Motorcycle Views

Wild Motorcycle Tales

Here's a great story from Saurav Bhattacharjee. Got your own story? Send it to me.

A Haunted Ride

The workings of the road are stranger than the workings of our mind. The roads less travelled are usually the ones that take us places.

It was the end of an unmomentous winter this year. My house had burnt down following an electric short circuit which had claimed the life of my beloved dog and companion. Unable to fix my mental fortitude I decided to head out for the hills of Shillong, my home town, to regain my composure. Little was I to know that the pine covered hills would offer me a very different welcome this time.

Having fixed and repaired my house, I got out my Royal Enfield Thunderbird, packed the essentials and set off on a fine sunny day. It was to be a 100 kilometer ride to Shillong and then another 100 kilometers to the border town of Dawki.

With the heavy construction work along the Guwahati Shillong Highway, NH40 was a mess of dust, rubble and potholes. As I reached near Shillong the skies turned dark grey signaling the inevitable downpour that was on its way. Turning up the throttle I raced towards the hill town hoping to arrive at my favourite restaurant before the storm began.

With lady luck on my side this half of the trip I managed to find a comfortable seat at the restaurant just as it began pouring outside. The temperature suddenly dropped and the weather got quite chilly. But the charm of eating a steaming hot plate of chicken gravy with my favourite Thai fried rice while it pours cats and dogs outside is unrivalled.

I was prepared to beat the weather at its own game this time and with my stomach full of a heavy dose of protein and carbs, I got into my water proof gear, fastened my helmet on securely and with a quick prayer kick started the T-bird to life and headed off towards the Bangladesh border.

The rain was incessant. There wasn't a moment where it relaxed its wet grip over the trip. I kept climbing up Shillong peak, careful as streams of water crisscrossed over the asphalt, in gentle trickles at places and like gushing waterfalls at others.

Wetness got a new meaning in the very first hour. My water proofing gear was being tested to its vertex. But I found the Enfield to be super reliable even on the trickiest of places where it muscled through muck, oncoming gushing water and steep inclines. There was just no stopping it. It felt as if it had come to a life of its own in the storm. It was in its own element.

With the thunder crashing all around, the Thunderbird seemed to be living up to its name. Riding nonstop for two hours I had left behind the road that heads towards Cherrapunjee and was close to Pynursla, a small town on the road to Dawki.

A well deserved cup of hot tea found its way to my table as I stopped at a road side tea stall. A few cups of tea and some local made biscuits rejuvenated my spirits but didn't do much to aid my freezing hands. The rain had finally tired down, and had resorted to becoming a gentle, but unwelcome drizzle.

Dawki wasn't too far away now. The scenery however changed drastically. The dark green pine forests had given way to a lush green but super dense jungle which towered over the road, which had grown narrower, and made everything darker than usual. It became very quiet with the forest muffling out noise. The lack of human habitation was obvious. The sun set far more quickly than I had anticipated and soon I was riding in pitch black darkness.

I had accessorized my motorcycle with HID headlamps, dual 55 watt fog lamps and dual hazard lights. So visibility was not my problem. The twisting jungle road seemed endless and my eyes were functioning at their max to discern dangerous branches which were having a gala time hitting me at every turn. Something felt wrong.

I stopped the bike to check the time and realized that I had been riding for nearly four hours. Dawki at best was only three hours away from Shillong. I had probably lost my way, made a wrong turn in the dark or took some road where I had probably missed a turn. But I had been on this road before and I couldn't think of any place where I could get off the road and lose my way.

Now the forests around Dawki are well known to be infested by venomous snakes. I wasn't about to risk being bitten standing here in the middle of God knows where, and decided my best bet was to keep heading down the road. I was bound to come up to some form of human settlement. So off I went riding at an average speed of 40kmph to maximize fuel efficiency. I didn't want to be stuck out here without fuel.

After about half an hour of riding I came across a house with a clearing around it. The house was completely dark and having seen a million horror movies, this seemed the perfect hideout for some psychopathic killer or worse. But I braved my chances and went up and knocked on the door.

No one answered. I turned back to look at my bike. The T-bird was shining in the moon light, the sky now bearing an innocent star studded look. I knocked once again and then started walking back towards the bike. It was then that I felt something.

For a moment I felt as if I was hallucinating. I had walked up to my bike and got on it and looked back at the house but I could no longer discern it in the darkness. It was as if the forest had swallowed it. The moon light breaking through the tree tops kept shifting. I tried convincing myself that the long ride, the cold and this darkness were playing tricks on my mind.

I looked away. Now I couldn't make out the road. In the dim moon light I could make out the dense forest on my left and a grassy field broken by wild bushes on my right. I got off the bike, bent down and touched the ground in front of my tyres. Cold wet grass greeted my near frozen fingers. I stood up looking for the road I had travelled on. It was nowhere.

Now I always had an interest in the paranormal but here I was living one. I wasn't scared. My curiosity had overpowered my fear and I was looking out into the darkness slightly enjoying what I believed to be a complex form of hallucination. Then something moved to my right. I spun around trying to make out the shapes in the dark. Then I saw it again. It was a little child whose silhouette was clear among the bushes and he was not alone. I saw at least five more figures running around hiding among the bushes only visible when they would run across the moonlight. Now since there was no possible way that small children were running about in the middle of a desolate and dangerous forest, I jumped on my bike to get out of there.

I turned the key and hit the self start button, my eyes glued to those creatures, whatever they were, hiding behind the bushes, but the bike refused to start. I hit the self start again. The engine whined but stayed cold. It was then that I felt something brush against my right boot. With a reflex action I kicked out and swung open the start lever and kicked the lever hard. The T-bird blasted out into life.

My hands automatically found the switches and the HID light along with the high powered fog lamps shone up before me burning up the darkness and the roar of the Enfield engine tore through the blanket of silence sending resounding thumps into the wilderness. My eyes broke through the veil of pitch black unknown and there I was standing in the middle of the road, no house in sight, no grassy field but the defeated forest on either side at least six feet away from the road. I could feel the hot engine between my legs, pushed it into gear and sped off forward. I reached Dawki an hour later.

Next morning with the breaking of dawn I headed back to Shillong. As I crossed the forest, now bathing in the early morning sunlight, I tried to decipher the events of the previous night, which now felt more like a dream. The only thing that troubled me were the grass stains on my boots and clothes.

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