Storytellers of a new generation
Incident 3 - The Church. We Witnessed A Ghost In The Presence Of God


Horror diaries of a receiver 4.

There’s a saying that bad things happen in threes. In 2015, nature defied the odds and bad things started to happen to my family – except it was in dozens. Utterly frustrated by the way our lives were headed, and unable to find the cause of all our misfortune, we went to a man who had a special connection with the other side. In paranormal terms, these people are known as ‘receivers’, and are able to interact with the supernatural in ways others cannot. That day we discovered 2 crucial things – the first being that an evil spirit was targeting my family (especially me), and the second was that my mother and I both had the ‘receiver’ gift as well. This gift in its initial stages allowed us to experience and perceive things that others couldn’t, and if built on, we could do so much more.

My mother only realized the true extent of this statement on our trip to Spain. The Sagrada Familia, a Roman Catholic Church in Barcelona is said to be its most famous symbol. However, before we entered its doors, we had been forewarned that within the behemoth towers and stained glass, lay certain forces that haunted the walls of the architectural wonder.

Being the Indian tourists that we were, we had to explore and photograph every inch of the church, irrespective of how repetitive it got. That included every tower and turret in every corner of the monument. My mother had hurt her leg and therefore had to opt for the lazy man’s way of exploration (the elevator), while the rest of us took the stairs and decided to meet her at the top.

Either the lift was as old as the church, or my mother had gotten lost, because we managed to walk up faster than her despite taking several breaks (we are highly unfit). When she finally did meet up with us, her face had gone pale and her hands were trembling. After ten minutes of being unable to speak, she finally narrated what had happened. 

The walls of the passages connecting one tower to the other were very narrow, and were flanked by stone on one side and windows on the other. My mother was documenting her walk from the tower she was in towards us, when she suddenly saw a white light in the shape of a hand appear on the screen of her video camera. At first, she believed it was just the light from the window playing tricks, until she realized the light wasn’t coming from the window, the hand was coming out of the stone wall. And she had a video.

Fact or fictionFact or fiction?

The story was hard to believe. We blamed it on my mother’s hyperactive imagination, but she was convinced she had seen a ghost.

Back in the hotel room a couple of hours later, she started complaining about feeling unbearably cold. After a point, she began to shiver uncontrollably, and within minutes she went into a full-blown seizure. Watching my mother writhing on the floor, eyes rolled up and completely out of control, a few hours after she said she had seen a ghost? We began to believe it too.

The seizures didn’t stop. For two years, every few days, her body (almost like it wasn’t hers) would collapse onto the floor and convulse violently. It was terrifying. Our family was attracting spirits and ghosts like ants flocking to a grain of sugar, and there was nothing we could do about it.

A few weeks later, my mother coincidentally bumped into another woman who had recently visited the church on a family holiday. Ever since they had returned, her daughter had been acting strange – she had grown three times her size because she had developed a gargantuan appetite, had started speaking in different voices, threatening to kill her mother (all signs of demonic possession), and the next morning wouldn’t remember any of it.

Yeah, I’m never going back to the Sagrada Familia. Or any church. Or Spain. 

Woman having a seizure



Read the next part -



By Tiana Kirpalani
Cover photo credit: