Christmas Guest

24^th December 2015

It was 8’0 clock in the evening, Christmas Eve prayer just got over in an Evanglische church located in the outskirts of a small town deep inside of black forest in Germany. Church volunteers were wrapping up the things after the event.  As one of the residents in the church building, I was also invited for the Christmas Eve function; I stayed in a room on the second floor of the same church building which was rented out by church management. There were totally seven rooms, all were occupied by students from nearby towns and villages who studies in the local college.

Black forest is one of the most beautiful regions in the country, not densely populated; sharing borders of Switzerland on one side and France on the other side. I enjoyed my summer time touring around every single holiday, but then came winter, it was heavy, almost snowing every day, weekends were terrible for me, there wasn’t no-much friends for me there and more over neighbor room students travel to their home town every Weekend.

 I used to spend winter time weekends alone reading books, watching movies, trying out some new dish in cooking. Most of the weekends I used to be alone in the whole building… No, there is one more person…. Jesus..YES…lol... we two are the only residents of that building in the weekends.

Christmas weekend was a long one, So I invited one of my friends from Nuremberg to stay with me for couple of days to roam around black forest before travelling to Cologne to catch up our other friends for New Year celebration.

My friend arrived at around 9pm; then we planned to cook some special dinner for Christmas Eve. Later while we were cooking, I told him some of the weird happenings that I noticed in the church since the beginning of Advent.

Its only me (unaccounting God) used to be in the building most of the weekends, but since last few week, I sense somebody else also there, because I used to hear the sounds of bench, chair dragged in the middle of night, I also hear somebody talking, I checked out other students rooms, church hall, the other rooms in the first floor - for which I have limited access, but I didn’t found anyone.  And I noticed that the sound stops once I step out of my room to search for it. My friend was convincing me that it could be my hallucination. But there was one more.

Couple of weeks before, in a weekend, around 7pm, when I was cooking in the common kitchen at the second floor, I heard somebody rang the calling bell for our rooms at the second floor, usually we could speak to the person at the door through a phone at the kitchen and the door can be opened directly just by pressing a button in there. But that day, when I picked the phone no one responded, and the bell rang again after a while, I went down to check and found no one.  The bell was rung again and again in 10-15 minutes interval. No answer on the phone. Fortunately that weekend, a girl from one of the other rooms was present, she heard the bell ringing many times, got irritating and came out to check. She went down, I was watching her from the kitchen window; she came out of the building and went around searching on the other side of the building, it was heavily snowing, almost a feet height snow covered the place. The next 15 min, there wasn’t any ring, she too didn’t come up.  I went down slowly and checked around the church building for her, she wasn’t there. It was too cold; I didn’t even wear my jacket, so I went back inside after a quick look.

 I called out her name from inside couple of times and then she showed up from the church main hall. She told me that she checked the all places in the church except the cellar as she was bit scared to get in there.  Cellar - it’s the underground area. It has a huge hall and some rooms. But we never used the cellar and never know what’s stuffed in those dark rooms. 

For the last one month, there were painters working on the building, they were using the cellar to store things, they had access to the cellar rooms. I had the curiosity to check out those dark rooms, so I used to come early from work and have some chat with the painters, share coffee with them and later check out the rooms, most of them were stuffed with old things and nothing was interesting expect one room which is always open. It is a long narrow hallway which runs for the whole length of the building, there was no light inside, and whole hallway smelled bad, no visibility beyond 10 meters. Later I noticed the hallway area of the cellar actually covering a huge part of the building ground area but it is not under use at all. The next Sunday, I joined with the church volunteers to help out Christmas arrangement and casually I asked an old lady about the history of the church, as generally every one suspect, there is always an interesting twist in the German historic stories during WW II, YES, here, this place had been used as an hideout, and after war when it was renovated, this particular part of the cellar was just closed and never been used for anything. It was dumped with things which are decades old. The very next day, I visited the hallway with a little torch light, after walking few meters, I saw a huge cross made out of metal nearly 5 feet height, it was bit freighting, so I returned back.

Now my friend got terrified listing to this, he didn’t say a word.  

25^th December 2015

The next day was very long, we returned back` home late in the night at round 10PM. Then we were scanning through the pictures taken that day and chatting. Suddenly we heard some sound like somebody pulling a chair or a table.  We became quiet and trying to understand what’s happening. After a while no noise, we decided to check it out, I was pretty sure that it must be coming out from the cellar. Without even turning on the stair lights, we walked slowly down towards the cellar, before opening the cellar door; we noticed some light flashed inside the cellar. We didn’t get in; we got outside of the church and decided to watch from distance to know from which side of the cellar that flash light is coming. There are not many houses nearby, only few bungalow type houses can be seen here and there and then the road lead to the forest. When we were running towards the next building in the cold, we observed some footsteps marks on the fresh snow close to the next building toward the church, we followed the footstep marks and that lead to a small abandoned decades old hut nearby. This hut was less than fifty meters away from the church building, when we entered into it, to our surprise, we saw an underground tunnel and it was seemed to be running towards the church.

I told my friend to wait at the hut and I run to the church and went down to the cellar as quite as possible. I opened the cellar and straight away entered into the narrow hall way without even noticing other part of the cellar. I assumed that the narrow hallway in the cellar leading to the tunnel in the hut nearby. I carried a little torch light, but I didn’t turned on, I slowly walked inside the hallway, after moving some distance, I heard a voice of a little girl, it comes from somewhere inside the hallway, but I wasn’t sure from where it coming from, front or back of me as it was echoing inside the hallway. I moved few more meters; again the same voice was heard. Suddenly I stepped over some metal box; I slipped and fell down, huge noise of metal rolling around. Immediately I turned on my torch light, just a meter away I saw a woman in her thirties and two kids on her sides, a little girl, probably 8-9 years old and a boy, 4-5 years old. More than me, the lady got scared and started crying. Without any words, just their faces let me know who they are and I got answers for all those mystical nights. I called my friend and asked him to get into the tunnel, as expected, he came straight into this hall way. We took the scared mother and two children to the cellar main hall and tried to communicate and understand what they got to say. 

They were refuges and staying in a camp near by the town, once in a while they visit this place for better shelter, there are two toilets and a bathroom in the cellar, apart from that there was also a old guest room which was yet to be renovated. We provided them shelter overnight. The next day, we gave them some money and food items and also warned them not to use that place in future. After early breakfast, our Christmas guests left the building from the main door of the church. With so much gratitude, they said Good bye!!

On 2016 New Year Eve, I and my friends did camping. During the campfire late at night, everyone was telling some ghost stories. I decided to share my real experience in a dramatic sequence to captivate their imagination.

Happy New Year 2017!!