Written by Subham Halder. Based on a conversation between host Rahul Chaudhary and paranormal researcher RJ Arsh Oracle.
Introduction
Most people use "dayan" and "chudail" as if they're the same word. They're not — at least not according to the tradition behind this legend. A dayan is said to be alive. A chudail is said to be what's left after she dies with something unfinished. That single distinction is the spine of a decades-old Uttarakhand story involving a burned house, a well full of children's remains, and a village that dug up the same grave twice because the first attempt to fix things didn't actually work. Nothing here is verified — no police file, no forensic record, just oral testimony passed down and then investigated firsthand by the man telling it. But the story is detailed enough, and consistent enough in its own internal logic, that it's worth laying out properly instead of flattening it into "Indian witch legend #4,812."
⚠️ Content Warning: This article contains disturbing themes, including references to children, alleged child deaths, human remains, blood, violent deaths, skull injuries, cremation, and supernatural beliefs. Some descriptions may be upsetting or disturbing to sensitive readers. The events described are based on an oral account and paranormal testimony and have not been independently verified. This article documents the story and the beliefs surrounding it; it does not present the supernatural claims as established fact. Reader discretion is advised.
What Is the Difference Between a Dayan and a Chudail?
This is the question almost everyone searching for either word actually wants answered, so let's deal with it before anything else.
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| Dayan vs Chudail |
Dayan: The Living Witch
A dayan, in this account, is a living woman — not a spirit, not a ghost. She's someone who has gone deep into tantra vidya, an occult ritual practice, usually chasing something specific: power, wealth, control, or in the more extreme version of this legend, immortality. Arsh describes it as a progression. Women who master the "basic stages" of tantra and keep going eventually reach an advanced level, and that level — not a curse, not a birth trait — is what earns someone the label dayan.
Hair matters a great deal in this framework. There's an old folk saying that a witch's power lives in her braid, and Arsh backs it with a broader claim: that the human body stores its most concentrated energy in the feet and the hair, and for a dayan, that energy collects almost entirely in her hair. Gathering and holding onto that energy is apparently a prerequisite for completing whatever ritual stage she's working toward.
Chudail: The Vengeful Spirit
A chudail, by contrast, is dead. She's what a dayan can become after death — specifically, according to this legend, if she dies with her ritual work incomplete or her goal unmet. The transformation isn't automatic just because a tantric practitioner dies; it's tied to unfinished business, and to how her body is handled afterward. Skip the last rites, and you may not just be burying a body — you may be creating a chudail.
Are Dayan and Chudail the Same in Indian Folklore?
Not in the version of the tradition Arsh describes, though the confusion is genuinely common — even within India, people use the two words interchangeably all the time, the way English speakers might swap "witch" and "hag" without thinking twice. His answer, when asked directly, was blunt: no, they're not the same, and mixing them up misses the actual danger. A dayan can be reasoned with, avoided, or in theory even caught. A chudail, in his telling, generally can't.
The Uttarakhand Legend: The Woman Who Wouldn't Stay Buried
A Village Near an Ancient Temple
Arsh's own family comes from Uttarakhand, and near their village sits a fairly well-known temple. On the path leading to it, sometime around 1950 or 1960, there was a house. A woman lived there alone with her two small children — somewhere in her early-to-mid thirties, according to the story.
The Children Who Disappeared
Around that same period, children from the village began disappearing. Nobody could explain why, and nobody connected it to the woman on the temple road — not at first.
The Woman Accused of Being a Chudail
Then, one day, neighbors noticed something burning near her house. It smelled like meat. When people finally went inside, they say they found pieces of the missing children — a hand, a finger, remains rather than whole bodies. There was no investigation after that, no attempt to understand what had actually happened. The village called her a chudail and burned her house down with her inside it.
Why Did the Villagers Call Her a Chudail?
Rahul — who calls himself a skeptic going into this — asked Arsh directly after hearing the story: does an entity like this actually exist? Arsh didn't hedge. He said yes, very strongly, and that he still thinks about cases where he personally encountered something like this, or reached out to families he believed were living under a chudail's shadow. He told Rahul plainly that it unsettles him even now, imagining what those families must have gone through.
But it's worth holding two things at once here. Notice that nobody in the story above actually caught her doing anything. They found remains and jumped straight to the most available explanation — one that let them stop asking harder questions. Arsh adds one more detail to this kind of case: he says a genuine dayan or chudail presence tends to produce a specific, disturbing symptom in the people around it — someone clawing their own face open with their fingernails, or walking in front of a moving train for no reason anyone can name. He can't fully explain the mechanism. He just says it's a signature he's seen repeat across cases.
