My Own True Ghost Story - Rudyard Kipling

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My own true ghost Story by Rudiered Kipling. As I
came through the desert, Thus it was, as I came
through the desert, this city of dreadful night, somewhere in
the other world, where there are books and pictures in plays,
and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men

(00:23):
who spend their lives in building up all four lives
a gentleman who writes real stories about the real insides
of people. And his name is mister Walter Besant. But
he will insist upon treating his ghosts. He has published
half a workshopful of them with levity. He makes his

(00:44):
ghost seers talk familiarly, and in some cases flirt outrageously
with the phantoms. You may treat anything from a viceroy
to a vernacular paper with levity, but you must behave
reverently toward a ghost, and particularly an Indian one. There

(01:07):
are in this land ghosts who take the form of fat,
cold pobby corpses and hide in trees near the roadside
till a traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck
and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who
have died in child bed. These wander along the pathways

(01:30):
at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village
and call seductively. But to answer their call is death
in this world, and the next their feet are turned
backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are
ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells.

(01:55):
These haunt well cerbs and the fringes of jungles and
under the stars, or catch women by their wrist and
beg to be taken up and carried. These and the
corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles, and do not
attack Sahib's. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported

(02:19):
to have frightened an Englishman, but many English ghosts have
scared the life out of both white and black. Nearly
every other station owns a ghost. There are said to
be two at Simla, not counting the women who blows
the bellows. At Syree Dak Bungalore on the Old Road,

(02:41):
Mussouri has a house haunted of a very lively thing.
A white lady is supposed to do night watchmen round
the house. In Lahore, Dalhousi says that one of her
houses repeats on autumn evenings all the incidents of a
horrible horse and precipice accident. Marie has a merry ghost,

(03:04):
and now that she has been swept by cholera, will
have room for a sorrowful one. There are officers quarters
in Mia Mia whose doors open without reason, and whose
furniture is guaranteed to creak not with the heat of June,
but with the weight of invisibles who come to lounge

(03:25):
in the chairs. Peshawar possesses houses that none will willingly rent,
and there is something not fever wrong with a big
bungalow in Allahabad. The other provinces simply bristle with haunted
houses and march phantom armies along their main thoroughfares. Some

(03:47):
of the dark bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have
handy little cemeteries on their compound, witnesses to the changes
and chances of this mortal life. In the days when
men drove from Kolkatta to the northwest. These bungalows are
objectionable places to put up in. They are generally very old,

(04:12):
always dirty. While the Khansama is as ancient as the bungalow,
he either chatters senali or falls into the long trances
of age. In both moods. He is useless if you
get angry with him. He refers to some sahib dead
and buried these dirty years, and says that when he

(04:35):
was in the Tahib's service, not a khansamac in the
province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and
trembles and fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of
your irritation. In these dark bungalows, ghosts are most likely
to be found, and when found, they should be made

(04:58):
a note of. Not long ago, it was my business
to live in dark bungalows. I never inhabited the same
house for three nights running, and grew to be learned
in the breed. I lived in government built ones with
red brick walls and rail ceilings, an inventory of the
furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at

(05:21):
the threshold to give welcome. I lived in converted ones,
old houses officiating as dark bungalows, where nothing was in
its proper place, and there wasn't even a fowl for dinner.
I lived in second hand palaces, where the wind blew
through open work marble tracery just as uncomfortably as through

(05:44):
a broken pane. I lived in dark bungalows where the
last entry in the visitor's book was fifteen months old,
and where they slashed off the curry kid's head with
a sword. It was my good luck to meet all
sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and deserters flying

(06:05):
from British regiments, to drunken loafers who threw whiskey bottles
at all who passed, and my still greater good fortune
to just escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair
proportion of the tragedy of our lives out here acted
itself in dark bungalows, I wondered that I had met

(06:27):
no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a
dark bungalow would be mad, of course, But so many
men have died mad in dark bungalows that there must
be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts. In due time
I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were

(06:47):
two of them up till that hour. I had sympathized
with mister Besant's method of handling them, as shown in
the Strange Case of Mister Lucraft and other stories. I
am now in the opposition. We will call the bungalow
cut mine dark bungalow. But that was the smallest part

(07:09):
of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has
no right to sleep in dark bungalows. He should marry
cut mine. Dark bungalow was old and rotten and unrepaired.
The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy,

(07:30):
and the windows were nearly black with grime. It stood
on a bypath largely used by native sub deputy assistance
of all kinds from finance to forests, but real Sahibs
were rare. The kan Summer, who was nearly bent double
with old age, said so. When I arrived, there was

(07:51):
a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the land,
accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a
noise like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff
holly palms outside. The Khan Sama completely lost his head
on my arrival. He had served the sahib once. Did

(08:12):
I know that t sahib? He gave me the name
of a well known man who has been buried for
more than a quarter of a century, and showed me
an ancient the guratype of that man in his prehistoric use.
I had seen his still engraving of him at the
head of a double volume of memoirs a month before,
and I felt ancient beyond telling. Did they shut in?

