Patna, May 22: Many people had left Patna’s Gardanibagh for fear of ghosts after a Boeing 737 crashed into the locality 10 years ago, killing 60 people including all five occupants of a bungalow.

Today’s Mangalore disaster seemed to bring those ghosts back from the past, reviving memories of a tragedy Patna had been trying to forget for the best part of a decade.

A four-storey girls’ school has replaced the government bungalow on which the Alliance Air flight from Calcutta had dropped on July 17, 2000, killing all 60 on board and wiping out the family of bureaucrat Amarendra Mishra.

Mishra, who was not at home, has shifted to another neighbourhood. Many others followed him, fearing “dead men’s ghosts loitering amid the debris”. Some performed yajnas and havans for weeks at the site to drive the “evil spirits” away.

“The fear of ghosts haunted us for more than two years. We did not go to the spot. The 10-cottah plot stayed abandoned for years,” said Dhirendra Kunwar, a Gardanibagh resident who had witnessed the crash, India’s last major airline disaster before today’s.

The site was fenced off with barbed wire and stayed in that condition till six months ago. Now the state government has built the Kamala Nehru Girls’ School, which will soon be inaugurated.

“When the girls throng the school and the bell rings, life will return to what has been an abode of ghosts for 10 years,” said Ravindra Sinha, a Patna resident.

“But the memory of the bodies, charred beyond recognition, and the wails of the grieving will stay with me for ever. It is hard to forget that horrendous scene.”

The suspicions of pilot error in the Mangalore crash make the parallels more vivid.

The inquiry report into the 2000 crash had blamed “loss of control due to pilot error”. It said the pilots “had not followed the proper approach and procedure… kept the engines at idle thrust and allowed the air speed to reduce to a lower than normally permissible value on approach”.

Minutes before it was to touch down, the plane had hit a tree. “I still remember how the plane wavered in the sky before crashing,” recalled V.S. Dueby, the then Bihar chief secretary who lived near the airport.

The inquiry cited several operational constraints at Patna airport, saying these threatened safety margins for Airbus A320s and Boeing 737s. Since there was no space left for expansion, the government decided to shift the airport and acquired land in Bihata. The new airport is yet to come up, though.