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In 2013, in the middle of the Thar Desert, at 2 AM, a paranormal investigator was visiting this desolate village with his team.
Explore the mystery of Kuldhara, India's ghost village where 80,000 people vanished overnight due to tyranny and hardship.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- Kuldhara's abandonment was a coordinated mass migration driven by oppressive rule and economic hardship.
- The Paliwal Brahmins were skilled farmers and traders who thrived in harsh desert conditions using innovative techniques.
- Salim Singh's cruelty and extortion were central to the village's fate, as documented by British officials.
- Paranormal claims add mystery but the true story involves historical and environmental factors.
- The legend of Kuldhara illustrates how socio-political pressures can lead to sudden, large-scale population shifts.
What the video covers
- Kuldhara is a deserted village in Rajasthan's Thar Desert, abandoned for over 200 years and known as India's most haunted village.
- The village was once a prosperous hub of the Paliwal Brahmins, who developed an advanced water harvesting system called the Khadin System.
- Salim Singh, the cruel Diwan of Jaisalmer in the early 1800s, imposed brutal taxation and threatened the village chief's daughter.
- Facing impossible choices, the villagers mysteriously vanished overnight in 1825, abandoning their homes, farms, and wells.
- Paranormal investigators have reported unexplained phenomena such as ghostly handprints, sounds, and apparitions in Kuldhara.
- Historical British documents confirm Salim Singh's tyranny and the socio-political context of the village's abandonment.
- Scientific studies challenge some myths, disputing earthquake theories and highlighting environmental factors like drying rivers and trade decline.
- The mass exodus was likely driven by economic oppression, fear of Salim Singh, and deteriorating living conditions.
- Tourism and ghost stories have kept the legend alive, but the real reason behind the abandonment is rooted in history and hardship.
- The video also includes a brief sponsor message about digital security and online scams.
Chapters
- 00:00Paranormal Investigation in Kuldhara
- 00:45Signs of the Supernatural
- 01:25Tourism and Haunted Reputation
- 02:09Historical Background of Jaisalmer
- 02:51Salim Singh's Cruelty and Power
- 03:42British Records and Historical Context
- 04:32Geography and Climate of Thar Desert
- 05:30Paliwal Brahmins' Water Harvesting and Prosperity
- 06:27Salim Singh's Ultimatum and Village's Fate
- 07:15The Overnight Disappearance of Kuldhara
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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After completing the investigation, they were returning to their car when they saw something strange on the bonnet of their car.
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The marks of a child's hand. Small hands, like that of a 4-5 year old child.
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They were clearly visible in the dust. But just a few minutes ago, there were no marks.
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The surprising thing was that there was no child here. In fact, there was no human in this entire village.
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For the last 200 years, no human has lived in this village. These people started to look around, and then one after the other, new signs started to appear before their eyes.
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When they called the journalist, the same signs started to appear on their vehicles. This is not a horror movie script.
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This is an actual village. In the Thar Desert of Rajasthan, just 17 km from Jaisalmer, Kuldhara village.
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It is called India's most haunted village. There are more than 400 houses in this village.
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It has a network of proper streets. There are temples, wells, walls, doors. Everything, except humans.
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It is said that you can hear women scream in the village. See headless bodies moving.
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"I saw a man, he didn't have a head. No head at all." You can smell food being cooked.
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"It's a barren area. Even today, people say that you can smell food being cooked." The tourists come to this village to see the ruins.
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But before nightfall, everyone returns. Because staying the night is forbidden. It is said that 200 years ago, Kuldhara was a flourishing village.
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And then one day, all the villagers suddenly disappeared. Without a sound, without a sign.
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As if someone pressed a button at night, and thousands of people vanished. Hello friends!
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To get to the truth of Kuldhara, you need to know about a person first.
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A person whose name was enough to shake Jaisalmer. This was in the early 1800s.
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Jaisalmer was a princely state at the time. The kings were in power, but the actual power was with the Diwan.
