NEW DELHI—Over the past year, a series of unusual events have occurred at a courthouse in eastern New Delhi. Books have disappeared, strange noises have been heard. Computers and lights have seemed to switch on by themselves.

Employees at the Karkardooma District Court began wondering if the courthouse was haunted. Eventually the executive committee of the local bar association called a meeting, mulled over the evidence and decided to install closed-circuit television cameras to find out what was going on.

“We were primarily concerned because we thought somebody was stealing books,” said Raman Sharma, the joint secretary of the Shahdara Bar Association. But whether the culprit was a book thief or something more otherworldly, they did not know.

Related:

Bollywood launches its first zombie films to win back viewers

In opening their investigation, the bar association joined a long list of other authorities who have taken complaints of paranormal activity seriously in India, a country that lives, it is said, in several centuries at once.

Last year, for example, a police station in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh was shuttered after a “resident spirit” terrorized the beat constable on duty, according to a report in the Times of India. A state lawmaker demanded an inquiry. Elsewhere, a primary school was temporarily closed when a boy said he saw an egg-shaped ghost emanating from a chalkboard.

Official police investigations of complaints about alleged supernatural events occur with regularity. “We entertain all complaints, be it against zombies or werewolves,” a police officer told the Times earlier this year, speaking about another paranormal matter.

Fantastical tales — of levitating holy men, firewalkers, conjurors, religious statues seeping saffron water — are not uncommon in India, an ancient culture in which the line between superstition and belief is often blurred.

“This is how everyone in India is brought up — listening to ghost stories,” said Sushil Sharma, a lawyer who has worked in the courthouse since 1989.

New Delhi, the country’s sprawling capital that is home to 16 million people, is known as the “City of Djinns,” a reference to the genies from the Islamic tradition still said to inhabit the city’s shrines and graveyards. News of the courthouse haunting, thus, “will bring relief to people who feared Delhi’s age-old djinns and spirits are being driven away by the process of gentrification,” the news website Scroll noted drolly.

But there’s a darker side to such beliefs. In tribal areas of eastern India, women are still accused of being witches — blamed for everything from crop failure to infertility — beaten and sometimes killed. Villagers with little access to health care often turn to shamans, or faith healers, for help. Last year, a prominent Indian rationalist who long advocated for an anti-black-magic law was gunned down while on his morning walk in the western city of Pune.

Just a block from the courthouse, a billboard advertises the services of a healer who can solve vexing problems, from sour love affairs to demon possession.

“We’ve got a country with a 16th-century mindset superimposed on the 21st century,” groused Narendra Nayak, president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations. “People will use their mobile phones to view ghosts and we will do a puja (prayer ritual) before sending a spacecraft to Mars. Lots of cultures have learned to get over these things and be more rational in their approach, but we haven’t. That’s the tragedy of this country.”

The bar association’s grainy and dim surveillance video, as these can be, had plenty to satisfy believers — white orbs floating by, computers flickering on and off — and much to raise doubt.

“It was just a virus,” said Madan Lal Karkar, 45, a lawyer who was sitting Tuesday afternoon in the small cyber library that was monitored. Karkar was playing computer chess, but otherwise, the room is infrequently used now. The Internet isn’t working.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

The cyber library sits in one of a series of concrete buildings with open-air corridors that during the daylight are filled with witnesses, suspects, lawyers in their customary black jackets and banded collars — left over from the British Raj — and an occasional stray dog. To say the place is dusty would be an understatement. Ant-hill-size piles are in the stairwells. Legal volumes are covered in plastic sleeves for protection.

When Sushil Sharma heard about the closed-circuit TV cameras, he felt a bit vindicated, he said. He has been saying that supernatural activity has been occurring at the courthouse for years, ever since he and a colleague were returning to their chambers late one evening and heard loud knocking and saw a padlock swinging wildly back and forth, seemingly on its own. These days, he makes sure he leaves work before nightfall.

“I was fully conscious. I’m not a drug addict, I’m a lawyer,” he said. “I believe something is happening here. We should talk about it.”

The bar association said it plans to leave the spirit alone for now, until the publicity dies down.

It was getting late. Darkness drew in. A curl of moon rose. It was time for Sushil Sharma to go home. His ghost did not seem to be in evidence. One of the colleagues who had started too early on happy hour began singing drunkenly in his chambers. The sound echoed eerily throughout the emptying court complex and down to the busy street.

Read more about: