More than the thrill that comes with taming evil spirits, reports Dhruv Munjal, Exploring India hopes to bust myths surrounding ghosts.
Mention a haunted place anywhere in India and chances are that Rajesh Meena and Ashish Singh have been there.
Ghosts and spirits have been a weird obsession for years -- in school, as their classmates ate and drank and played football on picnics, the two would wander off to the nearest tomb or graveyard, hoping to confront paranormal elements.
That fascination seems to have become a vocation: Meena, 21, and Singh, 22, travel to haunted sites across the country, videos of which are put out on their YouTube channel, Exploring India.
Recent adventures include Rajasthan's Bhangarh fort, as well as Kuldhara, a ghost village near Jaisalmer abandoned by its inhabitants some 200 years ago.
Last year, the duo also paid a midnight visit to Noida's infamous Nithari village, spending over two hours at the house that was the scene of multiple child murders in 2006.
Content creators on YouTube have been all the rage, but the horror genre has largely gone untapped. When they launched Exploring India Meena and Singh had no idea how the experiment would go.
"We liked to travel, and haunted places were a big attraction. So we just decided to film all of it," says Meena, who graduated from Delhi University's Shivaji College earlier this year.
More than the thrill that comes with taming evil spirits, Exploring India hopes to bust myths surrounding ghosts. "We are rationalists. Stuff like this does not exist," says Singh.
Three years, 500,000 subscribers and more than 50 haunted places later, Meena says they have never encountered anything even remotely supernatural -- no spooky voices, no taps on the shoulder, no white sari-clad woman at the gates of a cemetery.
But even the bravest among us can sometimes feel vulnerable. For Meena and Singh, that moment arrived in Bhangarh. "There was a lot of excitement, but we were also more nervous than usual," remembers Singh.
Due to many local legends, trespassing near Bhangarh is legally not allowed before sunrise and after sunset.
Unable to get permission to shoot in the night, the two decided to enter the town through an unguarded path that borders the Sariska tiger reserve.
They eventually spent the entire night at Bhangarh fort, seeking out ghosts but unable to find anything in the end.
"That was a risk, but it was also about overcoming our fears. To be honest, we were worried about the tigers next door more than anything else," says Meena.
In such scenarios, wildlife isn't their only problem. In ramshackle buildings and decrepit forts, robbers become a concern.
At Meerut's G P Block -- where there have been reportedly many sightings of a young girl in a red dress and the ghosts of four men drinking alcohol -- thieves are a constant threat, something that Singh says they are always wary of. "I have friends in Meerut. So before we went there, we did a proper check," he adds.
Other times, they are harassed by the police or driven away by locals.
In Hasanpur village in Uttar Pradesh's Shamli, they had to seek special permission after initially being denied permission to shoot in a dilapidated haveli, apparently a target of a communal riot many decades ago.
But the trip proved to be worth it: They discovered animal carcasses and human skulls, but no paranormal activity was reported.
What if something like that were to actually happen? "The only way to defeat fear is by facing it. If that happens, we'll just deal with it," says Singh.
But even a seasoned ghost-slayer like him has an important bit of advice: Never head out to such places alone.