The Second Village Story: The Tantric Healer Who Became a Hunter
This story actually starts as a non-answer. Rahul asks Arsh how people go about "summoning" a chudail for personal benefit — a fairly direct question. Arsh doesn't really answer it. Instead he says, in effect, let me tell you this story first so you understand why this even happens — and the conversation never circles back to the original question at all. Make of that what you will.
The Woman Known as a Healer
In a village well past Ajmer — roughly 200 to 300 kilometers out, though Arsh won't name it directly — a woman was known locally for practicing tantra. When a child in the village showed signs of what people called "possession," she reportedly cured it, and just like that, the village decided she was a good thing to have around.
Children Begin Disappearing
Four months later, children in this village started disappearing too. But the pattern was different from the first story. Here, missing kids came back — about ten days later, laid out directly in front of their own homes. Every returned body carried the same signature wound and the same coating of sandalwood paste. Villagers started staying up at night to catch whoever was responsible. On the nights they stayed awake, nothing happened at all. But the moment they let their guard down, children vanished again — and this time, no bodies came back. No more doorstep returns, nothing to bury.
The Village Search
A full search of the village eventually turned up something far worse than a single body: a well, containing the remains of somewhere between seventy and eighty children. Not long after, someone caught the woman red-handed, carrying a child into her home.
The Rituals Described in the Account
What follows is pieced together from a villager who reportedly watched the process happen in secret.
Sandalwood and Blood
- Sandalwood paste applied to the child's face first.
- A bath in animal blood, said to be from a rooster.
- The blood left to dry completely.
- A second layer of sandalwood paste applied over the whole body.
The Skull Wound
Before anything else happened, small cuts were made at the neck and hand to drain the child's blood. Then came a hammer, used to drive a hole straight through the center of the skull. It's the same wound found on every body that had earlier turned up on a doorstep — which is presumably how villagers eventually connected the two.
Burial and the Fire Ritual
The body was buried for three days at the exact spot where the woman performed her rituals. Over that same spot, she held a havan — a fire ritual — chanting mantras and adding a strand of her own hair into the flames.
Arsh says this pattern shows up in certain old, disreputable tantric texts that promise immortality in exchange for dedicating children's souls to fire. He's quick to add that he thinks the promise itself is false: "this doesn't actually happen," he says, "you can't go against the laws of nature." There's also a passing comparison to a Turkish film built on the exact same premise — trading children's souls for a longer life — which, honestly, sounds like a strange thing to bring up until you notice how often that specific trade shows up as a story shape across totally unrelated cultures. One more claim gets raised and immediately shut down here too: some believe a mother killing her own child with her own hands extends her lifespan. Arsh rejects this outright, saying he's only ever heard it from "very bad practitioners" and doesn't believe it holds any truth.
The Woman Is Killed by the Villagers
Once the ritual was witnessed, villagers set her house on fire with her inside. She's said to have screamed from within that she'd return for revenge. Afterward, they buried her — but badly. No cremation, no last rites. Just a body placed under a peepal tree, with religious idols stacked on top of the grave out of fear, as if holiness alone could hold her down. When the area was later excavated, diggers found a large number of child skeletons under her burned house, which — grim as it is — at least confirmed to the village that she really had been what they suspected.
How a Dayan Becomes a Chudail in This Legend
A Dayan Is Still Alive
It's worth pausing on something the legend itself is fairly precise about: while she was alive, this woman was a dayan, not a chudail — the village's label was, strictly speaking, premature. The transformation the legend describes only happens after death.
What Happens After Her Death?
According to Arsh, she became a chudail specifically because she was on track to complete a piece of tantra — some personal goal — and the villagers cut that short before it was finished. Dayans skilled in this darker, "lower" branch of tantra who die with something unresolved are the ones who go on to become chudails, in his framing. It's not a universal fate for every dayan who dies; it's tied to leaving the ritual incomplete.
Why Cremation Matters in the Legend
A local baba later added a second rule to this: if a dayan's remains are buried in the exact spot where she lived and performed her rituals, she can never become a chudail at all. The villagers hadn't done that — they'd buried her under a tree, away from her actual practice, and skipped her last rites entirely. Both mistakes, according to the baba, opened the door for what came next.
The Village Falls Into Chaos
Men Begin Dying
A full year passed after the burning before anything happened. Then the village fell into what Arsh calls total chaos — villagers reportedly described the period in blunt terms, like rivers of blood running through the streets — and it lasted roughly three months before anyone found a way to stop it. Someone died every single day — but only men. Women were untouched entirely. The men affected would take anything sharp they could find and drive it into the center of their own skulls, dying on the spot. Nobody could explain the compulsion.
The Baba's Explanation
A baba was eventually brought in to deal with it. His diagnosis matched the rule above: the mistake wasn't the burning itself, but the burial — no cremation, no proper rites, and a grave site disconnected from where she'd actually lived and worked.
