Something In The Hallway

Language: English

SG:”I still think about that night with my younger sister because it never really made sense, like I can explain parts of it but not the whole thing. We were just at home doing nothing, I was on my phone in the living room and she went into the kitchen, and then she called my name kind of quietly, which already felt off. When I walked in, she was just standing there staring at the hallway, and she told me she thought she saw someone walk past, even though we both knew no one else was home. I tried to play it off and said it was probably just shadows or something from outside, but honestly it didn’t feel like that. Then we both heard it at the same time, like actual footsteps coming down the hallway, slow and steady, not super loud but clear enough that we both just went quiet. I remember not even wanting to move, like if I stayed still it wouldn’t notice us or something, and my younger sister grabbed my arm and didn’t let go. The steps got closer and then just stopped right at the kitchen, and we were both just standing there waiting to see something, but nothing was there. The light flickered a couple times and for a second the room just felt off, like it didn’t look the same. And then it was just over, no more noise, nothing. We ended up telling ourselves it had to be something normal, like the house making noise or the lights messing up, but I don’t fully buy that even now, because we both heard the same thing and reacted the same way, and it really felt like something was there with us for a second and then just gone.”

Interviewer: “Do you feel as if the event could be explainable or as if it was really a ghost/paranormal event?

SG: “I think it could be explained because this event never happened again and could maybe have been an open window, but the event/ghost felt so real as if something was actually there watching us.”

Context: This story was told to the informant by a freshman at USC while the two were watching a horror movie. SG was reminded of the event while watching The Conjuring because of the house’s long hallways.

Analysis: What I like about SG’s story is that it doesn’t try to prove anything; it just tells what happened and leaves you thinking. The fact that both she and her younger sister heard the same footsteps at the same time is what makes it feel real, because that’s harder to explain away. At the same time, she never fully says it was a ghost, which actually makes it more believable. Nothing ever shows up, and that almost makes it creepier. It’s just the sound, the light flickering, and that feeling that something was there, then gone, and that uncertainty is what makes it stick.

Dual spirit possession. Huh?

Age: 15
Performance Date: 04/17/2026

Context: 

I am an international student in the US. When I went back to India for my winter break, I took a trip to Rajasthan – the western part of the country – with my family. One night, my cousins and I decided to talk about our experiences with ghosts at 2 am. We turned the lights off, sat in a circle, and turned on our touches. One cousin of mine, let’s call her T for the story, volunteered to share her frightening experiences of being possessed by a spirit(S).

The Story:

One day, T was coming back home from school when she unknowingly stepped on a piece of lime on the road. Eatery items in India tend to have an association with black magic, where the magician uses food, i.e., items like sweets, lime, or fruits and leaves them on the roads or distributes them in temples, taking advantage of the naive nature of people as they unknowingly eat the possessed food item, considering it a gift of god.

However, in her case, T stepped on one instead of eating it. Coming back home, she was normal. But it didn’t take long for her to be abnormal. She started liking to sit in the dark, would randomly laugh, and would look at the right side of her bed, and would cry for no reason. 

As the days passed, no one in her family really noticed what was happening. One day, she was having lunch when she randomly picked up her lunch plate and took it out of the house. She walked towards the spot where she stepped on the lime. By then, her mom was out of the kitchen and realized that T was not there. Her mom, in search of her, came out of the house and shouted out loud. “Hey T, what are you doing?” This sharp sound broke her trance, but made her mom realize that something was not right with her. 

After a few days of repeated unusual things that T did, it made her mom certain that her daughter was possessed. She fortunately knew a priest, who previously had experience dealing with necromancy. When the priest paid a visit to their house, he gave a piece of paper with spiritual chants written on it, and asked T to read it for a week and then mix that piece of paper in a glass of water and drink it at the end of the week. T also mentioned that after mixing that paper, the glass of water would turn orange. Before that priest left the house, he told T, “Be strong, someone is fighting for you as long as you let them”.

Days passed, and the priest paid weekly visits. Even though the hallucinations were declining, they weren’t completely gone. Suddenly, one day, T stopped sleeping in her room, saying that the right side of the bed feels inclined, and I feel there is a gush of wind hitting my face whenever I toss towards that side.

