This essay is about how I took a trip to India after graduation with my friends.
It was me and a couple of my friends, we've always dreamt about going to India to visit the Taj Mahal and explore the city around. My friend and I have been planning to go to India after graduation since we were in freshman high school, the day of the trip came, and we have never been more excited. We booked this cheap flight and rented a hotel in a little town not far from the city.
Our destinations were a specific little town in India and not many people lived there, but we'd been stopping often in towns and small cities along the way. We spent as little days there, shopping for food at the markets and strolling around to see the sights, although there weren't many. This was in the day of a hot summer, in July and all the grass on the hills and plains around the town were dead and brown. The overall feeling was that of the normal kind of any rural place has in the summer. But the overwhelming of happiness and joyous took over my body of being able to travel with my close friends. My feelings and attitude towards life had changed into positive, it was like I was a whole new different person. Every night I went to bed with a smile on my face.
One night we decided to visit this abandoned fortress that stuck out in the middle of the desert. We heard a legend about that a sorcerer cast a curse on the area after being rejected by the local princes. Many people witnessed seeing ghost and paranormal activities there so we decided to give a try. At first, my thoughts were unclear and I was very unsure that I didn't want to visit that place, but I overcame my fear and went with my friends, a as we were walking there, my heart tightened and fear grew within me. As we went inside the place, this stench smell took up my whole nose, it smelled like rotting flesh and decay and it made me sick to my stomach. We kept going around the place as we tried to ignore the smell even though it was hard. There were many statues there like Krishna and other religious statues, but this one particular statue caught my eye, as soon as I looked at it, it sent shivers all over my body. It was a small, hand-carved statue of a woman, with a stained noose hung around her neck and it was old and rusty. I tried to ignore what I had just seen and tried to keep the same pace as my friends. After a while, my friends and I got tired so we decided to rest for a couple of minutes outside. My mind was still thinking about that creepy statue that I've seen earlier so I got up and tried to go and take my mind off it but I was somewhat still attracted to that statue and something was pulling me to it. I went back to go examine the statue carefully one more, it still had that creepy feeling like the first time I've looked at it. I decided to pick it up and read what it had said. As soon as I picked it up, the lights started flickering and there was a harsh wind that came out of nowhere, it knocked me out of my feet and I dropped the statue. I could hear the shatter of the statue and a shadow of what seemed to be women came out it. I took a big gulp and watched the shadow gets bigger and bigger. I sat on the floor for a moment to try to recover from what I had just witnessed, but my heart began to throb as if was beating out of my throat. It was just my imagination, I whispered to myself. Trying to get myself together I began to feel these hot winds of air on the back of my neck and it sounded like the rasping tones of an old woman. “You have awakened my soul, now I will haunt you for the rest of your life”. I screamed as I quickly rose to my feet. I just kept running and running, trying not to look behind me, I couldn’t run anymore. I threw myself on this wall behind a big statue. My back against it, knees to my chest, hand-thrown over my mouth to restrain my labored breathing, desperately trying to pump air into my lungs for the next run. I listened for the first time. A few seconds pass silently. Then I hear her “I will haunt you for the rest of your life”. I start to cry, tears falling silently down my cheeks. Every thought comes to my mind, what if I hadn't come here, what if I didn't touch the statue, what if I didn't leave my friends. But my thoughts are interrupted when suddenly I hear one of my friends called out my name “Fatuma, where are you, hurry up, we are going to leave”. I feel relieved and I start running as fast as I could not even looking back at once. I met with my friends outside and they asked why I was out of breath and looked like I saw a ghost, I just told them that I wasn't feeling well and needed to get home as soon as possible. We came back to our hotel and tried to rest for the rest of the night but I couldn’t sleep. I kept turning and tossing trying to forget what had just happened. We left India sooner than we were expecting and I was more thrilled to leave.
My experience in that place was the most frightening and the scariest things that happened to me in my entire life. Some nights I would still have nightmares about that creepy statue. My friends still wonder about what I was actually doing in there by myself and the terror look I had on face when I came out. It’s been almost two years since our trip and I still haven't told my friends about what happened to me in that place, and I don't think I’ll ever have the guts to tell them that.