The Burari Deaths

The following story has vivid descriptions that may be disturbing to some audiences regarding suicide and unusual deaths. Listener discretion is advised. The morning of July one, twenty eighteen was supposed to be like every other morning in Burrari, Delhi. The human air pounded against the face of gertrue Singh was enjoying his routine morning walk around seven. Only something seemed off to him. You see, he usually enjoyed this peaceful time with his neighbors, but they were nowhere to be seen. Even stranger, the store that they owned had not opened yet either, and it was nearly a couple of hours past a normal time they would open. Upon returning home, he noticed that his neighbour's door was wide open. Confusion clouded his mind and as he slowly started to enter the house, soon it turned into worry, then fear took over his body. Inside the house, he came across a scene that he would never forget. What looked like the hanging roots of a banyan tree descended from the ceiling of the house. Gertruane fled and called the police when he realized that what he was seeing were not tree roots at all, but bodies, blindfolded, wrists and feet bound, hanging one by one next to each other, heading up to a total of ten people. Another body was later discovered sprawled out on the floor of another room, death clearly having overtaken them. As well as I am sure you are all wondering, everyone was baffled with the same question, what happened to these people? How did they die in broad daylight without any reported sounds of distress. The death of these eleven people, an entire family spread out over generations, shook the district of Ferrari and the city of Delhi, India. What was once a quiet, peaceful town was now the site of one of the world's deadliest mysteries. If only we knew exactly what happened to that family would cause a tragedy that still baffles investigators to this very day. My name is Edwin. Here it's a dark memory. The Chundawat family, sometimes referred to as de Batia family, was a seemingly normal middle class family. There were eleven of them living in their house together, which may seem crowded to some people. Imagine living with three different generations all under the same roof. Which you would think it to be unbearable. Things are different in India and many other neighboring countries. This custom is actually very common for entire families to live together under one roof, even cousins and grandparents. This culture highly values family and practicality, so the Chundawats were definitely considered a normal family in their community. They would enjoy many different types of food together, and the head of the household, Loalit, would regularly enjoy a drink with his friends. However, their seemingly perfect life was shattered when the family patriarch, beopl Sing, died in two thousand and seven from natural causes. After Bopaul's death, there were some major changes in the Chundawat family. They became vegetarians and Lalit stopped drinking. They believed that cleansing their diets would help them become pure and ensure their chances of a good afterlife. However, the sun and new family patriarch Lalit, started to go down a very dangerous path, possibly the path that led to the death of him and his entire family. When the bodies of the Chundawat family were discovered, ten of them were found hanging from the ceiling, all in a row next to each other. They had their hands tied behind their backs, their feet tied together, and their mouths taped shut under their feet. There were five stools on the floor. This meant that there had to have been two people sharing each stool when they went through with hanging themselves. Unfortunately, two of the members that hung themselves were only teenagers, but the youngest being thirteen years old. They were described like the hanging branches of a Banyan tree, which is something that is held sacred in their culture. You can see what one looks like on the website accompanying this episode. Now, as you may have picked up already, the oldest member of the family, Narayani Devi, was eighty years old at the time, was noticeably absent from the trail of bodies that shocked the neighbor before he called the police. When the house was searched, they found her body in a neighboring room. Based on the corner's report, she had died from lack of oxygen. She would think that she may have died from natural causes based on her age, but her body said otherwise. There was bruising on her neck, leading authorities to believe that she had been strangled to death, but it was difficult for anyone to comprehend that at the time. The family had loved her very much, and their culture shares great respect for the elders of a family, So who could find it in their heart to watch the life leave the eyes of an innocent woman and have it be caused by their own hands. The scene inside the house is enough to give even the bravest of hearts nightmares for the rest of their lives. We can all imagine what it must have been like to see those bodies hanging like branches of a tree from the ceiling, but none of us can truly understand what it was like because there are not enough words to do it justice. Even authorities were shocked by the scene. The great first police officer that arrived, when called by the neighbor, had this to say, it was shocking. I stayed only for ten to fifteen seconds before rushing downstairs to call my seniors. At the time, I did not see whose hands were tied and whose eyes were covered. I just saw a lot of bodies hanging just like branches of a tree. What happened to the family shocked their community as many people could not believe that they would commit the ultimate sin and end their own lives, and other people thought that foul play was involved. Slowly, because of all the questions about what really happened and the graphic details of the case, it started to spread across the country and then across the world, as the media often causes stories like this to spread like the plague, much like the Barrari case. It is not the first time that the media has run stories like this. For example, the nineteen seventy eight People's temple mass suicide was fueled by a religious cult and resulted in the death of nearly nine hundred innocent people. Unfortunately, this list could go on for a while, which is honestly quite scary, but this shows the unnerving influence that a person could have over others and it shines a bright light on mental health. If this was addressed in the Chundawat family, then perhaps they may not have met their tragic demise. As mentioned earlier, the family was shaken in two thousand and seven when their patriot died, but no one else took it harder than his son Lalit not only was he thrown into the position, which could be