Fear of the Paranormal

It was going to be a great weekend. Friends were coming over from Hyderabad and the agenda was to just have fun and nothing else.
It was the morning of 29th May when my friends ( Snehal, Sravanthi, Sirish and Chaitanya) came to our (Me and Santosh) house. We had an awesome time in Bangalore for two days, we partied a lot, played paintball, ate at good places and caught up on a lot of things. We were to leave for Coorg on 31st which was a Sunday. As usual we were never really on time, the plan was to start at around 4.30 AM in the morning but the previous night's partying took a toll on us and we were able to get out only by around 9.00 AM.

The drive to Coorg was a memorable one. There's no better fun then to travel in a car filled with friends. It was an 8hr drive as we stopped at various places for a break. We finally reached this home stay after driving around for quite some time. A little insight about this Home Stay, it’s a good 30 KM away from the main town of Coorg, somewhere near Kakabee. To reach the home stay we have to take a deviation from the main road and travel 3 KM on a really bumpy road. Driving on this bumpy road is no easy job and definitely not in our city cars, so we asked the owners to pick us up. We were waiting for the guys from the home stay to come pick us up when this dog came near our car wagging its tail. At first we thought it was one those friendly little dog’s that had come near us with the hopes of getting some food from us but it came as a bit of a shock when it started howling looking at us. It sounded like a very sad howl and all of us were terrified as we are a bit towards the superstitious side. The jeep then came to pick us up and we got into the jeep and we didn’t talk much about the dog. We had opted for a cottage with 6 beds so that all of us could stay together. The cottage we stayed in looked archaic, its architecture was very native to Coorg. Once in our rooms, all we could think of was about the dog and the reason behind its howling. Each one of us had an interpretation, some thought that it howled because it saw a spirit and some felt it was a sign of impending death. We finally decided to stop the topic as we were getting freaked beyond our wits.

After dinner, we all sat by the fire to talk but for some odd reason all of us were very uncomfortable, we constantly kept looking around. The minute the fire burned out, all of us were more than happy to go back to the cottage. We then played Uno till 3 AM in the morning and then retired to our beds. I instantly fell asleep as I was very tired from the travel.

The next day everyone woke up excitedly as we had planned to go on a trek and in all the excitement we completely forgot about the ‘Dog Incident’. After the trek all of us were exhausted and most of us were bitten by leeches including me. At this point, I would want to classify leeches as one of the most disgusting and ugly creatures to have been created on this planet. After returning to the cottage, I started noticing that there were a lot of flies in the room and I remember the room being almost pest free the previous evening. Snehal had to unexpectedly leave as he had to catch a flight to Delhi the next day for a Visa Interview. I was constantly on the phone because there was an important presentation that I had to give two days later and I was totally unprepared for it and Chaitanya was suffering from severe stomach ache right from the time we got back from the trek. All this sobered down our mood a bit and we were all serious.

We decided to hit the sack as we were not really in the mood for anything that night and we noticed that Chaitanya’s stomach ache grew worse by the hour. He was sleeping on his stomach in order to reduce the pain. This got us all a little panicked because there was no hospital in the near vicinity but Chaitanya assured us that it was no big deal and that we should all go to sleep. It was not long before we saw Chaitanya shivering like crazy and it was really strange because he did not have fever and he is the kind who is extremely resistant to cold. Along with the shivers he also started to moan in a very peculiar fashion and all of us were scared out of our wits. No one wanted to wake him up, such was the level of hysteria. We were so scared that we kept the lights on and tried to sleep and precisely at that time two dogs started howling and crying right outside our cottage door. We were just horror struck and some of us also started experiencing temperature variations in the room.

It was just impossible to sleep that night. Even the ones who managed to sleep had only nightmares to welcome them. We were so relieved when we finally saw the sun rising and it was not long before we packed our bags and left.

That night was the longest night for all of us. We don’t know if it was logical on our part to have gotten scared that night or if we were just behaving like a bunch of juveniles. Whatever it may have been, it definitely did change our definition of fear. Fear of the paranormal.