Do Ancestor Spirits Protect Us? Guardian Spirits & Bhuta Kola

The Guardian Spirits Nobody Talks About: What I've Learned Investigating India's "Good Ghosts"

People ask me about evil spirits all the time. Possessions, curses, houses that won't let go of whatever died in them. What almost nobody asks me about is the opposite — spirits that protect instead of harm. I've spent years looking into cases like this, and I want to walk you through what I've actually found, not just what sounds good on a podcast.

Rahul asked me about this directly once, and it's a fair question: if we talk so much about evil spirits, where's the room for good ones? My answer is simple. If bad energy exists, good energy has to exist too. You can't have one without the other. Even restless spirits — the ones who die with something unfinished — carry their own aura, and it isn't automatically dark. Some of them are just incomplete. Not evil.

That distinction is the whole reason I started taking "guardian spirits" seriously as a category, instead of lumping every case into the same haunted-house bucket.

The House Where the Food Kept Spoiling

Here's one from my own casework. A friend of mine moved into a flat, and almost immediately, food in the house started going bad — fast. Within half an hour of being brought home, groceries that should've lasted days were rotting. Nothing dramatic. Nothing was breaking or flying around. It was just persistent, and strange enough that eventually we couldn't ignore it.

We looked into it closely and tried to connect with whatever was causing it, because in my experience, spirits often signal us in odd ways rather than actually hurting us — especially if their aura is pure. What came through was the story of a laborer who'd worked on the building during construction. He'd been paid his wages and was heading home to bring food to his family, just as he'd promised. He died on the way. It's believed his energy stayed bound to that site, tied to the last thing he was working toward.

Once we understood that, we found his family — genuinely poor people — and brought them food ourselves. That was the resolution. Nothing more happened after that.

So when I look at a case like this, I don't see a malicious spirit. I see intention that was completely pure. He wanted his family to be happy, the same way any of us would. That's a good spirit. Not a wrong one.

Ancestors: The Original Guardian Angels

Can we assume our ancestors — our forefathers — are still somehow watching over us, like a shadow or a canopy above our lives? I think so, yes. The concept of ancestors is old — old enough that maybe we don't fully grasp it ourselves anymore.

You've probably heard people describe dreaming of very old places, or seeing an elderly figure they don't recognize. I've actually researched dreams like this. What I've come to believe is that people are seeing their own ancestors — because a spirit can sometimes become aware enough, even in a dream, to move forward or backward in time.

So yes, ancestors exist. I'm confident about that. Take a simple example — a father and his own father. There's usually a similarity between them somewhere, whether you call it genetics or physical build. But sometimes the resemblance skips a generation entirely in a stranger way. In my own house, I don't look like my father — I look like my grandfather. Have you ever noticed that in your own family? Most people have, once they actually look.

The significance behind that, I think, is that some fragment of our ancestors becomes visible in us again, in one way or another.

There's another layer to this too. You've probably heard of people who believe strongly in spirits and ghosts, yet negative energy just doesn't seem to affect them. The moment something starts to approach, they think of their ancestors — sometimes without even meaning to — and whatever was coming just falls away. That's what people mean by the blessing of one's "ishta," or the blessing of ancestors. Somewhere inside all of us, there's some form of energy — call it energy, call it ancestry — that exists and protects us in some way.

As for priests who say your ancestors are "unsettled" or "troubled" — I won't go too deep into that concept here. My honest belief is simpler: our ancestors stay with us always, like a guardian angel. Which happens to be exactly today's topic.

Kantara, Panjurli Deva, and the Bhuta Kola I've Actually Witnessed

Rahul brought up a movie we'd both seen recently — Kantara — and it connects to exactly this. It's a South Indian tradition where the soul of a clan deity, Panjurli Deva, is invoked, and a dancer becomes the vessel that spirit enters. Versions of this exist across many parts of India. Where I'm from, in Uttarakhand, we have something similar called the Jaagar — a procession built around invoking a clan deity's spirit. The concept is more or less the same.

People often call this superstition. I understand why. But I'd say — if you're an atheist, that's fine, that's your position. Just don't dismiss it outright, because millions of people have followed these practices for generations, and continue to.

Before I get to Kantara directly, there's a tradition in Uttarakhand worth mentioning: a very revered practice where a goddess's doli — a kind of palanquin — is carried. I actually learned quite a bit about this story from different people over time. The doli is said to start moving on its own. Two people carry it on their shoulders, and it moves up and down by itself, then blesses people and even feeds them sweets afterward. I've heard about this constantly, though I still haven't had the chance to witness it live myself. The Jaagar, though — that I have seen with my own eyes, and honestly, to this day, I'm still trying to understand how much of it is real and how much isn't.

But Kantara — that one I take more seriously, because I've seen the ritual it's based on firsthand.

Bhuta Kola ritual dance Karnataka deity possession tradition

If you look at Tulunad, the concept of Panjurli Deva shown in the film is deeply revered, and I hold it in high regard myself because I've watched this ritual in person. People in South India follow tradition and culture closely — you may have noticed this yourself. Whether it's worshipping a deity or simply showing respect for something, people there commit to it fully.

The mythology behind Panjurli Deva ties back to Vishnu's boar incarnation. Several old stories describe Parvati once finding a wild boar's cub. She took it with her to Kailash. As it grew, it started causing chaos there, and Shiva cursed it — you cannot stay here. Go to earth, and as a boon, protect the people who live there. Guard their crops and land from anyone trying to seize them unlawfully.

