Did you know Hema Malini once stayed at a haunted house before she married Dharmendra? The actress had said, “I felt someone was trying to choke me, I couldn’t breathe’ |

Dharmendra and Hema Malini tied the knot in 1980 but the actress chose to live separately from him as she did not want to disturb his existing life with his first wife Prakash Kaur and children Sunny, Bobby, Vijeta and Ajeita. Thus, the actress spent large part of a life living quite close to Dharmendra’s house in Juhu. But before she got married to Dharmendra, Hema was on a house hunting spree in the city because she wanted a house which had lots of trees unlike small apartments which Mumbai has. Having grown up in Delhi and Chennai (then Madras), Hema was accustomed to bungalows surrounded by greenery. That way of life felt natural to her, unlike Mumbai (then Bombay), where apartments were the norm. Adjusting to flat living never sat well with her. At one point, her father tried to ease this discomfort by surprising her with a sea-facing apartment—reportedly bought using her own earnings, but she turned it down immediately.In Ram Kamal Mukherjee’s book ‘Hema Malini: Beyond the Dream Girl’, the actor recalled receiving a call from her father while she was shooting, asking her to visit Walkeshwar in South Mumbai. During her break, she went over and realised he had purchased a new home for her. “There I saw a sprawling sea-facing apartment that my father had just bought for me. He asked me if I liked the flat. That was perhaps the first time I told him that I didn’t fancy staying in town (south Bombay) but wanted instead a house with a lot of trees, just like the one we had in Chennai. It was then that he started looking for a bungalow in Juhu,” she shared.Hema also recounted an earlier phase from the time she was working on her Hindi debut ‘Sapno Ka Saudagar’ with Raj Kapoor. During that period, she stayed in a small Bandra apartment, which was mainly used by costume designer Bhanu Athaiya for fittings. She later shifted to a bungalow, but the experience there was deeply disturbing.Describing the ordeal in the book, Hema said, “Every night I would feel someone was trying to choke me; I used to have difficulty breathing. I would sleep with my mummy and she noticed how restless I used to be. If this had happened only once or twice we would have ignored it, but it happened every night.” Shaken by these incidents, she decided it was time to establish a more permanent and comfortable base in the city and purchased her first apartment in Mumbai.Looking back, she recalled Dharmendra’s early visits, saying, “I remember Dharam-ji would drop by for coffee, but back then I had no idea I would fall in love and get married to him.” She went on to buy her first bungalow in 1972 while shooting ‘Seeta Aur Geeta’. By then, she and Dharmendra were frequent co-stars, and like him, she chose Juhu as home. “It was a five-year-old bungalow that belonged to a Gujarati. We constructed extra rooms in the house later. I loved that house because it had lots of trees around it,” she said.Despite living just minutes apart, Hema and Dharmendra’s first wife Prakash Kaur never crossed paths. Years later, their worlds briefly intersected when Esha visited Prakash’s home during Dharmendra’s brother Ajit Deol’s serious illness. Esha was 30 at the time and met her father’s first wife for the first time. Recalling the moment, Esha shared in the book, “I touched her feet, and she blessed me before leaving.”