There’s not much of a jungle left in Delhi now but there was a time when Shah Jahan could hunt upto what is now Uttam Nagar, near which he built his Hashtal Minar and elephant house. Before him Firoz Tughlak found shikhar much nearer, like the Karol Bagh Ridge where he built a mahal for a gypsy woman who had won over his heart during a hunting trip.

So the tale of Bhuri Bhatiyari-ka Mahal still holds good over 600 years later. Whether Shah Jahan had any such romantic encounter in the jungle is not known, but Maharaja Agarsen, who lived during the Lodhi period, did find an “apsara” (female form divine) in the jungle where he built his famous Baoli, which now exists right in the heart of New Delhi’s Hailey Road. Augustus Somerville wrote a book, “Strange Tales of Shikar” in early 20th century. I remember buying a copy when passing time in Old Delhi station to catch a train to Agra, on the way back from Shimla in 1962. It was an engrossing book which, together with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, made the wait in scorching June less irksome.

Somerville recounts the story of a girl who was murdered in a forest and the police could neither find her body nor any clues to her assailant. But one night not long after the incident, an Anglo-Indian Mail train driver had to suddenly apply engine brakes on seeing a young girl standing right in the middle of the railway track on a moonlit night and pointing to a spot in the distance. The enterprising driver and his jack (the assistant who shovelled coal into the engine furnace) walked towards the girl but she disappeared. Even so, they went towards the spot to which she had pointed and there, under a small mound, they discovered a body which was presumably of the girl, whose apparition they had seen. The discovery helped the police to catch the murderer and cause the girl to rest in peace thereafter.

Cyril Thomas, who hunted from Agra to Gurgaon and was known as Jungle-ka-Badshah, once had a strange experience when, after a shoot he tied up the hind legs of a deer and a wild boar he had shot on a tree branch in Korya Khar and lay down to sleep on a crumbling platform like structure as he had got belated and his bicycle tyre was punctured.

In the middle of the night he was aroused from slumber by someone pulling the gun from under his head. As he opened his eyes he saw a wolf-like snout from which emerged blue smoke and octopus like tentacles. Whenever he tried to push the snout away, his fingers turned painfully backwards. In desperation to retrieve the gun, which belonged to his cousin, a captain on leave from the Army, he uttered the words, “O, God!” and lo, the apparition vanished.

This belief in apparitions is not confined to India alone; it holds good in Africa, America and Europe too, along with vampire stories in which corpses drink human blood and revive themselves like Count Dracula. Somerville, an Anglo-Indian shikari of undivided Bengal, seemed to have the best of such yarns in his now not so easily available book. Ruskin Bond is undoubtedly his best substitute in present times for the mysterious midnight ‘White Lady’ and other strange happenings in the hills, but Delhi also has its spooky jungle tales.