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# The Steps Nobody Built
- URL: https://christingeorge.com/the-steps-nobody-built/
- Published: 2026-10-08T17:55:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-08T17:55:55.000Z
- Description: The stone steps from my family home in Erumely down to the Manimala River have no known builder, and the ghost stories grew in that gap.
- Author: Christin Emmanuel George
- Tags: Life, Memoir, Kerala, Growing Up

In 2009 I wrote that everyone has a ghost story to tell, and then spent eight hundred words not telling one. Even this rewrite has no ghost in it. But it has a flight of steps.

The house I grew up in is in Erumely, on the bank of the Manimala River. My great-grandfather took over the land and built on it. The story in the family is that a temple once stood somewhere on the property and was long gone before he arrived. What was still there were the steps, twenty or twenty-five of them, running from our land down to the river and laid in enormous stones. Nobody in the family built them and nobody knows who did.

![](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/WhatsApp-Image-2026-10-08-at-10.31.57-AM-2.jpeg)

Me and my cousins in the Manimala River. The orbs are damage to the print.

A vanished temple and a staircase with no author gave the family all it needed. Nobody ever told me a full story, and nobody ever told me to stay away. My grandparents, my parents and every visiting uncle dealt in hints. Someone had felt watched down there. Someone had goosebumps, and someone had heard laughter. My reading now is that they could not say more. They were devout Christians, and a spirit left behind by somebody else's temple had no place in what they believed, so they could hardly warn me about one. They passed on the feeling and left me to infer the rest.

I was well prepared for hints. My parents went to charismatic meetings, and they would come home and tell me they had watched a person turn into the devil. An adult hearing that might picture a face twisting in anger. I was a child, so I pictured scales, a tail and horns, and filed it under things that happen. Smells worked the same way. A sweet smell on the air meant Mother Mary was near and a foul one meant an evil spirit. That a tree had come into flower somewhere, or the wind had passed some garbage, I worked out for myself much later.

So the monsoon had plenty to work with. Rain coming off the roof falls in a rhythm, and from inside it sounds like someone walking round the house. Wooden doors swell in the wet and get pushed against their frames, and that sounds like someone outside knocking.

I went down to the river at dusk anyway. This was the mid-1990s and I was somewhere between seven and ten. The way led through a small rubber plantation, past jackfruit trees and a stand of nutmeg with its foliage hanging low. On either side of the steps stood massive trees, rooted at the very edge of the river and going straight up. There was no light at all apart from the torch, which was humongous in my hands and flickered. A twig would snap. Something small would skitter off through the leaves. Everything outside the torchlight was watching me. Even then I did not believe there was anything down there. Half of me was afraid and the other half wanted to prove I could face it, and that half kept winning.

I was a believer in those years, and I had the experiences believers describe. I spoke in tongues. I saw the light and felt the coolness and the love. Most people who go through that come out surer of God. I took the same inputs and came out with a different conclusion, that my brain can make me feel, hear and see what I want in place of what is there.

My aunt and uncle live in that house now. They have stopped using the steps and let the wild take them, and they walk to the river on a path made alongside.

![](https://christingeorge.com/content/images/2026/10/1791480635350_image.webp)

The steps now, from the top.

I never saw anything on those steps. I had the chills every single time. I am nearly forty and I have goosebumps writing this.

Tags: Life, Kerala, Memoir