This incident happened to my paternal grandmother about 15 years ago in 1994, at my native town in Tamilnadu, India. I was 7 at the time, and lived with my parents and my elder sibling at a different part of the state. It was only during holidays do we visit our native town. All of my relatives and my grandparents on both sides live here. Every house is huge and decades old. Some are even centuries old.
As my grandfather had to be out of town for a few days, my grandmother (59 at that time) decided to stay in her mother's (who was over 85) house. This house was built in the 1880's and had seen a lot of births and deaths. The house is huge, divided in to different sections for each purpose, just like any other heritage Indian homes.
On the morning she went there, everything was quite normal. My great-grandmother lived there with a young lady helper. That night she slept with my great-grandmother, lying on her bed on the other side of the room. She has this habit of using the toilet, once, during the middle of every night.
As she was lying facing the wall on one side, she tossed around to get up and put her foot down. As she turned, even in the dark, she could see a small black thing standing beside her bed. It was about two foot tall and it resembled a wooden doll called "marapatchi" popular in our part of the country, which was used by children during olden days to play. It was looking up at her. Once she set her eyes on it, she clearly heard it asking her, 'where is my daughter'. Frightened to the core, she had thought that the thing was looking for her daughter (my aunt). She lay on her bed again and pulled the covers over her head and never turned that way again.
She waited until five in the morning, unable to sleep, without shifting her position, and with this urge to use the toilet. Then without telling her mother or the lady help, she opened the front door and made her way to her daughter's house (my aunt), which is only a few blocks away. There after narrating what had happened, to my aunt, she had her tea, and called great granny to tell that she'll soon be there and not to worry that she is missing.
A few days after this incident, my great granny passed away. She was a gem of a lady and the eldest of our family and hundreds attended her funeral. My grand mother says that it must be some ancestral spirit, probably her grandmother, who had come to take her daughter away. It is believed that the spirits of ancestors diminish in height as time passes, which is why whatever it was, it looked small.
An interesting fact is that, when told about this, my great grandmother had coolly exclaimed that her daughters were turning her residence in to a ghost house and to stop spreading such rumors. In my family to talk ghosts is taboo, and no one is much of a believer to this date.
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