That whole concept is what Kantara shows through Panjurli Deva: a person, chosen by the deity itself, performs what's called a Kola. Bhuta means deity, Kola means dance — the deity's dance, essentially. In this ritual, the deity itself is said to enter a person's body and resolve people's problems directly.

Think about how precisely the "ancestor" concept fits here. Even if these are our gods, in a way, they're protecting us. Keeping us safe, somehow. They enter people's bodies, get worshipped, dance, and people stand before them with folded hands. Drums play, a whole fair forms around a Bhuta Kola.

But here's the real question, and I get it a lot from skeptical minds like Rahul's: how do you tell a genuine possession from someone faking it? Take Kantara as an example again. Rishabh Shetty, who directed the film and also acted in it, described a scene — you couldn't really call it "possession" exactly — where the deity enters a person's body during the Kola. He said the Gulika Deva sequence was shot in a single take, and even he isn't fully sure what happened during it. That stuck with me. People travel from far-off countries just to see and understand these rituals, and they all come back stunned, because when the deity performs the Kola, it reveals things about people through gesture and expression — things they may not even know about themselves, things they've carried as unspoken questions for years.

That, to me, is the point where the difference becomes clear on its own. It's not an act. It's not a hoax. It's genuinely a Bhuta Kola — a dance of the deity, where the deity enters a body and resolves people's troubles.

Sepoy Harbhajan Singh

Talking about good spirits reminds me of another story — one Rahul actually brought up too, and I'm glad he did: the story of Sepoy Harbhajan Singh. He served with the Sikh Regiment and died in 1962, during the India-China war, near Nathu La pass in Sikkim. To this day, soldiers say that when they go serve at that post, Harbhajan Singh's ghost still watches over it. If a soldier on night duty falls asleep, he wakes them — sometimes with a slap — or warns them if an attack is coming. It's a very well-known story. It lives on almost like a legend at this point.

The Graveyard Near the Shimla Highway

Rahul once compared this to an army story, so let me tell one myself. There's a place near the Shimla-Himachal highway called Daakshahi Graveyard. I don't know if you've heard of it — it's badly underrated, but it's genuinely one of the most haunted places I've encountered. I connect it to guardian angels because during our first experience there, it was an army man — call him a person, call him a spirit, call him a good soul — who actually helped us.

Daakshahi Graveyard is said to sit near Chandigarh, along the highway toward Himachal. When we went there at night, our Google Maps location suddenly disappeared. And where we actually ended up, there was no graveyard at all. It's said to be one of Chandigarh's most haunted spots, tied to the grave of a woman — she died there along with her child, or so it's believed. There are other stories too that I don't know in full detail.

When we got there for research, it had already gone completely dark, and the area is close to a cantonment zone. We drove further in. I had two other paranormal researchers with me. The road was very narrow. Sitting in the back, I noticed an elderly army-looking man riding a bike behind us. He passed close by on my right side and simply disappeared. A little later, our car stopped — and the path disappeared again. We got out for a while. When we looked at the road, Rahul, there wasn't even enough space for a car to pass through it at all. There was no room, and there was a ditch on that side. Our car was large enough that another bike passing it would have been impossible.

And here's the part that still gets me — right where our car stopped, almost as if it had stopped on its own, three paths split off from that exact spot. On one of them was a photo of a soldier and a memorial board dedicated to him. There was another sign there too, saying the way to the city was in that direction. So in some way, like a good soul, they helped us. They helped us find our way through that pitch-dark, difficult stretch of road. It was deeply eerie. But that's what happened to me there.

I'd agree completely that good spirits exist and that they help. But at the end of the day, they're still spirits — which means the capacity for harm is probably just as real as the capacity for good.

The Jinn Who Loved Too Much

There are cases that prove exactly that. I solved one myself involving a jinn. A young man I studied was genuinely good — deeply devout, prayed five times a day. One day he was walking home from prayer, troubled by things going on in his life, when he saw a girl standing by the road, right under a construction site where materials were about to fall. He saved her. When he looked at her afterward, he saw something in her eyes — a kind of light, a kind of goodness.

They became close almost instantly. They fell in love. But he never once visited her home. After some time, they got married and he brought her back to his own family. Everyone objected — nobody understood what was happening. Eventually, it came out: she wasn't human. She was a jinnat — a jinn. And she loved him deeply. She wasn't there to harm him. Jinns, like us, exist alongside people — sometimes visible, sometimes not. That's a whole concept we should talk about separately sometime.

In this case, the jinn had simply become possessive over him. Rahul asked me how this was even possible — how he married her and never realized she wasn't human. The answer is that she was a genuinely pure jinn. A good one. But even in ordinary life, we all face problems and conflicts — just because I'm talking to you doesn't mean nobody will ever argue with me, right? So whenever someone said something unkind to this man without reason, something bad would happen to that person. That was consistent.

Eventually he figured out she was a jinn. It's said that jinns pray their own version of namaz late at night, usually around 2 or 3 a.m., among other signs people use to identify them. One night he woke up and she wasn't beside him. That's when he understood. And here's the remarkable part — after that, he gave up his entire life. His home, everything. He moved into the forest and lived there with only her. As far as I know, that's still the case today, because I never followed up further. I studied this case. I didn't resolve it.

She became so intensely attached to him that he could never really be with anyone else again. So it's entirely possible that even guardian spirits, when they become overly possessive, can turn into something closer to a devil.

So — Good or Bad?

Rahul summed it up well once: spirits, like people, are both good and bad. I agree completely. And as long as you're not interfering with them in some way, they probably won't unnecessarily interfere with your life either. That's generally what people believe when it comes to ghosts.