Alright, this is my final segment, or whatever, in my Halloween Scary Story blog posts and this one is the grand finale because, well, damnit, the woman was just plain freaky.
Some years back, I had gone to visit one of my best friends, the same friend I said I could play the board with and know she isn’t moving it, and to stay for a few days. This friend and I have known each other for many years and have been through a lot together. I’ve also found one of the very few people on earth who will visit cemeteries with me.
I do not get squeamish or scared at cemeteries. I find them to be amazingly peaceful, quiet, calm, well groomed and I like looking at headstones and thinking about the people who once lived. I wonder what their life was like. I wonder how they died. I wonder if they were happy. I wonder if they had pets and hobbies and dreams. I can spend hours upon hours in a cemetery because it is really one of the only places I can find that is quiet.
So, there I am, with my friend in the small town she spent the last half of her youth in and we decide to go out and do something. Since neither one of us was inclined to go to some neighborhood bar and drink, we opted to hop in the car I had borrowed and drive by cemeteries.
No it’s not weird. Again, I’m skeptical and while I believe there are spirits and ghosts, I do not believe that they are going to rise out of their graves and come after me like zombies or try to run me out or whatever. That’s crap.
After Kristine showed me a few cemeteries and purportedly haunted houses in the area, we drove by the last cemetery for the evening. Now remember, Kristine has lived in this town for years and has driven by this place a hundred times so when we saw a light coming from the cemetery, I’m going to have to take her word that it was not a regular occurrence. Additionally, we both got this really bad feeling to the point that we decided, “This is so not good� and sped away from there.
Safe back at her house, we discussed this and Kristine concluded that perhaps there were teen-agers up there, goofing off, so we decided we would go visit this cemetery and another one the following day.
The next morning, we got up and went to the first cemetery and walked around, looking at headstones, enjoying the peace. I remember standing at one grave and out of the corner of my eye, I swear I saw a little girl, in a dress, standing next to a small wagon. Because I wasn’t expecting anyone else to be there, it startled me but when I whipped my head in that direction, all I saw was a small wagon with a white paint bucket next to it. Ok, ok, it was nothing. It was just a figment of my imagination. Still, I told Kristine about it and we decided it was time to leave that particular cemetery and head on to the next one.
The next one we went to was the one where we had seen the lights the night before and had that bad feeling but hey, it’s now daytime…nothing happens in cemeteries in the daytime right?
We drove up into the cemetery and stopped in front of the wall of urns where people had been cremated. We sat in the car for a few minutes looking at it before deciding to get out. Kristine has a necklace with a cross on it. Basically it’s a cross, hanging from a chain and she has worn this day and night, never taking it off, for about a year. When she stepped out of the car, the cross fell off the chain. The chain was not broken. The loop that held the cross was not broken. To throw a real chill into the picture, the cross fell on to the ground, upside down.
She picked it up and we walked up to the wall of urns and around a sort of alter or whatever it was. Around this alter there were large stone statues of lions. There were claw marks in the stone base and there was old, black wax on the alter. Um….what? Kristine told me that there were Satanists who would come up to this cemetery and do who knows what and told me stories of these statues moving.
Well, of course, unless I see them moving, I’m going to be skeptical but the claw marks…slightly unnerving. I know what you’re thinking…�Someone, maybe one of those Satanists, carved them into the stone.� Fair enough. Still, we’re in a cemetery and to even know that someone would do that isn’t exactly comforting.
We walked back to the wall of urns and Kristine sat down on the little stone bench that was placed in front of it while I stood and surveyed the cemetery below us. Something caught my eye. It was a figure, coming towards us at a very rapid pace. This really, really bad feeling washed over me and for a second I couldn’t say a thing but Kristine was there, with her back to the circular drive and cemetery, talking, and I knew, for some reason, that I needed to tell her to stop talking and not to whirl around.
I could see Kristine go rigid before I said a word. Ok, she sensed it and now I had to confirm it. “Kristine…stop talking….and slowly turn around�, I muttered under my breath as this figure rapidly grew closer and closer. My throat tightened up and it felt hard to breathe as Kristine, very slowly, turned around. By the time she turned around, the woman was up by our car, staring at us. No, boring holes into our skulls. She had this very upset look on her face…anger almost and she would not take her eyes off of us.
