Rani Pokhari — The Queen's Pond
The royal pond built in 1670 for a grieving queen at the centre of Kathmandu, where — besides the official history of a son trampled by an elephant — runs a second story of a beautiful woman with backward-pointing feet, a murdered child, and a shinbone pulled from the water to break her spell.
Case File No. 289
FILE 01 The Legend
King Pratap Malla built the tank in 1670 after his queen, Anantapriya, was distraught at the death of their son, trampled by an elephant; water carried from Gosaikunda, Muktinath, Badrinath and Kedarnath was poured in to sanctify it. A temple to Matrikeshwor Mahadev stands on an island reached by a causeway, opening to the public only once a year at Bhai Tika. A separate legend shadows the official one: the king met a beautiful woman at the pond; as the affair continued he sickened; she killed their child; and he noticed that her feet pointed backward. A string tied to her hem led the court priest to a shinbone in the pond water, which was cremated to break the spell — the classical resolution of a kichkandi, the unquiet woman of Newar and pan-Nepali folklore whose bone was never properly burned. The pond was rebuilt after the 2015 earthquake and reopened in 2020, its baroque new fence locking the perimeter at night.
FILE 02 The Sightings Log
The tale is still told as a warning about the pond after dark, and the kichkandi is said to attach to places where an uncremated bone remains. Night walkers around the tank describe a woman in red or white at the water's edge, and Kathmandu cab and tuk-tuk drivers repeat the wider kichkandi hitchhiker story — a woman who asks for a lift and directs the driver to a cremation ground. Because the pond is fenced and locked at night, the stories cluster on the perimeter rather than the island.
FILE 03 The Skeptic’s File
The kichkandi is a folklore type, not a localised apparition — the same backward-footed woman appears across Nepal and as the churel in northern India — and no historical source ties the pond's construction to a haunting; the ghost narrative is a later accretion onto a mourning monument. Local tellings collected in the 2020s are explicitly second-hand. The pond opens only at Bhai Tika and Chhath for religious reasons; the bitter 2016–2020 restoration fight was about concrete, fountains and a proposed café, not about containing anything.
BEYOND THE CASE FILE / PLAN A VISIT