“When darkness descends on the graveyard, a tall shadow emerges out, stalks passersby, stops them and asks for cakes and a cup of tea. Needless to say, the hair-raising encounter makes the people run away as fast as they can. A few of them simply collapsed, adds graveyard caretaker Mahmood Ali. ”

Mahmood explains, “Many people saw the ghost emerging out of Tomkinson’s grave while others saw it melting down right on the same grave.”

The ghost that emerges out of a graveyard in the outskirts of Gaya in Bihar state of India is of one English man “Owen Tomkinson” who was a British soldier who died of cholera at the age of 47 on September 19, 1906 & was buried in the Durbar graveyard at Iqbal Nagar here.

The full story goes like this:

The English left India in 1947. Sixty years on, one of them his ghost, to be precise continues to bother the residents on the outskirts of Gaya in Bihar. So these residents say.Meet septuagenarian Abdul Majid, who claims to have seen the ghost of Owen Tomkinson several times since his childhood days.

Tomkinson was a British soldier who died of cholera at the age of 47 on September 19, 1906. He, like many other Englishmen, was buried in the Durbar graveyard at Iqbal Nagar here.

Some of the graves here are real big with long structures. Tomkinson’s is a six-foot stone grave with a cross and flowers sculptured on it.

Majid says when darkness descends on the graveyard, a tall shadow emerges out, stalks passersby, stops them and asks for cakes and a cup of tea. Needless to say, the hair-raising encounter makes the people run away as fast as they can. A few of them simply collapsed, adds graveyard caretaker Mahmood Ali.

But has anyone seen Tomkinson when he was alive to identify his ghost? Mahmood explains, “Many people saw the ghost emerging out of Tomkinson’s grave while others saw it melting down right on the same grave.”

Majid, who last saw the ghost five months back, narrates another interesting tale: Some fifty years back, Tomkinson’s ghost happened to stop the tonga carrying a Sufi saint from the Baithu Sharif shrine nearby and demanded cakes and tea from him. The saint got rid of the shadow but only after promising to meet the demand later.

The next day, however, the saint came prepared with an iron chain. He put it around the grave while chanting hymns, and declared the ghost has been fettered.

Since then, Mahmood adds, the ghost had stopped coming out till someone stole away the chain a few years ago. “The shadow started appearing again though it no longer harasses anyone with its demand for cakes and tea,” says Mahmood, whose father Maqsood Ali, a retired military man, was also the graveyard’s caretaker till his death in 1983.

So superstitious are the residents of this Muslim-dominated locality that almost all of them believe the “angrez bhoot” does exist. That the attempt of this correspondent to see the ghost on a late evening proved futile, also cut no ice with them. Elders said it comes out rarely now.

“We are also waiting to meet him,” added a youth who runs a tea shop on the roadside. He along with several others his age can be seen whiling away his time in the cool and peaceful atmosphere of the graveyard every evening in the fond hope of meeting “Tomkinson saaheb”.