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Basically, the Prime Minister. And the Diwan of Jaisalmer was Salim Singh. Extremely cruel and cruel.
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But Salim Singh was not always like this. His story also begins with a tragedy.
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Salim Singh's father, Saroop Singh, had been the Diwan of Jaisalmer. But the royal officials cheated him, and had him murdered.
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Salim Singh was only 11 years old at the time. And an 11-year-old boy saw his father die.
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This fuelled the fire of revenge in him. A few years later, when Salim Singh became the Diwan, he crossed all the limits of cruelty.
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Whoever disobeyed him would be killed. It is said that Salim Singh alone killed as many people in Jaisalmer as all the enemies combined.
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His taxation policies were so brutal that it was difficult for the farmers and merchants to survive.
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Due to his extortions, Salim Singh had saved up ₹20 million at one time. Think about it, ₹20 million of that era.
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His mansion was one of the most magnificent buildings in Jaisalmer.
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The King of Jaisalmer could do nothing in front of him. King Rawal Mulraj was like a puppet in his hands.
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To be honest, the real ruler of Jaisalmer was Salim Singh. And this is not a story.
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This is actual history. The British officers of that time had recorded it in their official government documents.
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The exact timeline is not that clear, but these events took place between 1790-1820. In the midst of all this, Salim Singh sees a village called Kuldhara.
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The story of Kuldhara begins in the 13th century. When many Brahmins fled from the Pali district of Rajasthan and came to Jaisalmer.
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And they settled 84 villages there. Because they came from the Pali district, they were called the Paliwal Brahmins.
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And Kuldhara was their most important hub in Jaisalmer. Now, let's look at the geography of this place.
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The Thar Desert is the largest desert in India. Temperatures rise from 40°C to 50°C in the summers.
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It gets almost little to no rainfall. And as far as you can see, you can see only sand dunes.
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No one would ever think of living in such a place. But Paliwal Brahmins did something that is still praised by scientists.
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They developed a revolutionary water harvesting system. The Khadin System. In the diagram, you can see how interestingly hill slopes are used in it to collect and store water.
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To the extent that the sand of the desert turns into fertile land. During the rainy season, water is collected in this area.
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And slowly, over the next few months, it keeps seeping down. By the time winter arrives, and the water at the surface evaporates, the land becomes so nutrient-rich that crops can be grown here.
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It was as if someone was farming rice in the Sahara Desert. With the help of this system, in the middle of the desert, the people of Kuldhara used to grow two crops a year.
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And not only farming, the Paliwal Brahmins were also experts in trade and banking. Kuldhara lies on the trade route between Jaisalmer and Sindh.
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So the entire kingdom's trade passed through this place. As a result, a place where nothing was supposed to be, they established a civilisation such that at one point, Kuldhara was more prosperous than Jaisalmer city.
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The Paliwal Brahmins had more wealth than the kings of Jaisalmer. The question then arises, a place that had wealth, fertile land, and a strong community, how did it disappear overnight?
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The story goes that Salim Singh's eyes fell on Kuldhara's village chief's daughter. He wanted to marry her.
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He threatened the villagers that if it didn't happen, he would kidnap her. Later, Salim Singh gave the village an ultimatum.
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If the Paliwal Brahmins didn't hand her over within a day, he would kill everyone in the village.
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These people weren't left with many options. First, to hand over the girl. Second, to try to fight Salim Singh.
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Which was practically impossible. Because they didn't have their own army. So the Paliwal Brahmins chose the third option.
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An option that neither Salim Singh nor anyone else had expected. An option that shocked people even after 200 years.
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In Vikram Samvat 1882, on the full moon of the month Shravan, that is, on the night of 29th July 1825, all of them left the village.
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Not just Kuldhara, the 83 other villages where other Paliwal Brahmins lived, all of them were vacated that night.
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There were 20,000 houses in these villages. There were about 80,000 people living there. And all of them disappeared in one night.
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Thousands of people, hundreds of families, old people, children, women, men, all left their homes in one night.
