When young creators make fear their forte

Forget late-night ghost stories—content creators are turning India's folklore into popular, professionally made digital content

- Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran

At 15, an age when he should have been reading comics, Divay Agarwal, the co-founder of YouTube horror channel Khooni Monday, was visiting some of Delhi's notorious haunted sites.

The trigger, he says, was an inexplicable incident that happened to him. “I was standing on my neighbour's terrace one night, their jhoola just untangled and fell all by itself. I have no explanation for how that happened till date.”

The incident unnerved Agarwal, but also pushed him to face the fear of the unknown. “I began watching horror movies late at night. I also began reading up on all kinds of supernatural stuff. And once I turned 15, I started visiting graveyards and forbidden places like the Malcha Mahal to investigate things for myself,” Agarwal says. While it may not have seemed obvious at the time, his teenage fascination with the paranormal would play a role when, as a 26-year-old, Agarwal went looking for ideas for a YouTube channel of his own. “I started studying the platform to see where the gap in terms of content was. I realised that there was no organised channel doing only horror stories in India. And that’s how I started my channel,” he says.