Rumours of a ‘ghost’ take off at BIAL

Hemanth C S | ENS29 Sep 2008 05:11:00 AM IST
BANGALORE: After capacity constraints, connectivity hurdles and criticism from all and sundry over shabby infrastructure, there is now a problem quite without precedent at the Bengaluru International Airport (BIA).
Rumours have been doing the rounds for the past week that airport staff have been seeing ghosts on the runway. The description of the ghost has been varied: its gender, attire and features all change, depending on who sees it. A few claim that the ghost is a woman in a white saree, while others say the mysterious creature is headless.
A Kingfisher employee who works at the Cargo section told to this website's newspaper that the ghost, a woman in a white saree with her hair flying loose, has been wandering on the runway. He said this saree-clad ghost had disrupted flight movements. “A pilot of an international carrier had to abort landing after spotting a ‘woman’ with outstretched hands in the middle of the runway. Finally, after two failed attempts, when the ‘woman’ did not move from the runway, the pilot could only land in his third attempt,” he said.
Several employees say another ghost, a headless creature, was spotted near the escalators in the terminal area and in the parking bays. A photograph of the ghost is also said to have been captured on an infra-red camera by an employee.
“All that was visible on the photograph was a skeletal figure of the ‘woman’. This was later passed on via bluetooth to mobile phones and posted on YouTube,” he said. On checking, however, one only got images of ghosts wandering about airports in Thailand and Malaysia; there was nothing on our own native ghost! BIA officials flatly deny these rumours: there was no ghost buster team deployed at the airport. “It’s hard to convince someone to come down from New Delhi to investigate a bhoot. If a flight had to be diverted, we would need to take permissions. There are 10 airport controllers and none of them have seen the woman on the runway. One of the staff had a picture on his mobile, but it cannot be true,” said a BIAL official.