Somewhere during the early 70s, my father was studying at a college in Mysore. He was staying on campus hostel in a single room while most of the students shared their room with another student. My dad’s room was on the ground floor and it faced a giant tree which my mom and I saw when he took us to Mysore 20 years later. One of his classmate’s had told him that there lived a ghost in the tree and no one dared go out at night for fear of the ghost. My dad never believed in such things and even today he does not although what he witnessed has not been explained yet by science.
One night while he was sleeping in his room, he had a dream and in the middle of it he heard a blood curdling sound of what seemed like a woman laughing at an extremely high pitch aaahhh aaahhh aaaaahhh……. and immediately followed by an equally horrifying weeping sound as uuuuuunnnnnnnnnn …unnnnnnnnnnnnn . The shout was so intense that he woke up, he was sweating bullets and his heart was beating so fast that he could hear the beats in the silence of the night. Dad dismissed it as a nightmare and stayed awake sitting on his bed for a while. No sooner did he decide to sleep again than he heard the same sound again, an extremely high pitched laugh followed by weeping, this time he was well awake and what he heard was for real. His brain led him to imagine a mad old lady running around in the campus making these noises, but common sense made him realize that although the sound of laughing and crying resembled that of a human, no human can make such a high pitched and intense sound.
He gathered the courage to get up, although his heart was still beating like a high revving engine, he opened the door to see if any of his friends had come out. There was no one; he was alone outside his room in front of the giant tree. Then he could see at a distance a small light waving, he recognized it has one of his friends waving an electric torch at him. The two walked towards each other when for a third time the sound came but this time it only lasted for a second. They realized it had come from up the tree. Dad’s classmate was right, the tree indeed was haunted. My dad’s friend directed the torch at the tree to see what was there and they couldn’t see anything. Any normal human would not do what my dad did next.
He picked up a stone and hurled it into the dense tree, nothing happened, he picked up a second stone and hurled it again into the tree. This time the two men saw a big bat like bird fly away from the tree. I have asked him to narrate this story to me many times and never has his story been any different from when I heard it for the first time.
To this day there is no mention of such a creature – bird or bat in any natural science document that relates to the description given by my dad. The only thing that comes closest to his experience can be found in a book called “Jungle Lore” by Jim Corbett where the author had experienced exactly what dad and his friend saw that night. If we look at the stories of Vikram – Betaal , then the description of Betaal is quite similar, it hangs upside down from a tree branch like a bat and makes laughing and crying sounds. Corbett has described it as being a bird like creature whose sound puts entire villages to silence; he himself has heard it only 3 times over a course of 40 years he spent in Indian jungles. My father still maintains that it was no supernatural event but a very rare bird/bat which no one knows about.
All I know is; we in India call it Chudail and the west calls it Banshee.
