Why did the Ramsay Brothers choose horror as their speciality?” It’s a question that pops up right in the middle of author Alisha Priti Kirpalani’s new book, Ghosts In Our Backyard (HarperCollins India), after she has narrated several eerie, ghostly encounters experienced by the Ramsays. For Kirpalani, who was born into the family that introduced Hindi cinema to the horror universe, the question seems to be rhetorical.

Having chosen to write an unusual family memoir, which she describes as a bridge between the spirit world and spirituality, the book offers a possible explanation to the inspiration behind the “purani haveli” variety of horror that Indians lapped up through the ’70s and ’80s. The supernatural, she claims, was not just a figment of imagination for celluloid, but also a shadow that followed some members of the Ramsay family, her mother Asha Thawani—daughter of Fatechand Uttamchand (FU) Ramsay—in particular.