Ghosted: Delhi's Haunted Monuments

by Eric Chopra

Includes 16-page colour photo insert

Delhi is haunted—by its ghosts, its ruins, and its unending capacity for rebirth. In the shadow of medieval mosques and Mughal tombs, the past refuses to stay buried. Saints, Sultans, poets, and lovers—all linger in the city’s imagination, their stories shaping how we remember what once was.

In Ghosted, historian and storyteller Eric Chopra journeys through the capital’s most beguiling sites—Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, the Mutiny Memorial, and Malcha Mahal—to unearth a Delhi that exists between worlds: a palimpsest where Sufis bless kings, jinn listen to grievances, and begums occupy dilapidated hunting lodges. What begins as a search for Delhi’s haunted monuments becomes a meditation on why we are drawn to the dead and how ghost stories become vessels of collective memory.

Blending archival research with folklore, myth, and reflection, Chopra paints an intimate portrait of a city forever in dialogue with its former selves. Through invasions and rebirths, he reveals that Delhi’s spirit resides not just in its monuments but in the unseen presences that linger among them.

Ghosted is a lyrical, haunting journey through the city’s spectral landscape— an invitation to listen to what its echoes tell us about memory and identity.

280 pages, Paperback

Published November 25, 2025

Reviews

[Rusha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe the real horror is losing history to rapid urban development

[Vaibhav Srivastav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another layer of history of one of our most magnificent (and hence often doomed) metropolis, it lends a new view to each of the monuments mentioned here that you would now visit enriched by the tales of the Supernatural that envelop them over the past many centuries. An important book.

[Geetika · Rating 5 out of 5]

👻"Of all the stories that we get to hear about the otherworld, what we must not forget are the very real horrors of the world that we inhabit and the urgency there is to call them out."
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👻Narration flows, a smooth read.

👻The writer is humble in sharing his thoughts and reflections.

👻Some more excerpts I highlighted:

👻Paradoxically, something that is meant to scare us ‘away’ becomes an invitation.

👻We need magic to tolerate our everyday disenchantments.

👻This Mahal(Malcha Mahal)becomes a lens through which to see the tremors of postcolonial India: the unresolved fractures of Partition, the clash between inherited histories and imposed modernities, and the unease of a city that is always building over its own ghosts.

👻But rarely do we ask: how do we haunt the city? We do so when we do not unlearn our privilege, when we stop speaking truth to power, and when we become complicit through silence. We haunt it when we allow communal hatred, censorship, gendered violence, and environmental neglect to become ordinary. These are the horrors Delhi faces now.

👻At the end of the book are the notes and bibliography, all links for the academic essays and book chapters, news and articles and digital media cited in the book and an index. Plus color photographs.

👻Those with interest in nonfiction, history, architecture, travelogues and ghost/ supernatural haunted mysteries will like the book.

👻There is good language. I added many words to my vocabulary.

I read the kindle edition.

👻A five star read ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

[Noor Anand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eric Chopra is a historian and a fellow Stephanian, so I was very excited to read this book.
I can sense his passion for the subject and he’s put in a lot of work as far as research is concerned. But his writing is just dull - he managed to make an interesting subject very ho-hum. I don’t want to judge too harshly because I’ve definitely read worse non-fiction, but I’ve also read much much better non-fiction! An average book.