Story source:Folk-Tales of Bengal by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with illustrations by Warwick Goble (1912).
I'm going to write about two stories that were very similar in this unit (Folktales of Bengal part 2): The Ghost-Brahman and A Ghostly Wife. In these two tales, a ghost poses as one of the characters and lives as if it were them until it gets caught.
In the first story, a Brahman is too pore to afford a wife so he begs for the money until he can afford one. Once he marries her, he moves her in with her mother but doesn't stay with them because he really can't afford to support all three of them, so he leaves. Later a ghost takes his place and nobody can tell the difference. The Brahman comes back but people call him an impostor and banish him from his own house. He goes to the king, asking for help. The king agrees to try the case but he can't tell the ghost from the real man either. The Brahman is distraught until he finds another king who comes up with a plan. He comes in and says the real Brahman is the one who can fit inside the very small container. The ghost is tricked and gets into the container, showing that he is, indeed, a ghost. The ghost-Brahman is then thrown out and the real Brahman is reinstated in his family.
In the second story, a young wife marries a Brahman and moves in with him and his mother (I'm sensing a theme here...). One day she offends a ghost who almost strangles her and then traps her in a hole in a tree and takes her shape (another theme?), rejoining her family. The mother notices that something is amiss with the wife (aha, a difference!) and watches her very closely. She sees her stretch her arm out too far one day and tells the Brahman, and then they both watch her closely. The wife does some more ghostly things, like lighting the stove with her foot, and someone is called in to perform an exorcism and he gets the ghost to admit what she's done to the wife and then exorcises her. They rescue the wife just in time and return her to her family.
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