Time: 1.30 am, Inside Malcha Mahal.
First voice: Kuch to gadbad hai (Something is definitely wrong).
Someone coughs.
Second voice: Arey khaans ke kyun dara rahe ho (why are you coughing, I am scared).
The man coughs again. His friend scolds him for making a noise.
In the dark, walking with cell phone flashlights switched on, the three see a flicker of light in one of the rooms. One of them says it must be the lights from the nearby Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) building. They hear noises from the jungle behind the palace. They pick up a stone as a weapon for self-defence. “Let’s go,” they say in unison.
The video titled -- Night stay in Haunted Malcha Mahal -- ends.
For over three decades, Malcha Mahal, a 14th-century hunting lodge in the middle of Delhi’s ridge forest, inhabited by the self-proclaimed royal family of Oudh, remained out of bounds for those uninvited. Until the afternoon of September 3, 2017, not many had entered the lodge. And then one afternoon, the palace’s last resident, Prince Ali Raza was found dead.
In the months since that September afternoon, the entry to the stone palace has become a free for all. A five-hundred-year-old structure that was for decades strictly out of bounds has become the new haunt for the city’s ghostbusters and those who want to experience the supernatural.
‘Kashmir Ghost’ is scribbled on the entrance to the hallway inside the so-called palace. Exactly in the middle of one of the rooms, there are remains of a bonfire. The wall next to it is smeared with vermillion and so are its walls – signs that may be part of an occult practice or maybe not.
The lodge in the Malcha village ridge is surrounded by a thick forest cover in the middle of the city. The police use horses to patrol the jungle area once a day.
For over three decades, Prince Ali Raza lived at the palace with his mother Wilayat and sister Shakina. Proclaiming themselves as descendants of the Oudh Royal family, the three had refused to leave the 14th-century hunting lodge until the government returned their ancestral property. A New York Times article recently suggested that the three may not have been related to the Royal family. The reporter interviewed Raza’s relatives who said Raza was no prince. They said Wilayat hallucinated. The three took the truth to their graves.
In the last two years, after their death, the palace has been added to the list of haunted places in Delhi. “We have received about 4-5 complaints of people coming inside the palace at night. Some of them came here after hearing that the palace is haunted. We had to chase them away,” a police constable, who regularly patrols the jungle, said.
Over the last two years, bats and pigeons have taken over the palace. The liquor bottles, chips packets, and cigarette packets are strewn across the palace suggest the palace gets its fair share of visitors – wanderers, tourists, locals, party-goers, vagabonds and the Ghostbusters. The crockery, books, bedsheets and the framed photographs of the family that police spotted on the palace walls on the day Prince Raza was found dead too are missing. The utensils are gone. A portion of a wooden bed is strung to a tree near the palace. Nobody knows how the bed wound up at the tree.