Pan India

A village headman in the Vindhya foothills — the account collected third-hand, the original teller unnamed, the season unrecorded — described a figure seated on a boulder above a dry streambed who answered every question put to him correctly, including the headman's unspoken ones. The figure had no shadow at midday. When the headman looked back from the treeline, the boulder was bare and the streambed, which had been dry for two seasons, was running with clear water up to his ankles.

Ramkhelawan Tiwari, a government-employed weighmaster at the Lahori Tola grain depot, reported that a woman standing alone on the approach road to Manikarnika Ghat spoke his dead mother's name — her full name, including the village-name suffix used only within his family — before he had spoken a single word to her. She was standing in the reflected firelight of the burning ghat, her feet, he noted with precision, not touching the wet stone. Tiwari did not run; he stood where he was until the lamps of a passing funeral procession broke the interval, at which point the woman was no longer present.