The Dare : Part I

The Dare : Part I

(Note: Some of this actually happened. The building exists)

Of all the qualities that that building possesses, nothing scares me more than the nonchalant attitude of the people towards it. I mean, whenever you imagine a haunted site, you expect the people living around it to be scared of it. Not here, though.

Every single person that I talked to told me the same exact thing – nothing goes wrong if you don’t cross the fence. Unless you cross the fence, you are not in any danger.

I mean, there are people practically sharing a fence with a structure that has seen more deaths than most Tarantino films. And are they bothered by it? Nah.

More than the gory details of the building’s past, it is the nonchalance with which people speak about it that really creeps me out.

“Yeah, we just don’t go there.”

The level of acceptance in their tones gets me every time. They may have been warning me about touching a bad electrical socket, such was the level of certainty they felt of the danger within. You touch a bad electrical socket, you die.  You wander inside this particular piece of property, you die. As simple as that.

I remember reading ‘The Exorcist’ before watching the film based on it. The book had scared me more than the film ever did, and I am talking about literally the most famous horror film of all times.

It was this strange nonchalance that scared me. The makers of the film designed the film to scare the audience. But it was indeed more scary in the book, because you got the sense that the author really did believe every single word that he was writing.

You expect people to be either cynical or dramatic, when it comes to all things supernatural. What you don’t expect is for them to accept it and carry on with their lives.

Let me tell you a little bit about the building, itself. First of all, it is not built on some old burial ground (I’ve seen the papers in the old municipality office). It was never the base for satanic cults (there had been a house on the same area before – and no, the house wasn’t haunted). There had been no murders or suicides for there to be vengeful spirits around (all the recorded deaths had been genuine accidents, or due to natural causes). In fact, there was nothing that could have triggered these occurrences that I could find in the history.

So these are the details that I have gathered – and I will try to stick to the bare facts, so you can draw your own inferences and conclusions.

A Mr. Kshirsagar owned the land from the late 1930s till his death in 1963. He built a bungalow on the land, which he used infrequently (his business having been in Coimbatore). After his death in Coimbatore, the house passed along to his daughter and son-in-law. It remained empty till July 1973 when they put it up for sale. In February 1980, it was sold to a private builder, Mr. J.S. Naik. Naik demolished the house and started constructing the base for what he thought would be a five storied building. However, since construction began in September 1980 till when I came across it in the March of 2003, it had passed through the hands of no less than six separate builders and it was still incomplete.

The reason, of course, being the sudden deaths of all six of the owners. Two accidents, three heart attacks and one prolonged cancer later, it now lay unfinished.

These six deaths of the owners would seem like a big coincidence, were it not for the fact that each of these deaths were preceded by a number of deaths in each household. And that is not counting fatal accidents on the construction site, itself.

The total death toll from 1980 to 2003 was 63. 63 people associated with the building had died. Most of them from natural causes. Some of them from accidents.

And this was the building that I had decided to break into to have a bit of an adventure.

This was the building. This was my dare.