When people ask me about spooky experiences, I always think of one unforgettable event from my childhood. It happened 20 years ago when my grandma passed away. In our culture, we gather as a family for three days after someone's death to remember and pray for them.
My grandma (maternal side) passed away in Mumbai. She lived with my grandfather in a flat and just a short distance away was where my uncle stayed with his family. His apartment was a bigger one and also in a newly constructed building. As per his wish it was decided to keep the gathering at his place.
So we all met at my uncle's new apartment, which was on the first floor of a building with very few people. On the third day after grandma's passing, something strange happened during sunset.
Me and my four cousins were playing at the nearby park when it started getting dark, even though we were told to come home before it got dark. We hurried back to our uncle's place. I was the oldest at thirteen, and the other kids were between 6 and 10 years old.
We took the elevator in my uncle's building. Even though he lived on the first floor, we liked riding the elevator because it was something new to us in those days. It wasn't a modern elevator with automatic doors, but it had doors with grills that let us see each floor as we went up.
My cousin suggested that we go up to the seventh floor just for fun. We all agreed and laughed, and I pressed the button for the top floor instead of our usual stop on the first floor. The building was mostly empty, with only three or four other families staying besides my uncle's.
As soon as we passed the fourth floor, things got spooky. We heard a voice calling my 10-year-old brother by his name.
The voice said, "Hey, where are you going? Don't you want to eat?" We heard the same words again when the elevator stopped on the seventh floor. We were scared because nobody was on the first floor when we passed it. We thought maybe someone from our family knew we were in the elevator and wanted us to come back.
The strange part was that we couldn't tell who was speaking - if it was a child or an adult, a man or a woman. But we were sure that someone had called my brother with those words. I decided that we should go back to the first floor and go into our home as fast as possible.
Going down in the elevator felt creepy as the voice repeated a similar phrase: "Hey, where are you going? Don't go anywhere, come back." When we reached the ground floor, we ran out of the elevator and into our house where there were many guests.
We asked everyone if they had called us using the elevator, but they didn't believe us and tried to calm us down. It seemed like they did think what happened was real, but they didn't want to scare us even more.
This spooky incident is still vivid in all of our memories, and we often talk about it when we get together. What made it even stranger was that there was a family argument happening at the same time, and my parents almost left before finishing some rituals.
We have various take on who it could've been. But the voice sure gives us goosebumps until date.
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I am sure that there was no one residing above 4th floor as there were only 3-4 families apart from my uncle who had moved in.
The elevator was right in the middle of the passage way of the floor, opposite to the elevator was an open staircase and the doors to the flats (there were only 4 flats per floor) were at extreme corners of the passage. So in short you could clearly see from the lift itself if there's anyone on the floor.
One of my cousin believe it to be someone from home.
But I think it was my grandma.
The reasons being:
The voice took my younger brother's name. (,so it had to be someone who knew us)
It's believed in our culture that until the first three days soul of the departed is still around.
Moreover, exactly at that time a altercation was happening amongst adults inside the flat because of which especially my mom was about to leave.
So I think my grandma was looking after us and she was trying to tell us not to go.