What's more 'Goa' than its ghost stories?
Clyde chats with Chandrima Das, bestselling horror author and creator of another one of Bound's podcasts, Rumors: Dark Lore From India. They swap versions of Goan lore set in Portuguese villas and desolate villages, and try to guess what kind of ghost stories will emerge in the new metropolitan Goa!
This episode was recorded live at Chasing Pods, an event hosted by Hubhopper, Amazon Music., The Good Creator Co.
Follow along Susegad Shots series, where Clyde D’Souza experiences the best of Goa’s places and activities, and reviews them.
And don't forget to check out Rumors: Dark Lore From India, where Chandrima Das takes us to the darkest corners of India and uncover how real events and people from history have transformed into magical and haunting legends.
Rumors Dark Lore from India: https://buff.ly/3sxTKDl
Produced by Aishwarya Jawalgekar
Sound Design & Mix by Kshitij Jadhav
Brought to you by Bound, a company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social platforms for updates on this podcast or take a look at their other podcasts.
Hosted by Clyde D’Souza. He is a creative director who has worked in TV, print, and digital. His book Susegad: The Goan Art Of Contentment captures Goa through conversations, memories, stories, recipes and much more. He lives between Mumbai and Goa and lives the Susegad lifestyle every day! Follow him on Instagram @clydedsouzaauthor.
What's more 'Goa' than its ghost stories?
Clyde chats with Chandrima Das, bestselling horror author and creator of another one of Bound's podcasts, Rumors: Dark Lore From India. They swap versions of Goan lore set in Portuguese villas and desolate villages, and try to guess what kind of ghost stories will emerge in the new metropolitan Goa!
This episode was recorded live at Chasing Pods, an event hosted by Hubhopper, Amazon Music., The Good Creator Co.
Follow along Susegad Shots series, where Clyde D’Souza experiences the best of Goa’s places and activities, and reviews them.
And don't forget to check out Rumors: Dark Lore From India, where Chandrima Das takes us to the darkest corners of India and uncover how real events and people from history have transformed into magical and haunting legends.
Rumors Dark Lore from India: https://buff.ly/3sxTKDl
Produced by Aishwarya Jawalgekar
Sound Design & Mix by Kshitij Jadhav
Brought to you by Bound, a company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social platforms for updates on this podcast or take a look at their other podcasts.
Hosted by Clyde D’Souza. He is a creative director who has worked in TV, print, and digital. His book Susegad: The Goan Art Of Contentment captures Goa through conversations, memories, stories, recipes and much more. He lives between Mumbai and Goa and lives the Susegad lifestyle every day! Follow him on Instagram @clydedsouzaauthor.
Welcome to cigar stories from Guam. I'm Clyde de Souza and I travel and review best of Google's places and activities. Come experience these two cigar shots with me.
00:20
In today's episode, I'm talking to Chandra ma Das, who is the host of rumours, dark lol from India, another awesome podcast by bound. If you like all things spooky, you will love this podcast. This is a special episode with a live audience at an event where Chandra Emma and me talk about ghost stories from Guam.
00:48
When we were doing rumors, and we were doing the research for rumors, there was one story, which is about Goa, which I wanted to do on the podcast and I many years ago, I visited Goa as a tourist and visited Dona Paula, which is a specific area and go about seven kilometers from Tanzania. You know, walking around that area, we met a lot of tourist guides, and it was dusk the sun is setting the atmosphere is getting slightly darker. So one of the tourist guides is like man, do you want to hear a story about this place? So this is the story that he told us. Once upon a time there was a woman called Donna. She was a very high bond woman. Her father had been the viceroy of Jaffna Putnam in Sri Lanka. The family had moved to Guam when she was still a teenager. Then Donna metta fisherman from the village, and she fell in love with him. Now opposites attract, as they say, the daughter of a viceroy and a poor village fisherman. They couldn't live apart from each other. So when Donna went to her father and said, This is the man I want to marry. Her father was, of course, not very happy about it. He said no way. Now Donna was a young girl. She was used to getting a lifetime of, you know, whatever she wanted. She was a bit of a spoiled brat. But unfortunately, she couldn't take this shot. You know, a father had always said yes to her. In depression and anger, wild and tumultuous, she ran to the cliff, which is next to the rivers who are in Mondovi, where they meet, and she jumped off into the Arabian Sea.
02:22
That was the end of Donna as a human being. But that was the beginning of a ghostly legend. On certain moonless nights, you can see an apparition that looks like Dona emerge from the waves of the Arabian Sea around the middle of the night, when you look down from the cliff. She's wearing nothing except a pearl necklace. And she walks up the cliff, step by step, none of the stones and boulders on the cliff affect her or stop her. And when she reaches the top of the cliff, the image disappears.
02:58
We will always be like, Oh my god, this is amazing. You know, and then there's another version. So in this version, Donna is not a spoiled brat. So again, she needs although she falls in love with him. But when her father says no, she goes and marries Paulo, and she says, I don't want to be part of this upper class lifestyle. I'm gonna live in the village with the love of my life. So if she goes and start living in the village, obviously, life is very difficult. You know, they have to struggle. There's no money, although is a fisherman, he goes out fishing. Now he's not used to supporting a wife. monsoons arrive, he's not supposed to go out fishing anymore. You know, what is he going to do for money. So he decides to take a risk, he still continues to go out fishing into the Arabian Sea while the monsoons are on. And every evening, Donna is scared, she goes to that cliff and waits for him to make sure that he's arrived back safely a month or so passes without danger. But one day, follow, does not return. Donor waits for him and she prays to God, God, I'm not going to move from this cliff. Please return my husband to me. She stands there come rain or sunshine, day after day after day after day. All never returns. Don't stop to death on that clip.
04:16
Now, I'm gonna just add the last bit, which is years later, you know, vacation of Goa vacation is done. I'm back to my Mumbai job and everything. And then I come across this excerpt which was from a book by HIPAA pundit where she talks about the same legend and then she's like, actually, there was Dona Paula, she did exist, but she did not fall in love with a fisherman, and she did not kill herself. There really was a Portuguese woman called Dona Paula Ammeraal. The man is is if I'm not wrong, that was a full name. She lived well into her 50s married a local sort of landlord not a fisherman, and was actually known for charitable work in that area. Of course the area
05:00
Don't apologize named after her. And there is no follow, all of the fisherman simply didn't exist. So that is how load comes into existence. There might be a kernel of truth, there might be a real person's name at the heart of the story. But a lot of it is for entertainment. The truth can be boring. The truth can be very boring. Just to add to that the statue that one sees that Dona Paula is not actually Dona Paula. But it's actually a philosopher called Mr. And Mrs. Robert Knox. That's the reality of it, coming to the suppose it goes through in my family. But yeah, I grew up with my uncle telling me about this story. So my family's from North Goa, and commonly it's very quiet Fishing Village. Okay. And so my uncle used to tell me that, at that time, they used to go from Cambodia to coal Valley, cold weather happens to be the place where the later Wendell Rodricks is from. Okay, so at that time, obviously, there were no buses, cars, or Ubers, or anything of that sort. So you had to walk across the hill across fields into the village. And my uncle was telling me that his my granddad is his father was carrying him, you know, when he was a child and going across, and he lost his way, couldn't see anything, it was too dark. So he didn't know where the hell he was. And suddenly, he saw this man coming from the opposite side holding a lantern and asking asking him, you know, where are you going? The guy says that I'm going to Bali, but I don't know where I am. And weight loss says, okay, don't worry, come with me. I'll you know, I'll help you across. So he had some across over the hill and across fields and all of that with the lantern. And they reach the other side of my uncle. Now, my grand father has his bearings. So I said, Okay, he turns around to tell him okay, I'm fine. Okay, so all this time, he could see the light of the lantern, you know, behind him, and he thought, Okay, this guy's behind return, there was no one. That's a pitch darkness. Okay, so now the funny thing about this, it's not that that's spooky, but there is a very good law, okay. And the golden law is that there are protectors of a village, in every village in Goa, and they are called rockin dogs. They help you out if you're kind of lost and all that. So yeah, that's the personal, you know, family ghost story that I grew up listening to, which was again, fascinating. But now there are other ghost stories which are actually real. For example, there is a village in Chando. Okay, in South Goa, all the men over there can't find wives. Okay, and why? Because there's a queen skirts. So there is this kadamba queen, and sometime in the 1100s, where she had gone to her mother in law's place. And there was a invading Emperor at that time from Vijay Nagar he came to the village, kill the king, her husband killed all the men from from Chambolle. And that's it. So when she came back, she found her king dead, all the men are dead. So she went outside the temple over there, rubbed her feet three times on the ground, okay, and she cursed all the men of the village. He said, No man will ever find a wife. So that has been going on in Chandler now. So if you want to buy a house in Guangzhou, Chandler, the lots of these houses, which are just left like that, because the parents are from there, but they tell the men leave because you're not going to find a wife. So that's the