(08:37):
And the Khan Samak went to get me food. He
did not go through the pretence of calling it Khana
man's victuals. He said ratub and that means, among other things,
grub dog's rations. There was no insult in his choice
of the term. He had forgotten the other word, I

(08:58):
suppose while he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals.
I settled myself down after exploring the dark bungalow. There
were three rooms beside my own, which was a corner kennel,
each giving in to the other through dingy white doors
fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very

(09:21):
solid one, but the partition walls of the rooms were
almost cherry built in their flimsiness. Every step or bang
of a trunk echoed from my room down the other three,
and every footfall came back tremulously from the far walls.
For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps,

(09:44):
only candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was
set in the bathroom for bleak unadultered misery that dark
bungalow was the worst of the many that I had
ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and the
window would not open, so a brazure of charcoal would

(10:04):
have been useless. The rain and the wind splashed and
gurgled and moaned round the house, and the tardy palms
rattled and roared. Half a dozen jackals went through the
compound singing, and the hyaena stood afar off and mocked them.
A hyaena would convince us to sea of the resurrection

(10:26):
of the dead, the worst sort of dead. Then came
the ratub, a curious meal half Native and half English
in composition, with the old Khan Shamma babbling behind my
chair about dead and gone English people, and the wind
blown candles playing shadow bo peep with the bed and

(10:47):
the mosquito curtains. It was just a sort of dinner
and the evening. To make a man think of every
single one of his past sins, and of all the
others that he intended to commit if he lived. Sleep
for several hundred reasons was not easy. The lamp in

(11:08):
the bathroom threw the most absurd shadows into the room,
and the wind was beginning to talk nonsense just when
the reasons were drowsy with blood sucking, I heard the
regular let us take and heave him over grunt ave
duly bearers in the compound. First one dully came in,

(11:30):
then a second, and then a third. I heard the
dully stumped on the ground, and the shutter in front
of my door shook. That's some one trying to come in,
I said. But no one spoke, and I persuaded myself
that it was the gusty wind. The shutter of the

(11:51):
room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the
inner door opened. That's some sub deputy assistant, I said.
And he has brought friends with him. Now they'll talk
and spit and smoke for an hour. But there were
no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his

(12:13):
luggage into the next room. The door shut, and I
thanked providence that I was to be left in peace.
But I was curious to know where the doolies had gone.
I got out of bed and looked into the darkness.

(12:33):
There was never a sign of a doolly. Just as
I was getting into bed again, I heard in the
next room the sound that no man in his senses
can possibly mistake there were of a billiard ball down
the lanth of the slates when the striker is stringing

(12:54):
for break. No other sound is like it. A minute
afterwards words, there was another whir, and I got into bed.
I was not frightened, indeed I was not. I was
very curious to know what had become of the doolies.
I jumped into bed for that reason. Next minute I

(13:17):
heard the double click of a cannon, and my hair
sat up. It is a mistake to say that hare
stands up. The skin of the head tightens, and you
can feel a faint, prickly bristling all over the scalp,
that is the hair sitting up. There was a whir
and a click, and both sounds could only have been

(13:37):
made by one thing, a billet ball. I argued the
matter out at great length with myself, and the more
I argued, the less probable it seemed that one bed,
one table, and two chairs, all the furniture of the
room next to mine could so exactly duplicate the sounds

(13:58):
of a game of billiards. After another cannon, a three
cushioned one, to judge by the whir, I argued no more,
I had found my ghost and would have given worlds
to have escaped from that dark bungalow. I listened, and
with each listen the game grew clearer. There was war

(14:23):
on whir and click on click. Sometimes there was a
double click and a whir and another click. Beyond any
sort of doubt, people were playing billiards in the next room,
and the next room was not big enough to hold
a billiard table. Between the pauses of the wind, I

(14:44):
heard the game go forward, stroke after stroke. I tried
to believe that I could not hear voices, but that
attempt was a failure. Do you know what fear is?
Not or the very fear of insult, injury, or death,
but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot say,

(15:10):
Fare that trues the inside of the mouth and half
of the throat. Fear that makes you sweat on the
palms of the hands and gulp in order to keep
the uvula at work. This is a fine fear, a
great cowardice, and must be felt to be appreciated. The
very improbability of billiards in a dark bungalow proved the

(15:35):
reality of the thing. No man, drunk or sober could
imagine a game at billiards or invent the spitting crack
of a screw cannon. A severe course of dark bungalows
has disadvantage. It breeds infinite credulity. If a man said

(15:56):
to a confirmed dark bungaloo hunter, there is a corpse
in the next room, and there's a mad girl in
the next but one, and the woman and man on
dad's camel have just eloped from a play sixty miles away,
the hearer would not disbelieve, because he would know that
nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in