After a couple of days, she began waking up in places she didn’t remember going to, and her mother started staying awake at night. One evening, T quietly started walking towards the balcony. As T walked closer to the edge of the balcony, her body refused to move, as if two magnets with the same polarity were kept head-on. It felt like something was pulling her forward and holding her back at the same time. That night, when the priest returned, he explained that  “There are two spirits. One is trying to take her. The other is trying to protect her.”

Over the next few days, the rituals became more intense. T read more chants and the priest performed cleansing prayers in the house. And the weird behavior slowly began to fade away. One fine day, it was the end of the week, when T began mixing the piece of paper in water, ready to drink, but it did not turn orange. After that day, everything stopped.

Their Thoughts: 

T says that it was a horrifying experience for her. She also believes that this made her more spiritual. Not only this, she initially was a bit reluctant to share this story with others, but now she has mustered the courage to talk about it among her peers, and feels “it is just cool, thankfully I have no spirit now”.

My Thoughts: When T began narrating the story, I initially was a bit skeptical about whether the story was true or not. Over the course of the trip, I spoke to her mom to ask if something like this really happened, and to my surprise, it really did. More so, it was scary for me too, as I used to hear legends about people being possessed by back magic, but I never believed them. This time, when it happened to T, I now feel black magic exists, and I try to be vigilant of my surroundings when walking on the road or when eating food given by people.

The mountain ghost! Trip which turned haunted

Age: 75
Performance Date: 04/10/2026

Context: My grandfather did his K-12 studies at a boarding school in India. His school was in a remote location, and it was built on top of a hill. Right below the hill was a graveyard, and a famous legend had its way around campus – whenever children of his school would go out for an excursion and return late at night, they’d see a woman with a veil selling corn, late at night, by the roadside along the mountainous curves. As his school was on top of a hill, people had to be careful when driving around the corners of the mountain, especially at night, to avoid accidents. Residents would call this ghost the “corn seller” as she and her family had died due to an accident on this road. The story is that one day, a group of young boys was driving a super-fast car on these narrow roads. Suddenly, they saw a truck coming from the front. As there was no time for them to brake, the boys took a sharp turn towards the side to save themselves, but unfortunately ran over the corn seller’s canopy, killing her and her two-year-old child.

Story: Let us call my grander D for the story. His school allowed these excursions only for students in high school. Excursions were two-day-long trips from Saturday morning to Sunday night, and the students would travel during the nighttime to attend school on Monday. D had heard many stories of his seniors spotting this corn seller when coming back to school from the city. This time it was D’s turn.

D, as usual, left campus on Saturday morning. On the way down, he was vigilant to find the corn seller and bust the legend, but to his surprise, there was no canopy or woman selling corn. As his trip came to an end, D told me all his friends were super tired, yet they were trying to scare each other by pretending that they saw the women.  

Suddenly, the bus got a flat tire as they were about to reach the hostel, right after they passed the graveyard. It was around 10 pm, and all the children went silent. However, the bus driver was confident and let D and his friends come out of the bus to help him fix the flat tire. Most of the children were either sleepy or too scared to come out of the bus, but D and a couple of his friends decided to step out and help the driver. 

As the bus driver started to repair the puncture, D did not have anything to do. As he and one of his friends (let’s call him V) started talking to each other, paying almost no attention to the flat tire. Suddenly, they saw a deer. It was not moving, but its eyes shone like a diamond. For some reason, it caught their attention. Being young boys, they wanted to see what it was. D told me, “I was not sure if it was a deer, a dog, or some other wild animal, though the eyes looked like those of a deer.” Without thinking much, D and his friend V moved towards this weird creature.

The headlights from the bus barely reached that part of the jungle/road. As they stood there, both heard a faint voice from behind, “Bhutta le lo” ( which means please buy corn in English). V looked at D and said laughingly, “Did you hear that?” Before D could respond, the voice came again, this time sharper than before, as if the person was much closer. D and V slowly turned their heads for a brief second, and though they saw a faint figure on the other side of the road, they moved towards the bus. 

They were merely 200 meters away from the bus, but when they came back, the driver asked where you guys were and why you were both sweating. Both together said, “Kuch Nahi, we were just checking if we could get a lift, that’s why we went a little forward.”  They both did not share this with anyone at school, but now, when they think about it, they still do not know what exactly it was. Did they see the corn seller, or was it just their mind telling them that you are tired?

