Forest Figure Returns

Once confined to folklore, the chilling figure of Kashmir’s forests has resurfaced online, blurring myth and modern imagination.

- Zaid Bin Ishaq

That terrifying sound often comes in the middle of frozen nights, when the valley lies under snow, the rivers are trapped beneath ice, and the air feels ready to crack. It rings out like a thunderclap: “Whaaap.”

A pause, and then again: “Whaaap.” It drifts through the mountains like something alive, heard but never seen. Those who recognize it call it the Yach.

The Yach is neither animal nor ghost, neither storm nor spirit. It belongs to a belief older than explanation, a spectral guardian of Kashmir mountains whose presence is felt rather than seen.

“When we were children, our grandmothers would tell us to stay quiet when we heard it,” recalls 72-year-old Ghulam Nabi from Gurez. “They said it was the Yach passing through, watching over the mountains. If you spoke, it might take your voice away.”

For centuries, the Yach has lived in the collective imagination of Kashmir highlands. Travellers crossing icy passes said the sound guided them when they were lost. Shepherds in Shopian whispered that a certain meadow “belonged to a Yach,” a warning to keep away from what the mountains wanted to keep untouched. It was not a creature of fear, but of reverence, a reminder that nature listens back.

“Mountains have memories,” goes the old Kashmiri saying. “We only pass through them.”

To understand the Yach is to step into a time when Kashmiris saw the natural world as alive. Every spring, stone, and breeze carried a presence. A mountain was a being, a stream was continuity. The valley's ancient saints and mystics spoke to these forces, calling them rooh-e-zameen, the soul of the earth.