This is a true ghost story that my father experienced, which gives me goose bumps every time I hear it from him.

As far as I know I have not experienced anything paranormal in my 24 years, except one day when I happened to look out of the window. I saw a dark form standing in the middle of an overgrown farm just behind our apartment around midnight. My friend was staying over, and by the time I looked at my friend and told her to come and watch and turned back, the figure was gone and the farm was all moonlit and empty. Nobody could have walked away so fast as the farm was very big and the figure did not have a definite shape or features, and I would have surely seen the clothes and face of the person as it was a brightly moonlit night. This had me and my friend really freaked out. It never happened again and is still a mystery though there are rumors that it was initially a burial ground in the old times!

Getting back to my dad’s story, this happened some 40 years back when my dad was 20 and was going to college.

One particular night he happened to be all alone in his ancestral house, which was a huge three story house which dates back to the late 1800’s during the British colonialism in India. A lot of people had lived and died in the house and the surrounding estates which come within the boundaries of the house. It was a particularly silent night and my dad, being a brave teenager, decided to stay alone without calling any of his friends over.
He decided to sleep on the long veranda at the back of the house, as it was summer, which overlooked the dark estate which stretched for miles and disappeared into the darkness with only the sound of bats and owls.

After an hour or so after he slipped off to sleep he thought he heard a loud thump just outside the back door and got up to inspect what it was. As soon as he put his hand on the latch he was startled by the barks of dogs so suddenly outside in the estate which really freaked him out. The barking started so suddenly as if the dogs had seen something. After a few seconds the barks turned to whimpers as if they were scared of something but still reluctant to turn back. My dad mustered all of his courage and opened the door and went out to look at the grounds. He saw something which I am sure he would never forget which changed the entire opinion of how dad felt about ghosts.

He saw a transparent and translucent figure, which had a vague resemblance to an old woman, floating through the estate with the dark backdrop enhancing the figure. The dogs were chasing the thing keeping a safe distance between them and the figure. My dad felt like he was glued to the ground as he could not move or scream (and there was no point screaming as the next-door neighbor was a half a mile away). Then the most terrible thing happened.
It started moving, or rather floating, towards him at a very alarming pace and my dad screamed and managed to get inside and slam the door at the thing’s face at the exact moment it would have got him. He stood back and heard a loud bang on the door and something trying to push the door with such an inhuman power that the door started bending under the force. At the point where the latch would have burst open it all stopped suddenly and everything became silent once again. He was shivering so badly it took him some minutes to look out through the window. Then he saw to his horror and relief that the figure had moved back into the estate and was now floating past the mango groves into the neighbor’s farm with the dogs following it.

Dad could not sleep after that and when my grandparents came back the next evening he was down with high fever and was in a delirium for two days. When the story came out of him he heard his parents talking among themselves about the spirit of an old widow who used to stay where our mango grove was situated in 1800's. She drowned herself in the deep well right outside our estate which was no longer used because the water had become stale after this incident.