2/16/2020 Some selected Ghost stories as Urban Legends of Calcutta - Colloquium: a Journal of the Arts Department colloquium.bescollege.net/v503/ 1/7 MENU Call for Papers for Volume VI The upcoming issue of Colloquium invites original scholarly papers on Transcending Engendering Processes Read more Some selected Ghost stories as Urban Legends of Calcutta Debika Banerji Research Scholar, Department of Geography, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India Volume 5, 2018 I Full Text PDF Introduction Urban legends are stories that have been fabricated and interwoven into the history and essence of a city (Young, 2016). An urban legend usually lies in part truth, an incident or the ambience of a place is given prime importance and a tale builds up. They have their origins in folklore (Ashcroft et al. 2000). Urban legends have a strong historical and cultural setting (Biswas, 2010) even though they are mostly fictional in character. Hence, some of them have been documented in books, others remain in the oral form while many are slowly lost with time and a change in the city’s character (Bird, 2002). Popularity of urban legends maybe attributed to the fact that these give charm and character to a place. However the very nature of their origin gives a distorted view and is more embroiled in the psychology of the residents (Harding, 2005). A historical view on urban legends can form a very basic interesting surmise for establishing the nature and character of a city. Review of Literature: Calcutta, the erstwhile British capital of the Raj, has its fair share of urban legends and ghost stories. It is one favourite occupation of the Bengali, to fabricate oral narratives, sometimes passed from one generation to the other, spoken, ornamented and listened to on rainy afternoons. Such tales had their humble origins in the rural regions of Bengal,