story of John Doerr and the Queen scores. I'm almost I'm very curious. Okay. We've heard three stories. So far. Dona Paula, you've heard about Chango. We've heard about your family story, you know, about getting lost in the middle of the night. I feel like there's some very running thread here, about each of these stories carrying some belief system, especially to the younger one, there's a belief that this place is not a place where marriage and fertility and you're having kids and all of that having a family is not possible here. Is that sort of the pattern that you see with a lot of horror stories? Like are they always beliefs and what are those beliefs that you see Clyde? Yeah, I guess if it Chando, maybe that's the belief with other places. I think what has happened, especially with Gore, right, I mean, go ahead. A plague. Okay, sometime in the 1600s. So So for example, there's an island and guar called Divar Island. And during the plague, they were quarantined. It was the Coronavirus of that time. So lots of people were quarantined on that island, and they couldn't get off the island. So lots of priests, lots of villages were just continued on that island, that disease led to that place being so called haunted. Then, of course, when the Portuguese left, and there was the conquest and all of that the Inquisition happened, again, homes were kind of destroyed. So that led to those kinds of religious, let's say, stories, which were, you know, about haunted homes and all of that. So I think, yes, to an extent, a lot of beliefs, a lot of historical events, you know, lead to these ghost stories? Absolutely. I think it almost tells me that the whole conversation around the plague and the Portuguese inquisition and a lot of things which are historical fact, factors are very complex for us to digest. You know, a story seems to kind of carry better, almost from an evolutionary perspective. It seems to stay better over time. And so that is the one that seems to survive. Yeah, they were the crime stories of that time, I guess.
10:00
So right now we have a lot of true crime stories, which are very popular. But I guess at those times, those were the stories that carried forward and it made things interesting, I guess, and also made you not do certain things. Yes. Yes. A lot of things are cautionary tales, you know, don't don't do this. Don't do that, you know, don't chant or you know, or they explain a tragedy, or something really bad happened. Plague plus Inquisition plus historical factors too complex for us to remember. Exactly. It's cause is easier. It's easy. It's like It's like all wrapped into and distilled into one simple story, which everybody can swallow and remember, and then, you know, tell others Yeah, so you want to tell us about the Kristalina story that you've heard about salida village. So the story starts with Padre, a missionary, who is taking a walk near the seminary, and in the village, this is the 1880s According to whoever told me the story, and there is a banyan tree inside I think the seminaries thermoses it's even there now. So it takes a walk at night and he pretty close to the banyan tree. And that evening, Padre didn't return home. The Padres family got very worried. They asked some of the you know, local people and the people who were helping them build their houses and buildings, can you please go out and help look for Padre? Four or five days later? They found him alive. He was facedown in a pool of mud and convulsing slightly so they carried him back home washed him up. The man was just not able to make any sense for the first few days. On the third or fourth day. He apparently started levitating in the air and started screaming the name Kristalina Kristalina, forgive me, Kristalina, Kristalina. And then eventually, of course, he kind of, you know, got back to normal, but after this event to which they've they were supposedly a lot of witnesses. There was this whole story that started coming around that that banyan tree is home to the spirit of a young woman called Kristalina was Christina. According to the story, she was a woman who was married, and her husband went off to Bombay to do business. In the time that she was away. Kristalina got very lonely, very bored, and obviously had a few affairs fell in love with a few men here and there. Now, when her husband returned from Bombay, Kristalina committed suicide, she was the indecent shame woman in that story. But it is her spirit that is attached to the banyan tree. And apparently, whoever goes there does tends to get possessed by Kristalina. So absolutely right. And the great thing about this is that I actually spoke to a resident from Salida. And she concurs that this is this is what happened, although there is a different version of it, that she may have been murdered by her husband who returned home and to find his lovely young, beautiful wife, you know, having had an extramarital affair, so he probably killed her and that's when the body was found that under the banyan tree, now the lower starts after that as well, which is the partner of the Portuguese priest who saw the separation, and then he went crazy. And then he was sent to Portugal, so nobody really knows. But this is a true story. And I won't name the person but I actually need to know the person who's on this supposedly is it's Christina. That's how loud Okay, so but I won't, we won't name the person. It is definitely a load that exists and there is a poem written on it. Okay, by this guy called Joseph Hurtado, very famous going poet called Selected Poems. That's the book and so I'm going to read a little bit of the poem. So this is the part where the priest is in his horse carriage. Right? He's riding down in the middle of the night from pillar to Saliba. And he sees the apparition in front of him.