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The house that their ancestors built 600 years ago. The land that they had turned from a desert into fertile farms.
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The wells they had dug with their own hands. Everything was left behind. Without any information leak.
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Without anyone noticing it. And without anyone having warned Salim Singh. This coordination was a miracle.
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No one knew where they went. You know, even today, there's one thing that disappears like this.
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Or a website that looks like facebook.com. But it's not a real website. You can't tell the difference.
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NordVPN.com/dhruv Let's get back to our story. But what is even more mysterious is what they did while leaving.
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The thing that takes Kuldhara from being just an abandoned village to the most haunted village in India.
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It is said that while leaving the village, the Kuldhara residents had cursed that no one would be able to live in the village.
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And so, for 200 years, this village remained uninhabited. It is believed that whoever tried to live here faced strange paranormal activities and then left the village.
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No one spends the night here. The official website of Rajasthan Tourism also says the same thing.
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That's why no one is allowed to enter Kuldhara after 6 pm. It is said that on full moon nights, it looks like people have returned to the village.
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There are sounds of cattle, of women's jewellery when they walk, bells ringing in the temples, old flour mills running, you can even hear voices, and see people, but not their faces.
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The founder of the Indian Paranormal Society, Gaurav Tiwari, and his team went to Kuldhara multiple times.
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And what he experienced there was quite strange. First, the temperature. Suddenly, dramatic drops were recorded in the temperature.
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When the team reached a certain point, the temperature was minus 2°C. And here, unexplained electromagnetic fields were detected.
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When the investigators asked questions, the EMF readings changed. The motion sensor was on and when they remained silent the readings remained stable.
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"I want you to come forward and try to talk to us without being afraid, without feeling shy, and without being scared." One team member thought that someone had touched him.
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I just realised that someone has touched me. There were orbs in the camera, which were said to be ghosts.
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I promise I won't bother you. Something was recorded in the CCTV camera, but when Gaurav went to see it, the camera was turned off.
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Once, he saw something like a shadow on the camera, but when he rewinded and tried to see it again, the entire system crashed.
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The screams were not coming from any visible source. But they were being captured on audio equipment.
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This is the answer to the question I was thinking. And this is when the incident I talked about in the beginning of the video happened.
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On the cars parked there, the handprints of children appeared out of nowhere. In a desolate village, where no human being lives.
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No child lives. Gaurav Tiwari summarised his findings, saying that he collected significant anomalies, which suggest that something is happening in Kuldhara, that cannot be explained with simple scientific theory.
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Now the question is, what is the truth behind it? If you remember, in the video on the Bhangarh Fort, I told you about the same story.
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It is said that ghosts haunt the fort because of a curse. But there is one important difference between Bhangarh and Kuldhara.
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The characters in the Bhangarh story, turned out to be fictional. They were not real stories.
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But the characters in the Kuldhara story, are real. Their actual historical record exists. Diwan Salim Singh did actually exist.
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It's clearly written in the Gazette of the Jaisalmer Estate, that Salim Singh, through his atrocious policies, had driven the Paliwal Brahmins out of the Jaisalmer Estate.
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These are the words of the British officers, which are recorded in the official government documents of that time.
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The story of the Paliwal Brahmins is also true. It is also true that they were mistreated.
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The only thing in this entire story, that has no historical proof, is the story of the village chief's daughter.
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No book, document, or royal decree has mentioned any such story. This specific part of the story is a folklore.
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So you may wonder, if this is not true, then why did the people of Kuldhara leave this village?
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Is it true that they left the village overnight? Before we talk about this, let's look at the things that make Kuldhara India's most haunted village.
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In January 2017, a peer-reviewed journal Current Science published a study that challenged the entire story.
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This study did a forensic analysis of the structures of the nearby villages, the fallen roofs, the broken pillars.
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They argued that this damage pattern could only match with earthquakes. The data from the Geological Survey of India also shows this area is clustered close to the active faults and epicentres.
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All of the 84 villages. This study theorised that the Paliwal Brahmins had not gone anywhere.
