My late husband Eugene had worked on Bangladeshi projects before but none that involved a cement plant. So why, he wondered as he stepped off the plane in Dhaka, had the plant’s management asked for him by name? Borrowers seldom cared which officers were sent. They just wanted their loans.

It was the tail end of the monsoon season. Fields all over the country were flooded, roads and bridges, washed out. To reach the cement plant, Eugene and his colleagues had to detour around bloated streams and push their Land Rover out of pot holes as big as water buffaloes. When their driver finally pulled up in front of the cement plant’s guest house, it was late and they were exhausted.

The following morning after a hearty breakfast and factory tour, the manager whispered for Eugene to step into his office.

“Have a seat, Mr. Chen,” he said. Closing the door behind them, he pulled out his own chair and paused, drumming his fingers on its smoothly worn back. “I’m at wits end,” he said finally. “It’s our workers. They refuse to work at night.”

Eugene raised his eyebrows. In a plant that needed to be online twenty-four hours a day, this could be a serious problem.

The manager bit his lip and walked to the window. “They …” He cleared his throat. “They claim there are angry ghosts dancing on the wires over the road between their town and the plant. You must help,” he said, shaking his head in the sub-continental way.

“Me?”

“I scolded the workers and threatened them, but they simply will not budge. I was on the verge of giving up hope when I remembered hearing about you. If you could just talk to the ghosts …”

Eugene frowned. Damn! Which friend had opened his big mouth and put him in this position? He’d seen and communicated with ghosts before, but still … He was an engineer, not a ghost whisperer.

“You could solve all our problems.”

Eugene sighed. He couldn’t just walk away, he supposed. Bangladesh, which was basically one big river delta, had plenty of sand, but it needed limestone from India. This project was a showcase of cooperation between the two countries.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll meet you half an hour before sunset. You can show me where the sightings have taken place.”

That evening the two men rendezvoused beside the river, just beyond the barges bound for Dhaka. Day and night, bags of cement should have been gliding down the curved metal slide and onto those barges. Tonight the slides were unused and the barges waited, half-full or empty.

The road to town was more like a dike than a road. On either side, shallow water and marshes glowed mauve and pink in the setting sun. After a mile or so, the land dried out and the road dropped down to ground level. Once the sunlight faded, the flat, damp land around them could have been mountainous for all Eugene could see of it.

They’d been walking silently for some time when the plant manager directed the beam of his flashlight to one side. “We’re almost there,” he said. “I’ll wait for you.”

Even though Eugene had encountered ghosts before, that didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous. He kept walking, hoping the workers had been wrong. He glanced at the power lines. Nothing there.

Then he felt it… their angry energy. “I’m here to help,” he said. “What can I do?” He clicked off his flashlight and looked around. And there they were, not on the power lines but off to the left—dozens of hazy forms, some vibrating with anger, others holding back.

“I see you’re distressed,” he said. “Something must be troubling you. Tell me about it. I’ll see what I can do.” His heart was pounding, but he remembered what his grandmother told him years ago: If you’ve done them no harm during their lifetime, ghosts won’t hurt you.

It wasn’t easy to gain the trust of a crowd of angry ghosts, but eventually he talked them into explaining. Their families had stopped caring for their graves, they complained.

Eugene turned his flashlight on and directed it to the side where an old cemetery was barely visible beneath the tall grass and tumbledown fences.” I’ll tell them,” he said.

He relayed the message to the plant manager, who was shivering a hundred feet back. The next day the manager instructed the cement plant workers to tend to their cemetery plots first and then come straight back to work.

Problem solved. As soon as the grass was cut and the graves swept and decorated with flowers, the haunting stopped and the cement plant went back into operation. Twenty-four hours a day.

Happy Halloween.

P.S.–After I published this post, one of my husband’s colleagues told me the name of the cement plant. It’s Chhatak Cement Factory. Here’s a link to a YouTube video that shows it.