Their Thoughts: D brings this story almost every time we have a celebration at our house. He says that this incident made me believe in ghosts, and even since he never dared to be curious about spirits or haunted things in general.  He told me, “I still remember not being able to sleep at night, and the next morning when I met V, he too was in a similar situation.

My thoughts: I think D was tired, but if the story is true, then in my analysis, the ghost was wanted and was there to help people by scaring them to not stay on the road, as it was not safe due to the narrow roads. She was there not to scare people, but in reality to save their lives as they were standing on an accident-prone road.

Grandma’s House

Age: 18
Occupation: Student at USC

I interviewed my close friend who lives in the same dorm building here at USC. I asked him if he ever had an interaction with a ghost, to which he replied with his story:

So this happened there was like a sleepover at my grandma’s house and so basically, it was September, I want to say 2017. So me and my cousins, we all had to go to sleep early because my grandma didn’t really like us being up. And we all wanted to go outside. And so it’s like 12, and we snuck out and then came back I think, like an hour later, because again, we were no more than 12, so like you really can’t stay up that long, however, I still didn’t go to sleep. So, I was sitting there and I’m hearing things slam but like no one else is noticing it since they were all asleep. She had like an older house, and there wasn’t really a lot of stuff that was renovated or whatever, but it was like this older house and I was always scared of it, her doors would slam, and things in the kitchen were rambling and the water wouldn’t stop pouring so I got up.I turned off the water, but then the water would not move. Like it was stuck so hard. So then I got scared and went to sleep and then woke up.

I then asked If he believed it was an actual ghost to which he replied ‘yes’. It didn’t have a big impact on his life, it was just something that happened to him. I personally don’t believe in ghosts and believe that he was just young, in the dark, and the only one awake in an old house that he was already afraid of.

Haunted House

Age: 18

In an interview with my close friend and roommate, I asked if she had any ghost stories that she would be willing to share. For some short background information, she grew up in East Los Angeles in a Latino religious family. Her story is as follows:

In the back of my Aunts home, there’s a room there, which is often used as a guest room. And a lot of the time, family members would go when they visit to sleep over there, and that room was known to, like, have some kind of ghost or spirit in there. So, it’s happened a lot of times where people who go and stay there, they wake up and see a lady in a white gown, and they just see her there. A lot of people don’t know who it is. And people have experienced dreaming with family members in that room for some reason. I don’t really think there’s like a spirit in there. And even for many years, there’s a man who lived there that was renting out the room, and he would even talk about things that he would experience, like the lights would turn off randomly, or just random coincidences that would happen, that weren’t just coincidences. And I’m not sure, but they feel like it might have something to do with across the street, there was a an abandoned hospital, and for some reason that abandoned hospital, there was a lot of like, weird stuff that happened there, so they kind of feel like maybe it has something to do with that.

I then asked if she believed the story to be true or an odd coincidence. She replied:

I feel like I wouldn’t believe that it was a coincidence if it would have only happened to one person, I wouldn’t have put this much thought into it. But I think because so many people have experienced this and like, they go in and feel something there, I don’t know, I can’t say, because I haven’t experienced it myself. But I think just because it’s been more than like, one person who has experienced the same thing, I think it is true. 

I continued by asking if the story had a lasting impact on them, since they seemed to truly believe what was happening had supernatural reasoning. She replied:

Yeah, I think it did have a long lasting impact. I think it’s something that they still talk about a lot, but I think they don’t put too much attention to it. Because I feel like, when it comes to ghosts and stuff like that, at least in my opinion, I feel like when you pay attention to those things, it kind of feeds off of that. Yeah, so I think the more thought you put to it, the more you attract that energy.

Finally, I asked if she believed religion to play a role in their belief of ghosts. She replied:

Speaking for myself, I think because I’m a believer in God, I try not to put my energy into that. Yeah, I do think they exist, but I think I feel like there’s a greater power that protects me, that’s my God. So, like, I don’t fear it. And I feel like if I were to fear it, then that’s when I give it my energy. Because I don’t give my energy, I haven’t experienced that and they go to my family. I don’t know where their faith is, so I don’t know how that plays a role in their experiences, but I can only speak for myself. 

Since I am not a firm believer in ghosts, I feel as though it could have been coincidental noises combined with their preconceived notions about the hospital that was across the house that made them believe they were having an interaction with ghosts.