There was a big river in a place called Sentar and above the river was a bridge. It was believed that there was a spirit of a woman under the bridge. She used to be in the river at mid-night in white dress.
Once, in the late evening, a traveller came the same way to the other side of the river. When he was going to cross the bridge, a man stopped him and told that it was dangerous to cross the bridge at the time because it was about to be the time when a ghost would appear, but the traveller did not listen to him. The traveller asked the man whether he had seen the ghost and the reply was no.
Determined, the traveller went to the bridge in his bicycle. When he reached the middle of the bridge, he saw a woman in a white dress. He went close and asked, “Who are you?”. The answer was that she too wanted to go to the place where he was going. So, he told the woman to sit at the back of the bicycle. She sat and he peddled, and stopped at the end of the bridge and when he turned back to see the woman, she was not there. She was at middle of the bridge and he thought he had peddled before she sat and again he went back to the woman and apologized for peddling before she could sit. Then she sat in the carrier and he checked and proceeded. After he reached the end of the bridge, he turned back to see the woman but again she was not there. But this time she wasn’t at the middle of the bridge either. He felt so scared that he rushed to a house not far from the bridge and asked the family a place to sleep and he slept somehow even though he was scared.
Early in the morning he told the family members what had happened the last evening. Then the family told him to see a saint in a temple. He went and told everything to the saint. The saint said him to go to the same place and tie a string to her shawl if she appeared. He started sweating and shivering thinking of that but the saint told that he would also be there but hiding. So, at mid-night he went to the same place and the saint was just hiding behind the bushes. The traveller saw her and this time he was very frightened because he knew that she was a ghost. He went there and apologized for whatsoever had happened the previous day, so he wanted to cross the bridge with her but by walking. He kept her busy by talking about thing that he even did not know. While he was doing this, he tied the string to her shawl, which she did not know. When he finished this, he scared very much and even started sweating though it was very cold. Then he ran to the same house as the previous day. In the morning, the saint came and together with some other people, they went to the bridge and followed the string. It led them to the edge of the river and they followed the thread down the bridge where there lied a bone. The saint moved around the bone and said that the woman was a spirit, which was not freed, or no one knew about her death or her wishes had not been fulfilled. The saint did some chanting and some religious worshipping over the bone and told that claimed that she was freed. That day onwards the woman did not appear.
—
Arhato Shakya
GEMS, Lalitpur
