Delhi: Haunted Monuments Walking Tour

Ruins, at dusk, with the stories attached

Delhi has been built and abandoned seven times, and the leftovers are everywhere — tombs in the middle of roundabouts, stepwells behind office blocks, whole Tughlaq cities gone to scrub. The ghost stories attached to them are a way of noticing buildings that nobody else stops at, and this tour uses them exactly that way.

You will get the folklore and the history side by side, and your guide will be clear about which is which.

Mehrauli Archaeological Park

Where Delhi began. Over a hundred monuments across 200 acres, spanning a thousand years — the only part of the city with continuous building from the pre-Islamic period to the British.

Jamali Kamali, a 16th-century mosque and tomb, is the one with the reputation: two graves side by side, a poet and an unidentified companion, and a great many accounts from people who camped there overnight and left early. Whatever you make of that, the mosque is beautiful and almost always empty.

Also here: Balban's tomb, which holds the first true arch built in India; Rajon ki Baoli, a stepwell of 1516; and Quli Khan's tomb, which a British resident converted into a country house in the 1830s.

The Khalji and Tughlaq cities

What is left of Siri, Alauddin Khalji's capital of around 1303, and the Tughlaq monuments beyond it — stone the colour of the ground it stands on, built by a dynasty whose architecture was all slope and mass and no ornament.

Bhuli Bhatiyari ka Mahal, a 14th-century hunting lodge in the Ridge forest, is the other site with a name for being unpleasant after dark.

Practical

Three hours on foot on uneven ground, much of it unlit — sensible shoes and a torch on your phone.

Go with the folklore as folklore. What you are actually seeing is seven hundred years of a city's discarded architecture, which is more interesting than any of the stories.