but he could not leave the campus. The guy kept walking for a long time but every time he would find himself at the same spot where he started from. It is not like he lost the direction of the road, every time he tried to take a step forward, he felt someone was there, someone about to grab him from behind. When he turned around, he saw no one. So much time had passed in a situation like this, he lost track of it. After a while, he found a big relief after spotting a few more people were heading that way. Since then, he never dared walking down that lane.
It is debatable whether the ghost of the student who committed suicide after being rejected on his proposal in Herbert Hall is still roaming around campus at this well-known college. People with weak hearts get scared when things happen suddenly, like furniture falling and rolling over on its own or loud laughter. Roaming around the campus, you’ll find the room number 148 is locked. Situated opposite Herbert Hall, this is the room which witnessed the death.
Every year new sets of students come in and the older batch of pupils graduate, but these balconies, libraries, laboratories, restrooms retain the history of all the shadows of the people who passed by.
Excerpted with permission from Haunted Places of India, Riksundar Banerjee, Aleph Book Company.