Elen would tell you how her hatred for her sister was so intense that she didn't know who she was without it.

Are ghosts real? This was the question Mollie, a little 8-year-old girl who lives at the end of our street asked me in a–real–letter she wrote me recently. I had apparently included a book of ghost stories in a bag of books I had given her.

“Bhoot”, the Bangla word for ghost, derives from the Sanskrit word Bhūta, referring to living beings and the past. Later, it also came to mean ‘disembodied spirit.’ Ghost stories carry a special tradition in Bangla literature and the root lies in folklore and rural culture.

We are all quite familiar with the concept of vampires, zombies, and ghosts, as we see them in all our favourite Hollywood movies, and during Halloween, these monsters are usually what we resort to imitate. And that’s quite sad really, considering how rich our own supernatural folklore is. And so, for this Halloween, here are 6 Bengali supernatural beings your parents warned you about when growing up.

A strange experience by the sea-shore.