An eerie encounter on a quiet Klang street has haunted one group of friends for 15 years, fuelled by whispers of the legendary Mohini
FIFTEEN years ago, I met a lorry driver who looked like he had been welded to the road. Ravi was in his sixties – lean, deeply tanned and restless in a way that made age seem like a polite rumour.
He wore a plain white singlet and around his neck hung a cluster of silver and goldplated talismans that clinked softly whenever he moved. His face told its own story.
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Every line and shadow on it seemed carved by decades of night driving – the grit, grime and endless hours of crossing state borders in the dead of night along unlit roads where only the headlights dared push back the darkness.
For more than 40 years, he had driven through places most people would not even Google after midnight.
He had stories. Of horrific accidents. Highway hijackers. Street racers tearing through the night like they were auditioning for physics defiance. Drunk gangsters lurking at corners, waiting for a slow car and a bad decision.
But the story he told that night, at about three in the morning, on his porch in Taman Andalas, Klang, did not begin like a ghost story.
It started like a normal gathering. Drinks in hand. Casual chatter. The usual “lorry drivers see everything on the road” conversation.
Then the night itself interrupted.
A girl walked into view.
Because the house sat on a corner lot, she emerged from the side lane and stepped into full sight just before the gate as if she had been queued behind reality, waiting for her turn.
At first glance, something felt… off. She had a hollow, eerie expression. Dark, lifeless eyes. She did not acknowledge us and strangely, we could not decide if we were the ones who should be looking away.
She was draped in a glittering orange saree.
And while none of us said it aloud (because saying it aloud would make it real), she looked like she wasn’t quite walking so much as hovering, a few inches too light for gravity’s expectations.
Everyone of us gasped. The conversation died mid-sentence. Even the insects seemed to reconsider their soundtrack.
She stopped. Mid-step. Eyes fixed on us.
Then, slowly, she turned and retraced her steps back into the same darkness she had come from.
Gold chains and bangles caught the dim streetlight as she moved, flashing like small warnings no one understood yet.
She walked briskly, almost gliding, and vanished around the side of the house.
No one spoke.
No one needed to.
Then Ravi stood up.
That, in hindsight, was the first truly frightening part of the night. Because Ravi, as far as we knew, does not do “fear”.
He treated supernatural tension the way most people treat bad traffic, inconvenient but manageable. He pointed at us and said calmly: “Stay here, no matter what happens.” And then he followed her. Just like that. We sat frozen, trying to process whether we had just witnessed something paranormal or whether our brains had simply decided to improvise a group hallucination at 3am.
Ravi was gone for about 40 minutes. During that time, we did what most people do when confronted with the unexplained, we drank slowly and tried not to look like we were listening too hard to every sound in the dark.
One of his friends, who knew him well, finally broke the silence. Ravi, he said, had a history – not just of long-haul driving but of mystical studies. Trips to Thailand. Spiritual practices. Talismans. The works. That explained the necklace situation, but it did not explain the girl. When Ravi returned, he came from the same side lane she had disappeared into.
He was smoking. Not rushing. Not disturbed. Just… smoking, like someone who had gone out to check the tyre pressure. He exhaled a thick cloud, looked at us briefly and sat down. No drama. No build-up. He finished his drink in one go and lit another cigarette.
Then he said it, almost casually. “Atthu (That is) Mohini.” The tone changed immediately. Mohini, in Tamil folklore, is not a name spoken lightly at 3am with half-empty glasses on a porch. She is described as the restless spirit of a woman who died young, unmarried or under tragic circumstances. Sometimes suicide. Sometimes injustice. Always unfinished.
She appears as a strikingly beautiful woman, often in a white or red saree, wandering lonely roads, crossroads, abandoned places. She lures.
She draws attention. And then she leaves behind something far less visible than her beauty – illness, shock, disturbance. In some accounts, her feet point backwards. In others, she casts no reflection.
At that point, none of us were interested in folklore accuracy. We were more concerned with whether she was still nearby.
Ravi went on, in short, clipped sentences. “She moved fast. Then I stopped. She stopped too. She looked at me.”
A silence followed that felt heavier than the night itself. He said he had seen her clearly, floating slightly above the ground. Not walking. Not running. Moving but not quite obeying the usual terms and conditions of physics.
When he asked: “Yaaar neee?” (Who are you?), there was no answer. Only a stare. Then a grin. Ravi touched one of his talismans. A habit, he said, when something “does not belong on the road”.
After a moment, she turned away and drifted into a nearby forest. We would later learn what lay behind that housing area – cemeteries, a crematorium, and further off, a hospital. Places where endings happen quietly. And often. That detail changed the atmosphere instantly. Not just of the story but of the night itself. “Whoever she came for,” Ravi said finally, “shouldn’t sleep alone tonight.”
And that was it. No further explanation. No dramatic conclusion. Just a cigarette and a man who looked like he had already filed it under “road experience”. For him, perhaps, it was just another stop on a very long, very dark route.
For the rest of us, the night had quietly rearranged itself. We left at dawn in near silence. Every shadow on the road felt slightly too interested in us.
Every rustle sounded like it had intent. And I remember one thing very clearly, I did not look back at the side of that house. Not once. Fifteen years later, I have told this story many times.
People laugh, or they shiver, or they reach for neat explanations – a trick of the light, too many drinks, an overactive imagination at 3am trying to make sense of what the eyes possibly captured. Maybe they are right.
Maybe not. Because some nights do not end when the conversation does. They just wait for you to drive home… alone.
