I transcribe the story described by my roommate Su earlier tonight from memory. There may be serious accuracy issues. This is not meant to be a journalistic or historical transcription.
Tom Bell's Kathmandu has a chapter on the Kichkanni of MagalBazar. Apparently there's an apparition of a woman in a white sari with a shiny bright face that brooms the temples around at wee hours of night. Only those out at strange hours have spotted it, and the apparition disappears if you do a second take. It has been spotted by multiple reliable people on the same party on several occasions, so it can be ruled out as a hallucination or a trick of light. The apparition has also been spotted cleaning clothes, smashing wet cloths against the stone walls in the nearby dungedhara.
Su had been reading that very chapter of Kathmandu that evening. He is generally not comfortable with ghosts or spiritual creatures, avoiding the horror movies on Netflix, so he wasn't in the most comfortable situation. As it happened that evening, his friends were hanging out in Patan, and ended up out until 2 am. Fortunately for them, they had a friend's car and the accompanying driver who would take them home, so they weren't too worried about having to walk out in the dark in search for taxis.
As he describes it, he was telling the story of the apparition to his friends just as they were getting in the car. And just like that he stopped in the middle of the sentence. Everyone in the car -- the driver and four friends looked at him. His face was white. They followed his gaze to the faraway chowk on the right. And there it was. A middle-aged woman in an old white sari, brooming around the temple. She had a shiny face.
The car got very quiet. The driver said in a very scared voice, Dai, is it okay if I drive away the car fast? Everyone shouted, GO GO GO!
And they drove away from the vision of the apparition.
Su claims the locals have seen the apparition regularly and it's definitely not a strange cleaning person ahead in her work. The rumors can't just be rumors, when they have been verified physically by so many reliable people.
It's unclear what the apparition is looking for. No one knows if it's going to stop showing some day. There's a peaceful coexistence between the ethereal and the real in ancient narrow alleys of Mangalbazar.
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