13:48
But there it stands, tell me what figure may that be that still white figure standing alone beneath the banyan tree, a still white figure artists but a woman I see there. A woman waiting for someone or saying oh respire prayer, a woman. Yeah, she was both young and lovely to behold. Dressed in an all of stainless white, and decked with gems and gold. Upon this hill, No man made dry, but he must need to allow the panting beast a breathing space. So did the cleric now she came and sat beside the priest. Without the Lisa do crack when the whip and down the hill away the horse flew all the way at each moment, she appears less lovely and less young. Oh, can you trust his eyes? He thinks he sees the four key tongue.
14:49
So the poem is called the Cobra woman. And the best part about this book is that it also has a illustration by Mario Miranda. So yeah, it's a lovely book. Maybe you can find it. It's a rare book by
15:00
Yeah, someone sent it to me. So yeah, that completes this this law. So if you're in San Diego the next time do go. Yeah. From law to literature. Absolutely amazing. Yeah. So that's the fun thing. Like we said, right ghost stories. Yeah, they're scary. They're fun to tell during parties and during drunken nights and when there's nothing to do, because truth can be boring. So yeah, I'm glad that you know, you're doing the entire ghost stories series. And I'm happy that we could discuss the golden ghost story and several golden ghost stories on this podcast. So what do you think is the future of ghost stories? I think we're already seeing the future of course stories to some extent with the kinds of horror stories that have come in in the last few years on the screen. So ghost stories from my neck when I first started hearing them or reading them. I used to think of them as metaphorical and allegorical more than anything is the cost not about whether this is the supernatural is real or not. But about what are the fears that this gets us to talk about? Right? What are the fears that that ghost addresses so for me, the core story will continue. As long as we are afraid the fears may change, we may not be afraid of the dark, but we might become for example, you could write a really good cool story about a virus that transmits through your you know, mobile phones and makes your attention span smaller and smaller and smaller. Now that's a scary ghost right? You're right there are lots of now new infections ghost stories are getting perhaps more digital. They're getting the new mind virus ghost stories. Absolutely. There's all the true like you're saying the supernatural is now moving into the natural side of the ghost story. And that's the new ghost stories, I guess for all of us. More psychological. Yes. All of that. Yeah. So super chat drummer. This was a great conversation and we're gonna listen to a lot of your other ghost stories on rumors, the podcast and guides if you have some ghost stories, please get on to the podcast and write to us on Instagram and do listen to some fun ghost stories as well then all ghost stories, fun stories as well. But this was fun so thank you for coming on to say God stories and thank you and I hope all the folks who listen to rumors also listen to say God stories because after rumors you need something to come down that so say God story super so sleep well tonight and moguls who
17:19
hope you enjoyed this say God shocked don't forget to rate review and follow this podcast. This is Clyde saying bye for now. Follow me on Instagram at Clyde D'souza auto or buy my books who cigar the going out of contentment for more go and stories, recipes and a whole lot more. This podcast is brought to you by Bob, a company that helps you grow through stories. Follow them at bound India on all social platforms for updates on this podcast or take a look at their other podcasts. And as always, more gossip