(16:18):
a dark bungalow. This credulity, unfortunately extends to ghosts. A
rational person fresh from his own house would have turned
on his side and slept. I did not so surely
as I was given up as a bad carcass, but
the scores of things in the bed because the bulk

(16:39):
of my blood was in my heart. So surely did
I hear every stroke of a long game at Billiard's,
played in the echoing room behind the iron barred door.
My dominant fear was that the players might want a marker.
It was an absurd fear, because creed who could play

(17:00):
in the dark would be above such superfluities. I only
know that that was my terror, and it was real.
After a long, long while, the game stopped and the
door banged. I slept because I was dead tired. Otherwise

(17:22):
I should have preferred to have kept awake. Not for
everything in Asia, would I have dropped the door bar
and peered into the dark of the next room. When
the morning came, I considered that I had done well
and wisely, and inquired for the means of departure by

(17:43):
the way Kanesomer, I said, what were these three dulies
doing in my compound in the night? There were no dulies,
said the Consummer. I went into the next room, and
the daylight streamed through the open door. I was immensely brave.
I would at that hour have played blackpool with the

(18:05):
owner of the big black pool down below. Has this
place always been a dark bungalow, I asked, No, said
the Kansummer, ten or twenty years ago. I have forgotten
how long it was a billiard room, a ham much
a billiard room for the Sahibs who built the railway.

(18:29):
I was Kanzamaeden in the big house where all the
railway Sahibs lived and I used to come across with
Brandy Schwab. These three rooms were all one, and they
held a big table on which the Sahibs played every evening.
But the Sahibs are all dead now, and the railway
runs you say nearly to Kabul. Do you remember anything

(18:53):
about the Sahibs. It is long ago, but I remember
that one Tzahib, a fat man and always angry, was
playing here one night and he said to me, Mangar Khan,
Brandy Panny do. And I filled the glass, and he
bent over the table to strike, and his head fell

(19:16):
lower and lower till it hit the table, and his
spectacles came off. And when we the Sahibs and I
myself ran to lift him, he was dead. I helped
to carry him out. Ah. He was a strong Sahib,
but he is dead. And I ough to Mangar Khan,

(19:37):
I am still living by your favor. That was more
than enough. I had my ghost a first hand, authenticated
article I would write to the Society for Psychical Research.
I would paralyze the Empire with the news. But I
would first of all put eighty miles of a cessed
cropland between myself and that dark bungalow, but for nightfall

(20:02):
the Society might send a regular agent to investigate. Later on,
I went into my own room and prepared to pack,
after noting down the facts of the case. As I smoked,
I heard the game begin again with a miss in
balk Tis time, for the whir was a short one.

(20:24):
The door was open, and I could see into the room. Click, click,
that was a cannon. I entered the room without fear,
for there was sunlight within and a fresh breeze. Without
the unseen game was going on at a tremendous rate,
And well it might when a restless little rat was

(20:47):
running to and fro inside the dingy ceiling cloth, and
a piece of loose window sash was making fifty bricks
off the window boat as it shook in the breeze.
Impossible to mistake the sound of billiard balls, Impossible to
mistake the whirr of a ball over the slate. But

(21:07):
I was to be excused. Even when I shut my
enlightening eyes, the sound was marvelously like that of a
fast gain. Entered angrily, the faithful partner of my sorrows,
Kadir Baksh. The spungalow is very bad and low cast.

(21:29):
I wondered the presence was disturbed and is speckled. Three
sets of duly bearers came to the Bungaloo last night
when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was
their accustom to rest in the room set apart for
the English people. What to honor has the kansammer. They
tried to enter, but I told them to go. No
wonder these oorias have been here and the presence is

(21:51):
sorely spotted. It is shane and the work of a
dirty man. Kadir Baksh did not say that he had
taken from each two annas for rent in advance and
then beyond my ear shot had beaten them with the
big green umbrella, whose use I could never before divine.
But Kudeobaksh had no notions of morality. There was an

(22:16):
interview with the consumer, but as he promptly lost his head,
Rath gave place to pity, and pity led to a
long conversation, in the course of which he put the
fat engineer Sahib's tragic death in three separate stations, two
of them fifty miles away. The third shift was to Kalkutta,

(22:36):
and there the Sahib died while driving a dog cart.
If I had encouraged him, the Kansumer would have wandered
all through Bengal with his corpse. I did not go
away as soon as I intended. I stayed for the
night while the wind and the rat, and the sash
and the window bolt played a ding dong hundred and

(22:58):
fifty up. Then the wind ran out and the billiard stopped,
and I felt that I had ruined my one genuine,
hall marked ghost story. Had I only stopped at the
proper time, I could have made anything out of it.
That was the bitterest thought of all, and