Ghost stories find fertile ground in Indian city of Calcutta

Rumours swept Calcutta this year that a runaway boy spent the night beside a 4,000-year-old Egyptian mummy in the Indian Museum, a building with a reputation for being haunted.

The local media wrote it up, and a crowd, including some worried that the youngster had been possessed by ghosts, mobbed India's oldest museum demanding better security.

With passions running high, West Bengal state authorities investigated. "We checked all the closed-circuit TV cameras, gave them to the police," said museum geologist Tanuja Ghosh. "Sure, sometimes night guards hear something, some creaking, it's an old building. But this business about a small boy, it was false information."

Everyone loves a good ghost story, but Calcutta, the former capital of British India, is particularly fertile ground for the creepy, eerie and supernatural. Magazines publish lists of haunted buildings. Planchettes, also known as seances, have a long history, enjoyed by the likes of beloved native son, poet and 1913 Nobel literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

"The ghost belief is stronger here than almost anywhere else in India," said Soumen Kotal, co-founder of the Calcutta-based Paranormal Research Society of India, which investigates ghost claims. "The city is very old, and traditions come with that."