On the last weekend of October, Bengaluru looks a little different after sunset. Pub windows glow orange, cafés hang fake cobwebs from their counters, and teens swap formals for vampire capes, witch hats and skeleton face paint.Halloween, once seen as a Western import, has found a lively home in the city’s social calendar. Across Bengaluru, restaurants, breweries, malls and apartment communities now host costume nights, horror-themed menus, pumpkin décor contests and children’s trick-or-treat walks.But beneath the commercial fun lies something older and more local: Bengaluru’s long relationship with ghost stories. For many residents, the season is also a time to retell the city’s own eerie legends — stories passed between college students, night shift workers, security guards, cab drivers and families who remember a quieter Bengaluru of large bungalows and empty compounds.These tales are difficult to verify, but that is often the point. Urban ghost stories survive because they sit between fear and familiarity.Bonding Over Ghost StoriesBengalureans will gather at Shoonya Centre this Saturday for a Halloween story-telling event by Ghost Story Collective, featuring a contest for the best ghost tale and a discussion on haunting folklore and its cultural significance.Founded by lawyer-researcher Akanksha Dutta and Indian-American lawyer and YouTube documentarian Tarun Sridharan, the collective offers a space for people to share personal paranormal experiences, drawing on informal traditions such as campfire and hostel-night storytelling.“Engaging in storytelling can provide therapeutic benefits and enhance social interactions,” says Sridharan.Attendee Ananya Sarkar says the format helped her connect with others through first-person spooky accounts. “I had an engaging time listening to real-life stories and sharing my own,” she says.Stories shared with the group in-clude accounts of unexplained footsteps at a farmhouse and sightings of a shadowy, long-armed figure. The collective also explores the psychology of horror and recurring folklore figures, including the woman in white, across regions such as Kerala, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Southeast Asia.Asked whether ghosts exist, Dutta says, “None of us knows enough to be certain.”
