This just happened when I was 11 years old. I live in MUMBAI (the industrial capital of india) it is an incident of year 2005 when my final exams of standard 7th got over and Summer vacation started. My father decided of spending vacations in New Delhi with our relatives. As my father works in Indian railway association we got our tickets for Delhi earlier than any other person. But unfortunately my father had some work to be done at the moment so he decided to send me first and then himself.
At the day when he took me to the railway station for catching up the train he was afraid, because Delhi is not so close from Mumbai. It takes two days to get there and the whole journey I was all alone and I was just an eleven year old kid to travel for two days with no one known to me (with strangers). At that moment when he was thinking all these things in his mind he thought of cancelling my ticket, but later he came to know that the driver for the same train was his friend so he once again decided of sending me alone but this time with his friend, then the train started to leave the platform.
It was really fun to travel while sitting in driver's compartment as the driver was my father's friend and I was traveling with him, the train was full on speed. When half of the day was over it was quite dark and the train was 400 kms away from Mumbai. Suddenly the train stopped because of the red signal. It was really a big signal of 20-25 minutes. The place where the train stopped was not so scary. It was all slums there, there were many small houses like huts but no one was out it was almost like pin drop silence, but what happened afterwards will blow your mind.
It was 2:00pm sharp. An old lady with a stick in hand (stick for support while walking) appeared from the road coming from the slums, she was short in height. She came near the drivers compartment where was the driver and I sitting, I was sitting at the window like all kids do for watching the scenery out of the window, the old lady came to me and called me by pulling my sleeves she said "babu thoda sa khana de do" (sir give me some food). I wasn't having any thing to give her so I asked the driver to give her something to eat. The driver shouted at me and said "dont sit at the window", he shouted at the old lady too and said "mere paas kuch bhi nahi hai tujhe dene ke liye yaha se chali ja" (I have nothing to give you, go from here) and used some abusive words to make the old lady go from there. Afterwards the train again started to go, and then he politely asked me "hey do you want to sit at the window?" yes I said, but then I asked him why did he shouted at me when I was first sitting near the window.
Then he explained me everything and by listening to that, the whole journey to Delhi I didn't sit near the window. He said me to see outside the window and to see that how much is the distance between the ground and the train's window, where I was sitting. He said the window is 11 feet above the ground how can a human and that too a SHORT-HEIGHTED old lady can get up to 11 feet and ask for food? That made me understand that she was not a living human being, the driver told me that it was the spirit of the lady who was very poor and used to ask for some money or for food while the train passing from there had to stop because of signal. But two years back the lady died in a train accident when she was crossing the railway tracks and fell down and before she could fix herself to get up she was turned into pieces. He said she is not bad but if once you give her some to eat she follows you, not to haunt you but to get some to eat while she is hungry...
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