The lady was dressed up in a bright pink top, shorts and walking shoes. One would think she was just out jogging or speed walking. The problem was, her hair had just been done and she had a full face of make-up on. It didn’t match. She was around 50 or 60 years old and moved faster than most 20 year olds I know. At first she frightened me and then I got mad. What is her problem? Don’t glare at me, I have every right to visit this cemetery and the last thing I’m going to allow is for some lady to come up and try to scare me off. So I glared right back at her. Daring her to say word one to me.
She didn’t. She veered off the circular drive and towards a section of headstones. She stood at the top of one headstone and did not move for maybe 5-10 minutes. She didn’t kneel down, she didn’t fix the area up, she didn’t talk, she didn’t look around, she just stood at the top of that headstone and stared at us out of the corner of her eye. The biggest problem with this whole scenario is that she was standing so that the headstone was upside down to her.
A whole lot of things are not fitting here. So Kristine, feeling the same way I was, and that is the great thing about having a friend like this, you can tell what they are thinking or doing without having to explain it, started telling me about her G-dmother who was buried here.
It was also unspoken between Kristine and me that we were not to move until this lady moved. So, there she was, eyeballing us, and there we were, Kristine talking about her G-dmother and me eyeballing the lady back. It was a mixture of a charade and determination not to let her scare us, (although, duh, she was scaring us), and this feeling that we were not to move first because, don’t know what, but for some reason, we both had the feeling that we moving first was a very bad idea.
What the lady didn’t count on was the fact that both Kristine and I can be very stubborn if the situation calls for it and when something is telling us not to move first, nothing will make us move first. So, eventually, the lady started walking away, back down to the entrance of the gates to the cemetery.
We watched her as she walked very slowly away. As she got to the end of the circular drive, Kristine and I looked at each other, had another unspoken agreement and jumped back into the car. I drove down the drive and out onto the little car path that weaved its way through the cemetery. We passed the lady.
After we passed her, I looked in my rearview mirror and she was right behind the car. I sped up. I drove another 100 feet, looked in my rearview mirror and the lady was right behind the car. I sped up a little more, Kristine watching out of the passenger side mirror, me glancing up in the rearview mirror and no matter the fact that we were in a car, this lady was walking, we kept speeding up, every time we looked in the mirror, the lady was right behind the car.
I officially freaked out.
I dismissed the posted speed limit and we flew down that car path to the gates of the cemetery. When I looked up in the mirror again, the lady wasn’t right behind the car but she was not as far back as she should have been.
We got to the gates of the cemetery and had to cross a busy road to get into town. As we sat there and waited for the cars to go by, we both kept looking in the mirrors and that woman was gaining on us. She wasn’t sweating, huffing, puffing or anything. She was always, just there. I finally said, “FUCK this� and gunned it across the road. We drove down the road a few yards and looked back. The lady had come out of the cemetery and took a right down that busy road and I swear she was still looking at us. We looked at each other and Kristine then looked back again. The lady had vanished.
Again. I’m not saying the lady was a ghost or spirit but what I am saying is that the whole thing, from her done up hair and make up to standing over a headstone upside down to her consistently being right behind us as we drove out of the cemetery, was very creepy. Most of all though, I will never forget her coming up that circular drive, very fast, towards us with that look of cold anger in her eyes as she stared us down.
This ends the scary or creepy stories I will be telling despite the fact that I have so many more. While I may be a skeptic, one thing I try to do is keep an open mind. We have our beliefs and ideas but what we can all agree on is this: Even though we think we know, we don’t really know at all and we will not know until we physically die. So, even though my logical brain screams that none of it makes sense or that there is always some explanation for it, the other part of me agrees to keep my mind open to the endless possibilities. We only use 10-15% of our brains. Who’s to say that some people can’t tap into different planes of being or feel energy around them. None of us, no matter how wise and well book read we are, know.
<--- Here Endeth The Lesson
