NOT ALL HOMES WELCOME YOU

My friend Mr. Sinha had always believed in logic. A retired forest officer with a stern face and a steady voice, he laughed off the idea of ghosts and curses. When he bought a sprawling but decaying zamindar house in a remote Bengal village, he felt like he had found peace at last.

The house was massive dusty chandeliers, ivy-covered balconies, and courtyards overrun with time. He often told me over tea, “This house has bones, real history.”

He moved in with his wife, Asha. Their son lived in the city, but they were happy, alone, together.

For a few weeks, all was well.

It began with whispers. Asha would sit in the long corridor at night and stare at the western window the one with broken iron bars and creeping moss. She told Mr. Sinha that someone whispered her name from there.

He brushed it off as rural unease, a product of quietness and age.

But soon she began locking the door to that room. When he asked her why, she whispered, “Because it comes through the mirror now.”

She was not joking.

Her sleep turned violent moaning, murmuring old Bengali chants in a voice too deep to be hers. She began sketching symbols in her diary ancient tantric sigils, he would later find.

Then came the night she screamed for three full minutes, until blood vessels in her eye burst.

That was when he called me.

We brought in a priest, but the house rejected him.

Yes, that’s the word he used. “The house won’t let me.”

He refused to perform any rituals and left before sunset. So we tried a different route. A local woman named Parul, known for breaking dark attachments, came instead.

She asked only one question after walking into the house:

“Which mirror did she stare into first?”

We showed her the one in the western room. She gasped. Scratched into the wooden frame, hidden behind dust, were five words in faded Bengali:

“She will return for her body.

The Zamindar’s Daughter

Parul demanded we dig into the house’s past. At the old district office, we found a register from 1911. A daughter of the zamindar had gone missing Binodini. Seventeen years old. Some said she eloped. Others whispered she was sacrificed in a tantric ritual during a famine.

What chilled me was a photo of her we found in the attic.

She looked exactly like Asha.

And the symbols Asha had drawn matched the symbols in the margins of that photo’s back.

Parul told us:

“Binodini wasn’t missing. She was bound. Her soul never left. This house is a vessel, and now… Asha’s the host.”

The Final Night

On Parul’s advice, we performed an ancient reversal ritual. It had to be done between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM, under a blood moon. Four mirrors were arranged around Asha’s bed, each facing a cardinal direction.

Parul burned rare herbs and drew circles of vermilion and charcoal around her.

For 42 minutes, Asha lay motionless.

Then at 2:43 AM, the mirrors cracked one by one, and from Asha’s mouth, a voice screamed not of this world. The scream didn't come from her vocal cords it echoed in our bones.

She sat up, looked straight at me, and said in that ancient voice:

“Tell him to break the window. That’s where she still waits.”

What Broke the Curse

Mr. Sinha smashed the western window with an iron rod. Beneath the sill, hidden in the frame, was a small wrapped bone shard, tied with red string.

Parul took it, chanted over it, and buried it by the river with salt and turmeric.

The next morning, Asha woke up… unaware of anything that had happened. Her eyes were clear. Her voice was normal.

She asked only, “Why are the mirrors broken?”

Mr. Sinha never answered.

Even Now

They sold the house soon after, of course.

But Mr. Sinha sometimes calls me, late at night. He speaks softly, as if not wanting to wake something up.

He once said,

“Sometimes I think Asha hums a tune I’ve never heard before. A very old one.”

And I… I don’t have the heart to ask him more.