Horror house on Robinson Street: Hidden notes, strange sex stories emerge from Kolkata police probe

On 11 June, the Kolkata Police arrived at the doorstep of a house in Central Kolkata as locals alerted them about thick smoke emanating from one of the windows. They weren’t exactly prepared for what they stumbled upon after they broke into the house.

The charred body of a 77-year-old man was found inside one of the bathrooms in the house.  A fully-clothed skeleton of a woman was found in one of the bedrooms. Two bags full of bones - of dogs - were also found in one of the rooms. The only living person, a man in his mid-40s was also found in the house.

On investigating, it was found that Partha De (44) had been living with the corpse of his sister who had reportedly died in December last year. De, the police concluded, was mentally unstable. Not just that, before De’s sister died in December, the dogs had died in August. Apparently, the sister went into deep depression after the death of the Labradors and the siblings refused to cremate the remains of the dogs either. The case has not stopped intriguing the city, as one macabre detail after another keeps tumbling out of the house, promptly christened ‘Horror House’ and ‘Hitchcock House’ by the media, thanks to it’s deep love for alliterations. Here’s a round-up on the saga of bizarre that Kolkata has found itself facing over the last five days.

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- Partha De, a former employee of software giant TCS, had lived abroad before moving to India. He had been living with the corpse of his sister for the past six months and the remains of his dogs for nearly ten months. According to NDTV, De told the police that he loved his sister and dogs so much that he didn’t want to part with them. Not only that, he told them that his sister’s spirit visited him on days. He would also leave food for his dead sister next to her body.

The corpses

- Seventy-seven-year-old Arabinda De, Partha’s father who burned himself to death in the house on 11 June was unaware of the fact that his daughter is dead and her corpse is rotting in the very house he is living in. According to his son, the elderly man came to know about it only in March/April this year, following which he slid into depression too.

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- The forensic reports are still expected, so the police are still going with De’s statement about when his sister and dogs died. A report on The Times of India tries to reveal the consequences under which De’s sister Debjani died. “Partha was in a chatty mood on Monday and spoke to doctors for about one and a half hours, during which he said Debjani had turned spiritual and had stopped taking food towards the end, restraining herself to only a few sips of water,” TOI reports.

The notes and diaries

- The three occupants of the house - Debjani, Partha and their father Arabinda - all maintained diaries and notes, which are helping the police piece the puzzle together. According to the TOI report, bundles of handwritten notes were found stacked in pouches, cracks in the walls, compartments of almirahs and even inside cushions. Debjani’s notes were crisply-written, precise, coherent and dated. Partha’s diary entries were repetitive and slightly incoherent. “Police have found several writings of Arabindo till April 15, where he mentions his plan to divide the property equally between Debjani and Partha. Police wonder why he would consider leaving Debjani a share if Partha had told him about her death on March 12,” the TOI report says.

-  It is also being suspected that the members of the family only conversed through handwritten notes, if the content and sheer volume of them is anything to go by.

Sexual anxiety in handwritten letters

- Some of the notes reveal sexual anxiety. For example, several of Partha De’s diary entries suggest that he was displeased with his mother, who died in 2002,  because she thought he was impotent. One of the entries say that his mother used to send a maid servant to his room because she suspected he was impotent. Another note, according to the police and reported by TOI, suggest that the mother was disapproving of the proximity between the siblings. Another Indian Express report says, “In an entry, Partho said that during an outstation trip, his sister, Debjani, had tried to get physically intimate with him.” Given his mental condition, there are doubts about how much is real and how much is imagined.

Neighbours, guests and guards, nobody smelled foul. Literally

- A preliminary report issued by the SSKM Hospital in Kolkata revealed that no chemical had been used to preserve the skeletons. However, surprisingly, neither the neighbours, nor people visiting the house occasionally had smelled a stench. The Telegraph reports that Partha De had thrown a birthday party in April and had a gaggle of relatives over. No one got a hint that there were rotting corpses in a room in the house. A security guard used to bring food for the Des thrice a day, but he didn’t find anything suspicious either.

- Of the things recovered from the house are drawing books with sketches of dogs and monkeys in various postures in them. TOI says, it seemed as if a first standard student had drawn them. The police also recovered eight laptops from the house. 

Horror House selfie?

- As if the case in itself isn’t bizarre enough, Kolkata’s reaction to the story which has dominated news coverage for days has been doubly absurd. People have been trooping to the house to shoot pictures with the house in background. Some people have also taken selfies with the house and posted the pictures on social media, reports The Telegraph. The house on Robinson Street seems to have become a new tourism sport. “Ask Sanjiv Shah, whose small shop outside 3 Robinson Street would only serve a few cups of tea to drivers and guards through the day. He sold 650 cups on Monday. That’s how his business has been from Friday, the morning after a body and three skeletons were recovered from the De residence,” The Telegraph writes.  Even a Durga Puja organizer visited the house to take notes in case they wanted a Kolkata’s house of horror-themed Durga Puja this year.

Whispering voices

- The cops in Kolkata were in for a full-blown horror story experience in the house. When they entered the second floor of the house, they were greeted with a mumbled voice reading out some sort of a chant. And the rooms were empty!

However, TT reports that the voice was that of Joyce Meyer, a US-based spiritual guru known for delivering sermons about the ‘spiritual Bible’. The De’s had recordings of his sermons which played in the house through speakers, perhaps, all day long. 

- Reporters of Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika visited De and returned with a fairly weird account of the man. The account states that De, who is now incarcerated in the Pavlov Mental Hospital suffers from terrible body odour - doctors say the odour is a result of infections he has contracted as he was in close contact with corpses for so long. He was mostly incoherent and agitated. He would scream ‘Jesus, Jesus’ and occasionally holler at the doctors and attendants, screaming, “Touch me.” He would only calm down when the doctors tell him that ‘Jesus and Mary will come and touch’ him. Three women psychiatrists had come to counsel De. However, De instructed one of them to see him. The moment she entered the room, De asked her to take her clothes off. The psychiatrist told ABP that such behaviour is common in cases of psychosis. De apparently calmed down after she told him to close his eyes and imagine Jesus and Mary were around him.