a lot on someone's shoulders. But he also had been struggling with his mental health even before his father's death. For poor Lalit, it seemed like he never stopped running into bad luck no matter where he turned. Not only did he suffer a major head injury from an accident years prior, but he also was a victim of a violent crime. Someone had a tempted to murder him and it ultimately ended up in him losing his voice. With everything that happened, it was understandable that he felt that he was losing control of his own life. So after his father's death, something may have just snapped in Lolit, because then he started to claim that the spirit of his father was possessing his body and it was giving him instructions on how he and his family should live in order to prosper. This never rose to the surface until the investigators found eleven different diaries, all written by Lalt over the span of years ever since Bopal died. In these diaries, the police read things that could only be described by one word disturbing. Throughout the diaries, thought it would describe rituals that his father's spirit was telling him and his family to perform in order for them to lead a prosperous life. However, the the worst part comes in the last diary entry, where he describes the deaths of him and his family. It seems that there was a ritual that they were planning to do in order to give thanks to the father's spirits for their good luck. But it seems that he really believed that they would all be able to live through the ritual, as he wrote about how they would help untie each other after they had completed it. He even wrote that his mother was too old, so she would be made to sleep in the other room. Overall, the diaries were a great glimpse into the mind of Lalit, which ended up helping investigators determine what happened to the family, although it feels like we ended up knowing too much about Lolt because his mind was more twisted than we could have ever imagined. Once the diaries were found and word got out to the public, theory started to spread, especially the once revolved around Lolett, as he was the main subject of the diaries. Perhaps one of the most twisted theories out there is the one that Lolett maliciously killed his entire family as a way to take them out when ending his own life. Some believed that he pretended to have lost his voice, but was silently planning their deaths for years as a way to relieve himself of being the family patriarch. According to this theory, he would have been the one to strangle his mother in the next room and coerced everyone else into ending their own lives. Another popular theory is that the entire family was murdered by an outsider. This theory emerged once people discovered that the family's wrists and feet were bound, they were blindfolded and gagged. The house was also unlocked, with the door wide open, and there were no suicide notes found anywhere. However, this theory was quickly debunked for several reasons. The first one was that the family dog had not barked at all the entire night or the morning that they were found. The most important one was the fact that the CCTV footage showed no one entering the home the entire night or early the next morning. Well, no one except for a few members of the family who were shown on camera carrying stools and wire through the front door. If anything, this helps prove another theory. Throughout the entire house, the investigators saw signs of a ritualistic practice that the family may have been trying to complete when they died. There were eleven pipes protruding from the walls of that house, the exact number of people that died. To add on to that, seven of the pipes were facing downwards the same number of women that had died, and four pipes were facing upwards nuer of men that had died. These pipes were in the order of the sequence of males and females that were hanging. After rigorous investigating, no one was able to come up with a definite answer as to what happened to the Chandawahit family. But they are positive that whatever happened, they did to themselves. There was no murderer that snuck in or supernatural force that drove them to commit suicide. The fact is family was left alone with their own minds to drive them to their deaths, which is much scarier to think about. Perhaps the most logical explanation about what happened to this family lies inside the human mind. Lalitz clearly had a mental health issue that he never dealt with, and once his father died, he spun completely out of control, which resulted in psychosis because he believe that he was hearing his father's spirits and he had possessed his body in order for the family to have gone through Lali's plan without questioning it means that they could have all been suffering from mass psychosis because Lalit was an influential and powerful person in all their lives. Once a family coincidentally started prospering after the father's death, they all attributed it to Lalit's illusions, and therefore the perfect storm was created for the tragedy of Ferrari. Now the house is currently being inhabited by another family who claimed that the family members never really left. Who knows. They may be trying to tell us something about their deaths that we may never figure out. The only surviving member of the Chundawat family, Lalit's brother, Dansh Singh, still pleads with officials to continue to look into what happened to his family, as he can't believe that they would practice rituals they Lalli described in his diary. Honestly, it may not have known them as well as he thinks. Since he wasn't living with the family for a while, Danesh was the only surviving family member. Death has a way of changing people, and for this family had ultimately ended up leading to their own demise. Is the scariest part about this case, the fact that we may never get a real and definite answer about what happened to the family or why they did what they did. Perhaps, or maybe it's that what happened to them forces us to face the fact that the human mind is possibly the scariest part of what makes us well human, never knowing what we're truly capable of when something causes to switch to flip in our minds. Just like Lott, it forces to take a look into a mirror, because who's to say that all of us are not capable of the same thing. With the community of Ferrari and the surviving family find peace after this tragic event. This episode of A Dark Memory was written by Madelinguera and produced by me Edwin Kovadruyez. If you have a dark memory you would like to share with us, please head on over to a Dark Memory dot com and send a message. You can now access ad free episodes of this and other shows by tapping the premium link on our website until next time. Thank you very much for listening.