By Mark Magnier(c) 2009, Los Angeles Times AMLOHA VILLAGE, India -- Some say it was the prayers, others the all-night vigils, still others the three days without meat or alcohol. Whatever it was that foiled the angry god, residents in this village of about 600 people breathed a huge sigh of relief Thursday when the day passed without another death. 'We were so scared,' said Kuldeep Singh, 32, village head. 'Now we feel better.' Amloha has been on a knife's edge since late December when the first victim mysteriously died. In the last few months, four others followed at fairly regular intervals, in a place where years go by without a funeral. All the victims were young, died suddenly and displayed no apparent cause of death. The interval between the last two deaths was 17 days, prompting some to wait nervously to see what would happen Thursday, 17 days later. Superstition enjoys a long and rich history in India. While some of these practices may seem poetic to outsiders, said Sanal Edamaruku, president of the New Delhi-based Indian Rationalist Association, their prevalence can have deadly consequences. Diseases go untreated, handicapped children are buried up to their necks during eclipses, infants are tossed from balconies and caught to ward off evil, he said. 'Critical thinking is lacking,' said Edamaruku, who has tried for the past quarter-century to bust myths, slay ghosts and quell mass hysteria, but admits it's a daunting task. 'That's the irony of India. We're a rising power held back by 15th century beliefs.' Among the factors, experts said, include insufficient education, a prevalence of ancient texts laced with fantastical stories sometimes taken literally and a desire to understand the seemingly inexplicable. 'When something goes wrong, it's easy to fall back on belief in the mysterious, which absolves you of responsibility,' said Harish Shetty, a social psychiatrist at Nityanand Clinics in the western city of Mumbai. 'India has great engineers, but when it comes time for them to marry, they fall into a bundle of superstitions. It's in our psyche.' Roshan Lal, 55, one of Amloha's village wise men, said he looked for rational answers after the spate of deaths, but none presented themselves. So he and the rest of the community concluded the village god, Khera, must be angry. 'I always wanted to believe in science, but now I've concluded this was the work of alternate forces,' said Lal, wearing a white saf, or bandanna, as he chatted with other village luminaries outside the headman's house. 'Our god was angry before, but never like this.' The other time was in 1980, villagers say, when five to 10 people were bitten by snakes in short order. Mohan Lal, 50, whose son Rahul died suddenly on June 15, said Khera might be angry because someone put makeup and other cosmetics into their field four days earlier. Alternately, it could be because someone stored candy in the cremation ground two years ago. Both are considered taboos. 'It's very painful to lose my son,' said Lal. 'I feel like I've died myself.' Villagers point to other evidence. When resident Raman Kumar died suddenly on July 20, villagers cremated him and returned two days later to throw his unburned remains into the river in keeping with local custom. To their horror, however, his skull, other bits and the burial shroud were missing. Then they realized it was the day of the solar eclipse. Amloha's ghostly goings-on were front-page news across India on Thursday. From early morning, the village's single lane dirt road was clogged with television news crews. 'These TV guys are mad,' said Sohan Lal, about 40, navigating around a satellite truck. 'There's something wrong with their heads.' Some experts note that superstition in India can engender mass events and near-hysteria. In 2006, word spread that the water from a creek in Mumbai located near a Muslim holy man's grave tasted unusually sweet, prompting 10,000 people to show up overnight and hundreds to drink from it. The rationalist association said it urged people not to drink the water and to wait for tests, but most ignored its advice. Eventually, Edamaruku said, it was determined that the taste resulted from silting of human waste and that the water contained 10,000 times the acceptable level of e coli bacteria. 'Even as we try and improve literacy, we often lack scientific literacy despite all the engineers India produces,' he added. 'We'll launch a rocket but have a holy man break a coconut to make sure the timing is auspicious.' On Thursday, elders in Amloha said the recent deaths have generated the most attention the community had received in its long history. The prosperous village of lush rice fields, late-model tractors and 20-foot cones of cow dung fuel lies deep in Harayana, India's most prosperous state, some four hours' drive from New Delhi. 'Actually, nothing at all has ever happened here before,' said Singh. 'We threw the British out in 1947,' Mehar Singh Lambardar, 80, who lives with his father whose age no one can recall, told a reporter. 'You're probably the first foreigner to visit us here since the English pulled out.' Anshul Rana of the Times' New Delhi bureau contributed to this report. 