Halloween just passed, leaving behind its usual parade of fictional horrors: masked killers, haunted houses, and shrieking banshees. But do the real horrors of vengeful female spirits ever leave us?
For women, the jack-o’-lanterns may dim, but the perpetual threat of violation doesn’t. It isn’t found in dimly lit alleyways alone—it lurks in our homes, workplaces, public transport, taking root in the very fabric of our society. Some of us brace ourselves for the possibility of becoming the next headline; others brace for society’s response to it. And in a bizarre twist of irony, one of society’s favorite fears here in the Indian subcontinent is… her ghost.
In this land of myths and legends, where stories of Petni and daayans have terrified generations, have we ever wondered why female spirits are portrayed as more threatening than their male counterparts? Why do we, as a society, imagine women as the most vengeful paranormal beings?
The blood-thirsty churail, the rage-filled bride. Major industries like Bollywood, to say the least, are rife with them, with movies like Bhool Bhulaiyaa doubling down on the idea that vengeful female spirits like her are the ultimate symbol of terror.
Is it because somewhere in our subconscious we know she should be? The stories we tell — of banshees, witches, and spirits hungry for revenge — are they projections of our collective guilt? Let’s analyze it. .
SANTONA: The Garments Worker Who Didn’t Matter
On November 11, 2024, a decapitated body of a young woman, her severed head and limbs separately tossed 150 yards away, was discovered in Savar. The outrage on social media was palpable—at first. She was assumed to be a Daffodil International University student. People mourned, they grieved, and they called for justice.
Then came the revelation: she was a garments worker named Santona. Relief swept through a portion of the population. The collective gasp became a collective shrug, as though her identity diminished the value of her life. A young woman whose life didn’t warrant the same grief because she sat countless hours hunched over a sewing machine instead of sitting comfortably in a lecture hall.
How, you ask?
Well, first rule of societal horror: care only if she’s someone socially presentable enough to be invited into your well-furnished living room. The rest of the lot? Background characters who don’t command a second look from us in the gorefest we call daily life.
RUPA: Too Ambitious for Her Own Good
Remember Rupa? She dared to be a lawyer, dared to ride a bus alone at night. What she didn’t dare to do was survive the journey.
Rupa, an aspirant lawyer, was raped and murdered by three men in a moving bus in 2017. Wronged by the very men who claim to be the providers, who should have ensured her safety, she became the subject of national outrage — but not without a side of unsolicited advice.
“She shouldn’t have been out so late.”
“She should’ve asked a man to accompany her.”
“This is what happens to women who are too ambitious.”
Imagine the audacity of a woman wanting to be a lawyer, a jobholder, a human being. Society’s verdict was swift: her dreams were criminal, and her punishment? Death.
The message is clear: the world isn’t designed for women to dream, let alone act on those dreams. Yet, when women like Rupa don’t fight for better lives, aren’t we quick to label them as our burden?
TONU:
In 2016, Tonu’s body was found near a bush in what should have been the safest place in her town—a cantonment. DNA evidence revealed that she was raped by three different men.
The evidence, the semen of three men, was practically gift-wrapped for the investigators. Yet 8 years later and counting, a concrete conclusion is nowhere to be seen. As it turns out, justice is allergic to uniforms.
And how did we react?
We moved on and forgot about it. After all, it’s not polite to talk about the skeletons in the system’s closet.
Remember, we’re a nation obsessed with ghosts, not accountability. We’d rather imagine Tonu as a spectral avenger than confront the reality that lets her murderers walk free.
MOUMITA: The Doctor Who Didn’t Get to Heal
On August 9, 2024, Moumita, a postgraduate medical trainee was found dead in a seminar hall in Kolkata. A woman who had spent a grueling 36-hour shift saving lives became the victim of unspeakable cruelty.
She was found raped, tortured, and murdered in her own seminar room. Her genitals were mutilated, her face clawed, her body left broken with a total of 150 gm of human semen detected. However the description might suggest, no, this was not the work of any wild beast, but rather something much worse.
The initial reaction from college authorities? Suicide.
Because, of course, women regularly kill themselves by clawing their own faces out and dismantling their own private parts. Because that’s commonly how mental health crises work here, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, men sexualized her death photo in comment sections, fantasizing about being one of her rapists. Yes, you read that right. A number of people shared her photo not to mourn her but to sexually fantasize about her suffering allegedly as a form of sick joke.
ASIFA: Innocence Destroyed
Asifa Bano was eight years old. Let that sink in. An eight-year-old CHILD, drugged and repeatedly gang-raped over the course of three days. Her body was later found left to rot.
The real shock? Her killers were not only unrepentant but emboldened by their community, who shielded them under the guise of religious loyalty. Women protested in support of the men who brutalized a child, chanting slogans and blocking highways, willing to burn themselves in protest—not for justice, but to protect the accused.
How do we even begin to grapple with a world where a child’s death can become a political pawn?
Needless to say, these stories did not start with our Tonus or do not end with our Santonas either. It would take books after books filled with ages of impenetrable agony to possibly withhold a fraction of their stories, if we begin. For the sake of your mental health and mine, we will stick to the few stories above for now.
Of course, not every horror related to vengeful female spirits ends in a headline. For many women, the terror lies in the everyday. Walking down a street means dodging groping hands, lecherous stares, and unsolicited comments. In the cities, there’s at least the pretense of accountability. In rural areas, the violations are more insidious, more pervasive, and often go unreported. So we grow up learning to carry their keys like weapons, to fake phone calls when walking alone, to avoid eye contact with strange men. These survival tactics are second nature to us, a grim rite of passage.
And why not? Afterall, women are raised to anticipate violence.
Meanwhile, most men grow up learning that they can get away with it.
But the incomprehensible insanity doesn’t just end with violence—it’s about the reactions. Victim blaming, dismissiveness, and ridicule are the weapons society wields against women, ensuring that even in death, they are denied dignity.
Now let’s trace back to our original topic of focus.
Why do we fear her ghost? Why do we paint her as vengeful, terrifying, unstoppable?
Here’s my theory; the legends of vengeful female spirits may not just be folklore—they are manifestations of collective guilt.
We fear their rage because, as a society, we know we have wronged them. We project our guilt onto the supernatural because it’s easier than confronting the real horror: us. We are the creators of these nightmares, the architects of a world where women’s screams are silenced, their dignity erased, and their existence reduced to footnotes in police reports.
But this fear rarely transitions to the real world from the spiritual.If it did, perhaps we’d change. Perhaps we’d create a world where women can exist without fear, without compromise, without constantly being on guard. Instead, we shrug, ridicule, victim-blame and we move on — until the next headline, the next outrage cycle, the next ghost story.
So pardon me when I say I hope shekeeps coming back for us. I hope the child we forgot about haunts us as apossessed doll. I hope the student we did not fight for haunts the walls of her university. I hope the widow who was tortured by a whole village somewhere in rural India haunts the whole village in her white saree. Because that is probably the only way they would ever be truly heard.
Leave a Reply