Tourists in front of the home of Moninder Singh Pandher in Nithari. Picture by Prem Singh

New Delhi, June 23: You won’t find these addresses in travel guidebooks: Moninder Singh Pandher, D5, Sector 31, Noida, or the Talwars, L32, Sector 25, Noida.

But every day a crowd of people, often including foreigners, tiptoes to these houses to gawk at them from the street outside, nudging each other and whispering in excitement.

Most of the “sightseers” are reluctant, even embarrassed, to reveal their macabre fascination for these houses — one where a drain threw up skeletons of 18 children and the other where 15-year-old schoolgirl Aarushi was found with her throat slit. Not so Henrick von Heimner.

The 35-year-old Swiss tourist, who came to Delhi on business, had read about the Nithari child murders on the Internet and requested an Indian colleague to take him there.

“While in India, I also read about the Aarushi Talwar case and when I enquired about it, my colleague took me to that house as well. I think it was curiosity that drew me to these places,” smiled Heimner, who has taken pictures of both houses as mementos from his India trip.

The Nithari murders were uncovered in December 2006 and the investigators left long ago, but the crowds still keep coming. They range from day labourers to neatly dressed office-goers and youngsters on their way to the shopping mall 1km away.

Some even venture into the slushy lanes of Nithari, the village adjacent to Sector 31 that lost its sons and daughters to the killers at D5.

Horror sites do hold a haunting attraction for a large number of people, explained Dr Rajat Mitra, a Delhi-based psychiatrist.

“People are drawn to the weird, the deviant, the negative. Such places have an eerie ability to excite. Studies have corroborated that people are fascinated more by evil than the good. Evil is disturbing but wildly exciting,” Mitra said.

London, for instance, offers a Jack the Ripper Walking Tour that takes visitors across the sites where the legendary 19th-century murderer’s victims were found.

A study conducted at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which displays memorabilia from the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, has revealed that the exhibits left most visitors excited rather than disturbed.

No official figure is available of the footfall before the Noida houses, but the Talwars’ neighbours say the sightseers come from everywhere.

“When Aarushi’s body was found on May 16, there was a huge crowd in the evening. From the next day, people began coming from various parts of Delhi for a glimpse of the house,” said Ranjana Shah, who often offered water and biscuits to the journalists covering the story and the crowd of onlookers.

“One group of tourists had stopped over in Delhi on their way to Jaipur, but they made it a point to visit the Talwars’ house,” she said. “They had a flight to catch the same day, so they arrived with all their luggage.”

Mumbai travel guides said they were surprised at an unusual demand from customers three years ago when they took them to the Gateway of India.

“In 2005, after two Manipuri students were stabbed at the Gateway of India, I received several requests from tourists to show them the exact spot where the stabbing took place. I was taken aback at the sheer number of tourists who made the request,” said tour guide Shehzad Alam, who has been in the business for the past eight years.

It’s not just crime scenes that can captivate people’s imagination, but also houses where those involved in headline-making criminal investigations live. Neighbours of Priyanka Todi in Salt Lake admit to having seen passers-by stop to stare at the Todi home.

Priyanka’s husband Rizwanur Rahman was mysteriously found dead on the railway tracks last year after the girl’s well-connected family took her away from her husband with police help.

In suburban Mumbai, the Siddhivinayak Society apartments became a crowd-puller after the revelation that seven of the 14 teenagers arrested in a New Year molestation case lived in the building.

Psychiatrists say that the extensive media coverage of such events is partly responsible for the trend.

“Many girls are murdered and killed all over the country, but Aarushi’s family became a symbol of the globalised urban Indian. The watchers feel she is one of their own,” said Dr Harish Shetty from Mumbai.

“Also, visits to such sites give ordinary people, living dull lives, a little bit of thrill and an outlet to purge their own anxieties.”

With inputs from Charu Sudan Kasturi