Bhoot Chaturdashi Is November 7: Bengal’s Own Ghost Night, and the Stories Recorded for It

Bengali households have kept one night a year for ghosts far longer than radio has existed to play them back. In 2026 that night is Saturday, November 7: Bhoot Chaturdashi, the night before Kali Puja. After dark, fourteen earthen lamps, the choddo prodip, are lit around the house, for the ancestors and against the spirits said to walk closest to the living on this one evening. Fourteen kinds of greens, the choddo shaak, are eaten earlier in the day. If you search the way our listeners do, bhoot chaturdashi golpo is the query, and a bhuter golpo night is the plan. This guide builds that plan from the record: the ShunoGolpo catalog of 439 Bengali audio stories, verified on September 22, 2026, counted shelf by shelf.

The calendar first, because a ghost night planned on the wrong date is just a Saturday. Bhoot Chaturdashi falls on Saturday, November 7, 2026, and Kali Puja on Sunday, November 8, 2026. By Drikpanchang timings reported in dated 2026 Kolkata festival guides, the Chaturdashi tithi begins at 10:47 AM on November 7, and the Kali Puja Nishita window in Kolkata runs roughly 10:55 to 11:46 PM on November 8. These are fixed panchang calendar dates, the way the observance is reckoned every year, not an announcement. Your own panjika will give your city’s exact tithi timings.

The ghost shelf, counted

Of the catalog’s 439 stories, 297 are horror or thriller: 199 filed as horror and 98 as thriller. The rest is romance (73 stories), comedy (67) and drama (2), which is why this site calls itself horror-first and means it. Inside the 297, the dataset’s own subgenre labels, a cataloguing judgment rather than a law of nature, sort the night like this:

Two honest limits sit inside those numbers. First, 211 of the 297 carry a verified listening link; the other 86 are catalogue entries, stories the record can name but cannot yet play for you. Across the whole catalog the same split is 350 of 439 stories with a link (80 percent) and 89 without. Second, look at the last column before you plan around it. The real listener stories, all 40 of them, have no recorded length at all, which matters when we time the night below.

The series shelf

One name towers over the catalog the way it towers over Bengali horror listening. Sunday Suspense accounts for 195 of the 439 rows, 44 percent of everything recorded here, and 190 of those 195 are horror or thriller. Read that as this catalog’s holdings, not the show’s full run: the franchise has broadcast far more than any one database has verified. Around it, the shelves are smaller and more varied:

The table also holds a discipline the dataset insists on. Bhoot.com (13 rows) and Bhoot FM (11 rows) are listed separately because they are separate programs from Bangladesh, a later show and the older Radio Foorti one, and the catalog never merges them. A narrator is recorded for 234 of the 439 stories, and the most recorded voice is Mir Afsar Ali with 51, the voice a great many listeners will spend this night with anyway.

The tantrik layer, for the night after

Bhoot Chaturdashi is the ghost night, but the night after belongs to Kali, and the catalog has a shelf that leans toward her world: tantrik horror, 36 stories of tantriks, cremation grounds and rites that should not be interrupted. Most of that shelf is one author’s creation. Taradas Bandyopadhyay, the writer of the Taranath Tantrik tales, accounts for 30 stories in the catalog, and 27 of the 30 are filed as tantrik horror. Among named authors only Satyajit Ray, with 39 rows across the whole catalog, has more; the 61 rows credited to Listener story are a group credit for listener-contributed tales, not a person. Plan the tantrik stretch of the weekend from the playable part of the shelf: 19 of the 36 tantrik horror rows carry a verified listening link, and 11 carry a recorded length.

Timing the night, honestly

Here is where this guide refuses to guess. A length is recorded for only 131 of the catalog’s 439 stories, so every timed plan below is built from that recorded subset and says so. Across the recorded subset the median story runs 37 minutes. Horror is the shorter habit: a median of 30 minutes across 71 recorded horror stories. Thriller runs longer, a median of 52 minutes across 51 recorded ones. Some Sunday Suspense lengths in the dataset derive from archive.org file sizes and are accurate to about a minute either way.

Ninety-seven horror and thriller stories have both a verified listening link and a recorded length. Forty of them run 30 minutes or under, 40 more run between 31 and 60 minutes, 12 run between 61 and 90, and 5 run past 90. So a one-hour Kali Puja horror stories Bangla session, timed from the record rather than from hope, is one pick from that 31 to 60 minute group. A two-story evening is one from each of the first two groups: a short sharp one while the lamps are lit, then the longer sit-down story after. And if your night leans on the real listener stories instead, go in knowing the catalog cannot time them for you; not one of the 40 has a recorded length.

The village shelf is small, and it has its own guide

Village horror and folk horror together hold just 6 stories in the catalog, 3 under each label. Small shelf, deep roots. Our village ghost tales guide tells that shelf’s story properly, where the village tales came from and why they raised a generation of listeners, so this occasion guide links to it rather than retelling it under lamplight.

New to Bengali horror audio?

Then start where starting is the whole job. Our horror stories starter list picks the first stories for a new listener, in order, and this guide deliberately does not rebuild it. Come back here once the starter shelf is done and November 7 is on the calendar.

Make the night’s poster

One artifact makes the night shareable. The Horror Story Poster Maker draws a poster for any of the 297 horror and thriller stories in the catalog, in four styles: haunted house, moonlit forest, foggy graveyard, plain black. Pick the night’s story, make its poster first, send the poster to the family group, then send the audio. Our Poster Maker write-up walks through the tool itself. Fourteen lamps, one poster, and a queue timed from the record: that is a Bhoot Chaturdashi that plans itself.

How these numbers were counted

Every count in this guide was recomputed from the catalog file (439 rows, 20 fields, every row last verified on September 22, 2026) at the time of writing. Where the dataset’s README scope note and the file itself differ, the file governs: the README prose says 200 horror stories and 298 horror and thriller together, the file counts 199 and 297, and 297 is what this guide prints, the same figure the Poster Maker’s picker is built on. The dataset records no rating for any of its 439 stories, by design, so this guide prints none and implies none. Rows under the Kuasha names rest on a secondary episode index, the weakest attribution in the file, so Kuasha stays inside the totals above and gets no shelf of its own here. The dataset holds metadata and short original summaries only; no story text is reproduced in it or here, and two different stories in it share the title Ashariri, one more reason this guide recommends by shelf and series rather than by single titles.