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The earthquake destroyed the poorly-built houses. Many people were buried under heavy stone blocks. And the mass exodus story was later added to the folklore.
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But a year later, a rebuttal was published in the same journal, which systematically broke this earthquake theory.
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In this paper, it was said that the biggest problem in the earthquake theory was that no earthquake was recorded around the time of migration, 1825.
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There was an earthquake in Jaisalmer on 16th June, 1819. Six years before the migration.
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And the next one was on 4th April, 1905. 80 years after the migration. So if an earthquake killed the residents, when did it occur?
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Secondly, if the earthquake occurred, the nearby non-Paliwal villages should have been damaged as well.
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But no devastation report has been made in any neighbouring village. Earthquakes are never selective, that it will affect this village and not others.
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The third and most convincing argument is that the walls of Kuldhara are still in contact with each other.
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If there had been a devastating earthquake, we would see cracks in these walls, gaps would have been formed.
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But these walls are still aligned. This paper concluded that the earthquake would have damaged the structures later.
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But the sudden exodus from the village, could not have been due to earthquakes. So the question is, what was the reason?
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There's one factor that almost everyone agrees on. The water crisis. The foundation of Kuldhara's prosperity was water.
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Farming, trade, banking, all of this was possible in the desert, because the Paliwal Brahmins had found a way to harvest water.
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But the truth is, despite making such a sophisticated system, this system would ultimately depend on the monsoon rains.
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And in the Thar Desert, rainfall has always been unpredictable. There's a Kak river near Kuldhara, a dam was built on it about 300 years ago, and it slowly dried up.
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According to the secretary of the NGO Jaisalmer Vikas Samiti, Prakash Vyas, this could be the main reason why people left this place.
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As long as the river flowed, the groundwater was being recharged. The wells had water.
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But as soon as the river dried up, everything disappeared. The research of Professor Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi of Aligarh Muslim University shows that, by 1815, most of the wells in Kuldhara had dried up.
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The drying up of the wells, made farming impossible. And at the same time, due to the lack of security, trade was also stopped.
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This was also the reason for the decrease in sources of income. And in this situation, Kuldhara, which was wealthier than Jaisalmer, was becoming a target for enemies.
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Author Nand Kishore Sharma has written more than 40 books on Jaisalmer's history. According to him, as trade routes stopped, and the river dried up, Salim Singh started to collect higher tax from the Paliwal Brahmins of Kuldhara and the other 83 villages.
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On the other hand, dacoits and robbers had started stealing from them. They would kidnap women from the village, and until they were paid a ransom, they would keep the women as hostages.
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So this was the real reason. The water was running out, the wells were drying up, and the farming was becoming impossible.
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On the other hand, the oppressive taxation of Salim Singh, and the looting of the robbers, the people of Kuldhara left the village, after being troubled by all this.
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The biggest proof of all this, is British officer Colonel James Tod's famous book from 1829.
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Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan In it, he wrote about his experience in Rajasthan. James Tod saw that almost all the Paliwal Brahmins in the area were living in voluntary exile.
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Because if they returned to their lands, Salim Singh would have taken all their earnings.
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At that time, the farming was almost impossible. Trade had also dried up because of lack of security.
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And Salim Singh had taken the family members of the Paliwal bankers as hostages, so that they could be financially controlled.
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This is not a legendary story or folklore. This is a documented historical fact. The truth is that the people of Kuldhara did not leave the village overnight.
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At its peak in the 15th to 17th century, the population of Kuldhara was 1,588 people.
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But in 1815, the population of Kuldhara, according to British officer James Tod's book, was 800.
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10 years before the population had supposedly disappeared overnight, it had already been halved. About 800 people had already left Kuldhara.
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And this decline continued even after 1825. In historical records, we can see that in 1890, 37 people were still living in Kuldhara.
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That means that decades after 1825, some people continued to live there. It was a gradual decline.
