The Haunted Cemetery

Last night I was invited to visit a local “haunted” cemetery with a co-worker, her daughter and her daughter’s friends. Since Dave has been busy finishing up an application for a post-doctoral position (no, he’s not done with his degree yet, but this is just a proactive approach to having something lined up whenever he does finish) so I figured it would be something fun to do while Dave was still working.

I was picked up by my co-worker and a car full of giggling 14-year-olds and we were off. The kids were setting the scene with all of the stories they had heard about people seeing ghosts there. I hadn’t even heard of this place before this weekend so I wasn’t thinking anything would happen to us. We arrived, parked, grabbed our flashlights and headed to the cemetery entrance.

There was a path which was not very wide leading to the actual cemetery entrance gate. The kids led the group and I was last in the bunch. We traveled down the path, crossed a wooden bridge and finally came to the entrance gate. The cemetery was very old with many graves dating back to the 1800s. The place is very disorganized and gravestones were just sort of randomly placed around us, some right next to the narrow path. Some graves had tiny headstones, others had larger headstones, some which had fallen over and were cracked, and other graves were surrounded by either a white or iron fence. Although I wasn’t scared, it was still a little creepy to be in a cemetery so late at night on Halloween.

We followed the path for a while longer and came to a stop near the end of the trail. The kids were a little freaked out because they thought they had heard rustling in some bushes up ahead and were deciding whether or not to continue and try to find some sort of marker which supposedly listed the names of all of the people buried there. I was looking past our group and thought I saw the figure of a person in the distance. I turned to my co-worker to ask if she saw what I was seeing and then we heard a woman’s blood curdling scream maybe 20 feet in front of us. Everyone jumped, turned around and began to run at full speed out of the cemetery. Fight or Flight mode kicked in and the only thing I was concerned about was getting the heck out of there, and fast. One of the girls in the group had tripped and fallen on the ground and quickly jumped back up to get moving again. I had such a strong instinct to get out of there that I passed a couple of the kids and was jumping over headstones in my attempt to get out of there. We got to the entrance gate and heard the scream again, but in the distance. Since we figured nothing was actually chasing us we slowed our sprint down to a fast jog down the path, over the wooden bridge and out the first gate we had gone through and jumped in the car at lightning speed. The car engine started and we drove away from that place as fast as we could.

I don’t know if that scream came from a real person stationed there with some friends waiting to scare people or if it was a paranormal thing, but either way it sure scared the crap out of all of us and we all had the same instinct to run as fast as we could out of there. The cemetery trip was definitely a fun break from the normal Halloween routine, even if the whole adventure lasted only 10 minutes from when we got out of the car to when we ran back in it. I’ll never forget this night! Happy Halloween!