The Ritual Intended to End the Haunting
The baba had the tree excavated first, but found nothing underneath it — though villagers reported hearing voices coming from inside it anyway. He performed a ritual, then took the body of a child who had died of natural causes and cremated it at the woman's old house, declaring, "This is your ration. Whenever a child dies, they'll die here." From that point forward, any child who died in the village was cremated at that same spot, and the chudail's apparent wrath eased off noticeably.
For about three years, anyway.
The Paranormal Investigator's Investigation
Why Arsh Returned to the Village
This is where the story shifts from secondhand village lore into something Arsh says he personally witnessed. Cases started reaching him where women were dying now — a complete reversal of the earlier male-only pattern, and unusual enough that he decided to study the case seriously himself.
Digging Beneath the Tree
His theory: the baba had been right that cremation mattered, but wrong that the original body had actually been found. So he had the tree and the burial platform dug up a second time. As the digging progressed, he says he heard sharp screaming that felt like it was piercing directly into his ear — something he says he still remembers clearly today. Deeper into the excavation, blood started coming up out of the ground. He's upfront that this makes no scientific sense for a site that had been sealed for years. And yet, in his account, it happened — and underneath, they finally found the actual burned corpse.
The Women Chanting at the House
As the body was carried toward the woman's old house, Arsh says roughly twenty-five to thirty women from the village — he didn't have time to count precisely — were sitting together with their hair completely undone, rocking their heads and repeating the same line over and over: put my body back in its place. He describes the scene as terrifying enough that he credits his companions and his guru's blessing for getting through it without incident.
The Final Cremation
The corpse was carried into the house and, this time, cremated properly — a full ceremony conducted with a pandit performing the last rites. Once it was done, the chanting women reportedly collapsed, unconscious. According to Arsh, that finally closed the case for good.
When "Chudail" Is Used to Explain Ordinary Crimes
This is the shorter part of the story, mostly because it drifts from specific incidents into general commentary. Arsh points out that local newspapers — and occasionally national outlets — have run stories blaming chudails for things like missing gold or cash, especially around 2010. Most of these, once anyone actually looked, turned out to be plain theft. He admits some villages still report locked safes emptying out with no clear explanation, and he doesn't have a tidy answer for those.
There's also a belief that certain tantriks use dark rituals to funnel money toward themselves through a chudail, at the cost of a death in the affected household. Arsh describes one case he watched but never solved: a farmer's money disappeared, and the farmer himself died shortly after, with a completely severed thumb. The official report attributed his death to the pain of the injury. Arsh is skeptical — he doesn't think a farmer's body would be that fragile, and it's about as close as he gets to voicing outright doubt in the entire conversation.
Alongside that sits the more familiar possession narrative: a woman possessed by a chudail overnight, harming whoever she encounters, killing her husband on her wedding night before killing herself — a story he says has aired on news channels more than once.
Dayan vs Chudail: The Key Differences
| Aspect | Dayan | Chudail |
|---|---|---|
| State of being | Alive | Dead |
| Source of power | Advanced tantra vidya, self-taught over time | Carried over from unfinished tantra at the time of death |
| Where her power is stored | Her hair | Not specified — tied instead to the burial site |
| Can she be reasoned with or stopped? | In theory, yes — she's human | Rarely, according to this legend |
| What creates her | Years of ritual practice | An incomplete ritual + improper cremation/burial |
| Typical "signature" in this legend | Kidnapping, ritual killing, chasing a specific goal | Mass deaths, self-inflicted wounds in victims, hauntings tied to a location |
Dayan, Chudail and Churel: What's the Difference?
Dayan
Covered above — a living tantric practitioner working toward a specific, often dark, goal.
Chudail
Also covered above — what a dayan is said to become after death if her ritual work is left unresolved.
Churel
Churel isn't part of Arsh's account at all, but it comes up constantly in the same searches, so it's worth separating out. In broader North Indian folklore, a churel is typically described as the ghost of a woman who died during pregnancy, childbirth, or under some other kind of injustice — often depicted with backward-facing feet, a detail that shows up across several South Asian ghost traditions. She's said to target male relatives specifically, which is a very different motive from anything described in the dayan or chudail story above.
Why the Terms Overlap
Regional folklore in India was never standardized — different states, languages, and even individual villages draw these lines differently. A creature called "chudail" two districts over might carry traits that another region assigns to "dayan" or "churel" instead. That's not a flaw in the storytelling; it's just how oral tradition works when it isn't written down centrally.
Arsh makes one more comparison worth noting here: he points out that Western witch mythology — cauldrons, potions, wands — isn't actually more elaborate than what's described in Indian tantric tradition. It just gets more screen time internationally. The tantric rituals in this legend, the specific ingredients, the timing, the chanting, arguably match that level of detail beat for beat.
