So I don’t believe in ghosts but when I was a kid I did get scared easily. As a kid horror movies that my family watched (Evil Dead, Basketcase, The Omen, Friday The 13th etc) scared the crap outta my pre-teen self. Heck, the first two movies I watched (I say watched but it was more like hiding behind the sofa and peeking at the screen) was at age 4 or 5! By the time I was 10 I had watched the other two as well. And it was common among us kids to try and scare each other using the characters in the movies.

So one of my cousins had this habit of trying to scare the rest of us. He would say that some boogey man would come and kill us and he would try to get us going by just saying “Friday! Friday! Friday” in as dramatic as way as possible on Friday nights. Well one Friday night he kept saying this while he was at my home and scaring me – and would you believe it, the power went out and he got scared too and we ran and locked ourselves in the bathroom! There was thunder and lightning and the power got knocked off!

Another time in my house and another cousin and I had watched The Omen a few days ago. We were discussing the movie and about how we didn’t believe that it was possible to happen in reality. I was about 8 or 9 years old and my cousin is 2.5 years older than me. Once again we lost power and it was very late in the night and so we finally fell asleep. At around 4 am my cousin woke up and saw 4 small flames of fire moving on the street. He couldn’t see anything else or anyone else. He got scared and woke me up. Sleepy me looked out the windows and I saw the same thing.

We got very, very scared and pulled the covers over us and tried to go back to sleep. When we woke up and told this to the adults in the house, they informed us that it was a temple procession for a festival that was being done in the temple near my house. In the dark only the fire from the wick of the small lamps that they (it was a few women) carried by hand was visible which made it look like just four flames moving in the distance. Boy did we feel silly.