They say every place remembers. Streets, walls, rooms — even the air holds on to what has happened within it. Perhaps that is what we call haunting — not the presence of ghosts, but the persistence of memory itself.
When I began writing these stories, I wasn’t chasing ghosts. I was chasing echoes. Some of them came from places I had seen, some from the corners of imagination that refuse to stay quiet. Every story began as a question — not about death, but about what remains after. What if time doesn’t erase anything, only hides it from sight?
Horror, to me, has never been about monsters in the dark. It is about awareness — that uneasy recognition that the world is far stranger, older, and more conscious than we dare to admit. Fear, when stripped of its theatrics, becomes something pure — a mirror that forces us to see the limits of our understanding.
In The Eternal Prisoner, every story is a threshold — a door between the visible and the invisible. But it’s not a door that leads away from us. It leads into us.
The first story, Roswell Mansion, was born from a simple idea: what if architecture itself could remember the people who built it? In the fog-drenched hills of Himachal, the mansion stands like a wound between worlds. The engineer who enters it believes in logic, in physics, in structure — but the house teaches him that reality too has weak walls. That one crack, one misplaced beam, can open into another dimension. The haunted house here is not cursed by spirits — it is cursed by memory, by the weight of all that has been witnessed and forgotten.
Then came Echoes of the Dead — a story set in a small Indian village, where folklore still breathes and superstition walks like a shadow at dusk. It began with an old woman’s voice I once heard in my childhood — speaking of a chudail who changed bodies but never her grief. The story isn’t about witchcraft, but about repetition. About stories that the dead keep telling because no one alive dares to listen. Here, horror takes the shape of empathy — the realization that even the cursed crave understanding.
The Illusion Field (earlier titled Dark Tourism) emerged from the modern world’s appetite for curated fear. We travel to abandoned asylums, cursed villages, disaster sites — hoping for a thrill, a brush with something forbidden. But what if, in doing so, we cross into the illusion itself? What if the act of seeking horror is what creates it? This story is an allegory of our time — where reality bends under our fascination with the unreal, and every photograph, every post, becomes an invitation for the darkness to notice us back.
The Presence follows a man who believes fear can be conquered by logic. He journeys to a forgotten Assamese village to spend one night in a place called the Ghost Hamlet. There, he learns that courage isn’t the absence of fear — it’s its understanding. That the presence haunting him may not be outside, but a manifestation of his own suppressed terror. The story walks the line between philosophy and nightmare — questioning whether fear is external at all, or simply the human condition, given form.
The Lake House Mystery
In the silent depths of Lucerne Lake, memory never dies.
When a young architect and his wife vanish from a lakeside villa in Lucerne, the town dismisses it as another unsolved tragedy. But years later, strange echoes begin to rise from the frozen water— whispers of names, faces in the glass, and a story that refuses to end. Some houses keep secrets. Some lakes keep souls.
And finally, The Eternal Prisoner— the title story— closes the circle. An ancient count trapped in the eternity of his own making; a visitor who realizes that immortality is not freedom, but confinement without end. In that castle, time itself is the jailer. The candle never burns out, the footsteps never fade, and consciousness never sleeps. The count’s curse is the same as humanity’s: to live forever inside one’s own awareness.
This story, though gothic in shape, is deeply human in essence. It speaks of the endless loops we create— of guilt, desire, and denial— and the impossibility of escaping ourselves.
Together, these six tales form a map— not of places, but of emotions. Each location, each haunting, each silence is a fragment of the same realization: that fear is not foreign. It is born where memory meets imagination. India’s haunted landscapes— its misty hills, forgotten villages, sacred shrines, and colonial ruins— become mirrors to the soul. The supernatural here is inseparable from the cultural, the psychological, the historical.
Our ghosts are not imported from gothic castles; they are born from our soil, our faith, our unanswered questions.
In writing these stories, I wanted to explore not just what frightens us, but why it does. What do ghosts demand from us— fear, or acknowledgment? And what if, in every haunting, there is a moral dimension— a truth we once ignored, now returning in a form we cannot reason with?
There’s a moment, after every horror story, when the reader looks up— expecting silence— and yet the air feels different. That is the real purpose of the genre: not to make you jump, but to make you notice. Notice the shadows on the wall, the silence after a familiar sound, the weight of your own heartbeat. In that awareness lies the sacredness of fear. It connects us to what is beyond comprehension, and therefore, beyond arrogance. It reminds us that there are still things older than human certainty — and they’re watching, patiently, from the corners of our reason.
The Eternal Prisoner is not a book of horror. It’s a book of memory disguised as fear.
A journey through rooms where time bends, where ghosts are metaphors, and where every scream is an echo of something you’ve already heard— long ago, in a dream you can’t fully recall. When you close this book, may you not find peace immediately. May you feel that slight, lingering hesitation before turning off the light— because that hesitation, that delicate tremor of awareness— is the truest proof that something here, perhaps a word, perhaps a whisper, has stayed.
Reviewed by Gradias Publishing House
on
November 17, 2025
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