Why Are Chudails and Dayans Feared?
Arsh's own position on this is a little contradictory, and he doesn't pretend otherwise. He says people have built up far too much superstition — that most modern "chudail" stories turn out to be theft or ordinary tragedy. But in the same breath, he insists that if a place is genuinely under a dayan or chudail's influence, no human being can survive there for long, because they're simply too dangerous. The fear, in other words, isn't presented as irrational — just frequently misapplied. Notably, the fear isn't limited to female entities either: toward the end of the conversation, Rahul and Arsh briefly pivot to a male counterpart said to be drawn to the scent of women, with Rahul asking if this is a reference to a jinn. The exchange cuts off right there, unresolved — which is a strange place for the conversation to end, but also a very accurate picture of how oral folklore behaves. One legend rarely finishes before gesturing toward the next one.
What Does This Legend Tell Us About Indian Folklore?
Strip away the supernatural framing and a familiar pattern emerges: unexplained deaths, a woman who fits an outsider profile — living alone, practicing something unfamiliar — and a village that needed an explanation faster than it needed evidence. That's not unique to this story. It's the same shape that shows up in documented, real-world "witch-branding" cases across parts of India today, where accusations of witchcraft are used to justify violence against women, often widows or those involved in property disputes. The folklore and the social reality aren't the same thing, but they clearly feed off each other.
Did the Dayan and Chudail Stories Actually Happen?
There's no way to verify any of this. No police record, no news archive, no forensic report — just oral testimony from a paranormal investigator describing what villagers told him decades after the fact, plus events he says he later witnessed firsthand. The geography is presented as real (a village in Uttarakhand near a known temple; a second village roughly 200–300 km past Ajmer). The supernatural cause behind the deaths is not something anyone outside the story can confirm. Treat all of it as belief, not established fact.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is a dayan the same as a chudail?
No, according to this tradition. A dayan is a living woman deep into tantric practice. A chudail is what she's said to become after death, specifically if her ritual work is left unfinished and her remains aren't properly cremated.
2. What is the difference between a dayan and a chudail?
The core difference is life status: a dayan is alive and actively practicing tantra; a chudail is a spirit that results from a dayan dying with something unresolved. Their power sources and behavior also differ — a dayan's strength is said to live in her hair, while a chudail's is tied more to the location where she died or was buried.
3. Are chudails real?
There's no scientific way to verify this — it remains a matter of regional belief. Believers like Arsh describe personal encounters; skeptics point out that most investigated "chudail" incidents, like missing gold or sudden deaths, tend to trace back to ordinary causes such as theft or untreated illness.
4. What is a churel?
A churel is a separate figure in North Indian folklore, typically described as the ghost of a woman who died during pregnancy or childbirth, often depicted with backward feet and said to target male relatives. She's not part of the Uttarakhand account discussed here, but the term frequently gets grouped with dayan and chudail in casual usage.
5. Why is hair associated with dayan folklore?
The tradition holds that the body's energy concentrates mainly in the feet and hair, and that a dayan's power specifically collects in her hair — the same idea behind the older folk saying that a witch's strength lives in her braid.
6. Why are chudails associated with death and revenge?
In this legend, a chudail is created specifically through an unresolved death — a dayan whose ritual goal was interrupted, often violently, before it could be completed. The revenge motif comes directly from that unfinished business rather than being an inherent trait of the entity itself.
7. Did the Uttarakhand dayan story really happen?
There's no independent documentation of it — no police report, news archive, or forensic record. It's presented entirely as oral testimony and personal recollection from a paranormal investigator, decades after the events described.
8. Is there historical evidence for this legend?
Not for the supernatural elements specifically. What is historically documented is the broader, real-world pattern of witch-branding and witchcraft accusations against women in parts of rural India — a well-recorded social issue that overlaps with, but is distinct from, the folklore itself.
Sources & Further Reading
This article is based entirely on a recorded conversation between host Rahul Chaudhary and paranormal researcher RJ Arsh Oracle. No independent verification of the events described exists, and none is claimed.
For the real-world side of this folklore, human rights organizations and Indian news outlets have documented actual daayan pratha (witch-branding) practices in states including Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and parts of Odisha, where women — often widows or those involved in land disputes — are accused of witchcraft and subjected to violence or social exclusion. That's a well-documented, ongoing issue distinct from the supernatural claims in this piece, and worth reading separately if you're interested in why these accusations happen in the first place.
- Witch Branding in India: A Study of Indigenous and Rural Societies — ActionAid Association / Global Partnership Network
- Psychosocial Consequences Among Witch-hunting Survivors: A Qualitative Study from Jharkhand
- National Human Rights Commission of India — Witch Hunting / Dayan System
- The Witch's Mirror — Review of scholarship on witchcraft in South Asia
