What is really haunting the Amravati girls hostel?

Social media was flooded with disturbing news coming in from a tribal hostel for girls in Amravati, Maharashtra last week

Social media was flooded with disturbing news coming in from a tribal hostel for girls in Amravati, Maharashtra last week. Some accompanying videos showed young girls in their classic school issued blue salwar-kameez uniform being carried out of a building. Another clip showed a girl flinging herself across the hostel’s threshold before rolling in the courtyard, crying loudly. Reports said four girls from a residential tribal school had been possessed by some kind of paranormal entity, causing nearly 600 of the total 852 students to be taken home by their parents.

Ghost stories and claims of possession are dime a dozen in our country. As someone who has been running the India Ghost Project, the largest public archive of urban lore for the past year, and who has worked on the sociological causes for these tales to emerge – I can say there are few things that don’t have a precedent or a real-world explanation. But the reason a story like this one spreads like wildfire is because it presents a mystery to be solved.

Since the first reports of this alleged haunting went out, the hostel has been visited by ghost hunters and ghost myth-busters of all kinds. This includes Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti volunteers who offered to spend the night at the haunted hostel to assuage parental fears and stop the exodus.

These supernatural rationalisations may feed the story mill, but if we were to ask, in a rational register – what actually happened at the hostel, the answers are less than satisfactory. A medical report put together by government- appointed health experts stated that this incident resembled “selective hysteria” and “conversion disorder” – both terms are no longer recognised by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the key text for identifying psychiatric disorders. Hysteria, in particular, is a term with a deeply gendered history, used to dismiss the emotional duress experienced by girls and women.

The report used vague terms to describe what may have triggered these episodes - “stress” and “unexplained fear”. However, the experts also noted that the hostel was overcrowded and poorly ventilated, which would have likely exacerbated any symptoms. Hostels and boarding schools across the country follow a pattern of being heavy on discipline and surveillance, and cracking down on any perceived breach in morality. Along with academic stressors, this could be a contributing factor too.

In a 2026 paper, Oxford University academic Dr Sneha Krishan, describes how girls, particularly in settings such as hostels, are likely to tell “stories with horns and tails” – stories of death, violence, disappearance and even ghosts. As a function, these allow the hostels to be more than a “carceral container”, and to hold space for excessive feelings (hysteria, as it may be called), place of holding, while making room for radical friendship and community.”

What’s also concerning is that parents are more likely to take the language of ghosts far more seriously than they will take the language of mental duress. In India, over 80% of psychiatric patients in India do not receive timely care, and there is considerably less stigma attached to going to a traditional healer than to a psychiatrist. This scenario would be particularly exacerbated in a residential school with limited resources to offer counselling, where many students are first generation learners, and come from families with rich, deeply practiced cultural belief systems. In fact, a parent of one of the girls clearly stated to a member of the ANSI that he would only send his daughter back once a bhumka had cleansed her.

Telling ghost stories is a common cultural pastime for most of us Indians, but when this fascination has real world, damaging consequences, it must be interrogated. These stories don’t emerge from a vacuum--they point to institutional failures, mental duress, and the lack of a vocabulary to articulate what is going wrong.

It is a shame that the students of Amravati’s Shaskiya Madhyamik Va Uchha Madhyamik Ashram (government middle and higher secondary school) have been reduced to social media clickbait, and that their very real anxieties will be monetised by ghost story peddlers. What’s worse is that they are unlikely to receive continued mental health support, and no investigations will take place beyond the archaic medical report that sees them as hysterical. The girls--and what really haunts them-- deserve better.

Azania Imtiaz Patel is a writer, public policy analyst, and co-founder of the India Ghost Project.