A Ghost town always fascinates the adventure seeker in you; especially the eerie feeling when you visit them during a new moon night. A ghost town is an abandoned village with substantial visible remains.
Since Bangalore is fast developing, most of the ghost towns or haunted houses are getting razed and are being replaced with either highways or apartment complexes. There used to be a place named “Booth Bungalow” near Magadi road after sunkadakatte. It was very near to a lake called Tavarakere. Hence, it was also known as “Tavarakere Booth Bungalow“. We used to hangout there late night. It used to be a perfect haunted place for pranking / ragging the new joinees of our college. I still remember the first time, I had to spend the night there all alone as part of the dare by my college seniors. Aah! I wish those good old days written down in my Bangalore diaries come back to life.
I revisited the place in 2018, only to be shooed away by the security in that area. I learned that the surrounding area has been bought over by either Club Mahindra or DLF. They’ve made a compund wall around the property and there are 24/7 securities in the compound. That side of uber fast urbanisation of Bangalore.
However, in November 2016 I was driving past Lepakshi and chanced upon this Ghost Town. When you lose one haunted house, you get an entire village which is abandoned and is now a ghost town. I was happy to find that there is this haunted or abandoned village within 6 hours drive from Bangalore. Now is the time to remember Adam Lambert’s catchy song “Ghost Town.
It used to be a properly flourishing village due to the granite and cement factories in the vicinity until the 1970s when they decided to increase the height of the dam. Once, the height of the dam was increased, the water level around the reservoir also increased and this village was submerged in water. The villagers were forced to evacuate, move out and settle in other nearby areas. Even today after the rains, the village will be under water till Dec. After that gradually, the water level goes down and the entire village becomes visible again. Since all the buildings in the village were made by granite slabs, they don’t wear under the water. The buildings are still preserved. You can see many houses, a School compound, a granite company named Raghavendra Enterprises etc. Some of the broken structures are still used by the local shepherds as a shade when they are herding their cattle.