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Everyone didn't disappear in one night. People left slowly. Some migrated to Jodhpur. Jodhpur was outside the influence area of Salim Singh at that time.
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Some people went to Uttarakhand and Bihar. And the villages where they settled, we still have their identity.
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They were only looking for a better life. Now you might ask, if this is true, then what about the stories of those ghosts?
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Friends, the answer to that is quite simple. And quite human. Confirmation bias. I told you about this in the Bhangarh Fort video.
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The places that are considered haunted, the more you read about those places, the more you get a confirmation bias.
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You have heard everyone say that this place is haunted. So your brain starts finding patterns.
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Every little sound becomes a ghost. Every shadow becomes a spirit. In psychology, there is a term for it, pareidolia.
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The human brain tries to find a pattern in everything. We see faces in places where none exists.
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To tell you the truth, I went to Kuldhara 7 years ago, in 2019. You can see the photos on the screen.
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But before I left, I didn't know that people consider this place haunted. That it is, in fact, called the most haunted village in India.
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So I had no confirmation bias about it. So obviously, I didn't notice anything unusual or mysterious.
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I may have heard shadows and strange sounds, but my brain didn't connect it to the place being haunted.
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My brain might have assumed that there'd be some rational source of the sounds. Like the wind.
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And the videos by Gaurav Tiwari, where the motion sensor is on, all of this happens.
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In those videos, it is also said that it could be that the motion sensor was switched on due to the wind.
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Or it could be that the device is faulty. "It could be nothing more than a breeze.
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Or a sign that the device is faulty." A local tourist guide, Shaitan Singh, says that Kuldhara is just an abandoned place.
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And even the locals themselves don't believe that this place is haunted. When tourists come to see it, the local guides show them what the tourists want to see.
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The Secretary of the Jaisalmer Vikas Committee, Chandraprakash Vyas, also says that he has been going there for 25 years.
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But he didn't see any invisible power there. Nor did he hear any screams. "It's said that there are ghosts.
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I have not experienced anything like this in the past 25 years." And here, there is another twist in the story.
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The real reason behind the ghost story is not just tourism. But the real reason is the treasure.
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It is claimed that there was a lot of treasure and gold hidden in the ruins of Kuldhara.
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Left behind by the Paliwal Brahmins. At one time, thieves would flock to this area looking for treasure.
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They would search this area at night. Some found gold, and some stole the windows and doors.
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But for these thieves to steal successfully, it was important that no one would go there at night.
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That's why they spread such ghost stories. Today, no one might have known about Kuldhara if it weren't for this tale of the treasures.
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No one went there until the 1990s. And no one outside the country knew about the Kuldhara.
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But in 1998, a man named Sumer Ram started living in a house in Kuldhara with his father.
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Because they had nowhere else to live. There, at night he saw two foreigners, a Dutch and a German, coming with metal detectors.
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They went inside a house, and after some digging, found some gold and silver coins there.
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They took them away. When Sumer Ram stopped them, a foreigner threatened him with a knife.
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But Sumer Ram called the police, and both the foreigners were arrested. They were imprisoned.
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The items recovered from them are still in the custody of the Jaisalmer Court. You can see this article published in the Indian Express in 2010.
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After this incident, the local government built a boundary wall all around Kuldhara, and Sumer Ram was made the watchman of Kuldhara.
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You might still have a doubt, what about the handprints of children on the car?
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The truth is, that's just one video. It's hard to say how much one can trust it.
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On top of that, just 4 km from Kuldhara, there's another village, where people live and play.
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Sometimes, while the children play, they go to Kuldhara. Even the herders of that village, often go out with their animals.
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So the next time you visit Kuldhara, don't go to find ghosts. Instead, go to salute a civilisation, that had reaped gold in the sand.
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If you want to know scientific facts about ghosts, then do watch the video on the Bhangarh Fort.
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Click here to watch it. Thank you very much!
Topics:Kuldharaghost villagePaliwal BrahminsThar DesertSalim SinghJaisalmerIndian historyparanormalmass migrationwater harvesting
