Burari Kand: The Full Story of the 11 Deaths in One Delhi House

Every morning at about 5:30, the shutters of two small shops in Sant Nagar went up: a grocery store and a plywood shop beside it. The family that ran them had lived in the house above for about 20 years. On Sunday, 1 July 2018, the shutters stayed down.

Their neighbour Gurcharan Singh noticed first. One of the brothers usually joined him on his morning walk, and that morning he never showed up. Around 7:15 am Singh walked over to check, found the front door open, and went inside.

What he saw would lead India’s news for weeks. Ten members of the family were hanging from an iron mesh in the ceiling, bunched close together. Their eyes were covered, their mouths taped, their ears stuffed with cotton, and most had their hands tied behind their backs. The cloth over their faces had all been cut from one bed-sheet. In another room, the grandmother lay dead on the floor.

Police got the call at about 7:30 am. There was no forced entry. Nothing had been stolen. There was no suicide note. Up on the terrace, chained to the grill and burning with fever, was the only one left alive: the family dog.

The family had come to Delhi from Tohana in Haryana and built a solid, ordinary life. Newspapers called them the Bhatias; the family name was Chundawat. Neighbours, teachers and relatives all said the same thing about them: friendly, religious, hard-working, doing well. The kind of family you borrow sugar from.

Two weeks before the deaths, the house had been celebrating. Priyanka, an MBA, had just got engaged; she died 14 days later. The two 15-year-old boys were described by their teachers as bright students. Nothing about this house said anything was wrong. That is exactly what makes the case so frightening.

To understand Burari, you have to start with the younger son. In March 2004, Lalit was locked inside the plywood shop where he worked and the shop was set on fire, reportedly over a dispute with his employers. He survived, but something in him broke. After the attack he stopped talking and spoke to people only through gestures, a neighbour later told Outlook.

Then the head of the family, his father Bhopal Singh, died (in 2006 or 2007; accounts differ). About a year later, during the family’s daily prayers, Lalit suddenly started speaking again. To the family it felt like a miracle. And Lalit told them it was not only him talking: his dead father visited him, and spoke through him.

From that day on, the father’s word was law, and the father spoke only through Lalit.

Psychologists who later studied the case pointed to trauma that was never treated: a man who survived being set on fire, lost his voice and then lost his father, and built a world in which his father never really left. Psychologist Rachana Johri told Outlook his loss of voice looked like a response to post-traumatic stress.

When police searched the house, they found what would crack the case open: registers. Eleven of them, kept by the family’s prayer place and filled over roughly eleven years. Handwriting analysis showed that most of the entries were written by two of the young women, Priyanka and Neetu, taking down what Lalit said his father was telling him.

The notes were written in the third person, as if the father himself were speaking, and they covered everything: how to run the shops, how to invest money, who in the family was behaving badly and how they should change. Some entries warned that nobody was to disobey what was written there.

Over the years the entries grew stranger. They described a ritual the police called badh tapasya, a banyan tree worship in which the family would stand together like the hanging roots of a banyan tree, to come closer to God and to the father. The final instructions matched the scene the police walked into almost exactly: the blindfolds, the taped mouths, the cotton in the ears, the cloth from a single sheet, everyone’s hands tied, and the grandmother lying down because she could not stand.

And then the most chilling detail of all. The notes said that after the ritual, everyone would help each other untie their hands. A Hindi entry reported by Deccan Chronicle had the father promising he would come and help them down.

They were not planning to die. They were waiting to be saved.

That one camera across the lane did more to explain Burari than any theory. It showed the family themselves bringing home the stools and the wire. It showed nobody else entering the house that night. Five stools were found at the spot, shared between the ten.

Delhi Police first registered a case of murder. Eleven deaths in one house, with hands tied, demanded it, and the relatives were furious at any suggestion that the family had done this to themselves. The Crime Branch questioned more than 200 people, from relatives and neighbours to the mason who had worked on the house.

The post-mortems found that ten of the eleven had died by hanging, with no signs of a struggle and no trace of poison. The grandmother had been strangled. Investigators came to believe it was Lalit who tied the others’ hands and feet.

Then the police asked for something rare in India: a psychological autopsy. The CBI’s Central Forensic Science Laboratory studied the registers and the statements of friends and relatives to work out what the people in that house were thinking in their final weeks.

The forensic report reached the police on 12 September 2018, and its conclusion surprised even people who had followed every twist: this was not a suicide. It was an accident during a ritual. None of the eleven, it said, had meant to end their life.

Police described what was behind it as shared psychosis, a rare condition in which a delusion held by one person, usually someone with authority in a close group, is taken up by the people around him. In the Chundawat house that person was Lalit, and the delusion was that his father lived on in him and was guiding them all.

In 2021 the Crime Branch filed its closure report in court, saying it had found no evidence of foul play. As far as the police were concerned, the case was over.

The official answer in one line: no murder, no outsider and no suicide pact. A family that believed a dead father spoke through one of them performed a ritual he had promised to rescue them from, and nobody came.

Eleven people, eleven diaries, eleven years. Of course India filled the gaps with theories. Some were fun, some were cruel, and a couple still nag at people. Here are the big ones, with our verdict on each.

For weeks, Burari was on every front page and every prime-time debate. Channels spun theory after theory: black magic, a tantrik, a property dispute, a murder cover-up. Relatives who had just lost eleven people had to watch strangers argue on live TV about whether their family were killers.

Crowds gathered outside the house in Sant Nagar, and people came from far away to photograph it. That never fully stopped. Years later, the woman running the shop next door told Outlook that passers-by still ask whether this is the house where eleven people died, and that the children in the lane are scared of it.

The story came roaring back in October 2021, when Netflix released House of Secrets: The Burari Deaths, a three-part documentary by Leena Yadav and Anubhav Chopra that trended across India and South Asia. Yadav said almost everyone they interviewed kept calling the family ‘good people’, which she saw as a red flag: the secrets had been hiding in plain sight. Fiction followed, including Disney+ Hotstar’s Aakhri Sach and Aha’s The Great Indian Suicide, both in 2023.

The house still stands, and another family lives in it now. The shop beside it still belongs to the Chundawats; it is looked after by Dinesh, the elder brother who lives in Rajasthan, and someone else runs the counter day to day. The visitors still come.

And the dog? Named Tommy in most reports (a few call him Jacky), he was taken to a shelter in Noida and adopted by the animal activist Sanjay Mohapatra. On 22 July 2018, three weeks after the deaths, he collapsed after an evening walk and died of heart failure. The last life from that house did not last long either.

It is tempting to turn Burari into a ghost story: the pipes, the number eleven, the dead father’s voice. But the scariest thing about this case is how normal it all looked from outside. Two busy shops. Kids going to school. An engagement party. Neighbours who would have told you this was the nicest family on the street.

Inside, one man’s untreated trauma slowly became a whole family’s religion, written down page by page for eleven years, and nobody outside ever read a word of it. In many Indian homes, seeing a psychologist still means you are ‘paagal’; Johri told Outlook that mental health is still stigmatised. If anyone in that house had said the word ‘help’, the story might have ended differently.

That is the real verdict of Burari. Not black magic. Silence.

If you or someone you know is struggling, please talk to someone. Tele-MANAS, India’s free government mental health helpline, answers 24 hours a day on 14416 or 1-800-891-4416.