My local cemetery is not haunted.
No one has ever heard the wailings of a ghost here, no serial killer has ever been buried here (that I’m aware of), and there have been no recorded sightings of cultists performing rituals around any grave here.
But I wouldn’t call it normal, either.
It just popped up one day. I think it was May something. I mean it’s not like it didn’t exist before then or anything. It had always been here, nestled comfortably in the deforested stretch of land beside us– long before Ethel Commons was even built, it would seem. And yet for some reason, nobody really paid it any attention in the past. At least not until that one post by Susanne Mallory on the neighborhood’s Facebook page.
“Does anyone know who keeps the Willowcrest lawn so nice?? I NEED to hire whoever does it!” The post read.
“What’s Willowcrest?” Mr. Collins, the gruff man with the two Pitbull on Mayfield Boulevard, wrote beneath.
“The cemetery.” She replied, her contempt for Mr. Collins’ barking dogs almost visually noticeable.
“We have a cemetery?” Ambrose Rose, the weird middle-aged neighbor, asked.
“The one behind our neighborhood.” Susanne commented, continuing the reply chain. “Am I the only one who lives here??”
And so it was.
The collective eyes of Ethel Commons were opened that day to Willowcrest, the cemetery nestled right between our neighborhood and Westin High, in the forest. The entire neighborhood quickly caught on, and it wasn’t long before the place was uncovered.
One neighbor, I think it was Michael Haley (the softball coach for St. Andrews’), found a convenient path leading from the south side of the neighborhood to the back entrance of the cemetery, through a winding breadth of oak trees and rosebushes.
After which, people started going down to Willowcrest on the regular. It became a popular destination for jogs and dog walks for those in Ethel Commons, especially for the people who hated the limited lawn space the designers of the neighborhood carelessly left them with.
Obviously I was a regular, too. In fact, along with a couple of my neighborhood friends, I was one of the first people to ever explore the place. As a active teen boy, the urge for adventure was always calling me, and the newly uncovered territory of Willowcrest gave me new material to explore.
Describing the place wouldn’t do it proper justice, but I’ll try anyway.
It’s a pretty open space without many trees, which is pretty bizarre given the fact that it’s surrounded by thick groves of Oak trees, but it was. It has many nice benches and gazebos to rest in, along with several natural canopies of Willow trees to take shade under. It has long patches of lush, well-trimmed grass covering the entire expanse of the 75 acres of land. It made total sense why Susanne wanted the same lawn service so badly after exploring the place for the first time. Rolling hills topped with white marble gravestones stretched out as far as you could see, until the backdrop of trees cut them off. The whole area smelled like fresh cut grass and roses, and the sun basked the whole place in an ethereal glow of warmth.
Honestly, Willowcrest was so breathtaking it made me wonder how nobody had ever really noticed it before until Susanne mentioned it. I chalked it up to the secluded nature of the place.
The first day I went, my friends and I ran through the across the whole place together, laughing and yelling the whole way. We dove past graves and pots of flowers as we chased each other under the warm Spring sun, enjoying the feel of soft grass beneath our bare feet. We spent the whole afternoon chasing each other through rows of Willow trees. We came home panting and sticky with sweat, but thoroughly excited for the next time we could do it again.
That day was the highlight of my week, and we quickly made it a usual after-school activity.
Some moms in the neighborhood had qualms about the place, after kids like us started going daily. But unlike anywhere else moms would usually complain about, there was nothing for them to go off of. Nobody sketchy ever hung out there, no drug deals ever took place in a gazebo or anything. In fact, nobody really hung out there at all, besides people from Ethel Commons.
The entire time I knew about the cemetery, I don’t think I ever saw one person I didn’t know there. Not even visitors coming to grieve, which in retrospect was odd. But it felt like our neighborhood’s own private little park, and there was nothing that could prevent me and the other kids from making use of it.
Luckily, my mom wasn’t a helicopter parent like some people I knew, and always let me go. She told me to always come back before dark, and leave immediately if anything strange ever happened there, to which I readily agreed to without a second thought.
But I have to admit. I would be lying if I said there wasn’t anything strange about Willowcrest. Nothing strange enough to tell my mom, of course. It wasn’t like it was dangerous stuff or anything, but the oddities of the place seemed to mount each time I visited.
For one, none of the graves in the cemetery had dates on them. Now, this might seem like kind of a stupid concern, because a lot of families choose not to put dates on their loved one’s graves. But I mean like NONE of them had dates.
You could walk the entire length of the cemetery and you wouldn’t be able to find a single date; birth or death. Just names, really. And the names themselves were kind of odd, too. Not because they were strange names, but because they weren’t.
Names like: Michael Scott, John Andrews, Phillip Harvey, James Johnson, William Robert…
You get the point.
All were strangely normal, like someone had looked up ‘top 25 most common names’ and pasted them on the graves. There were even a few repeats, if you went deep enough into Willowcrest. I swear I’ve seen at least three different James Walkers before, maybe more.
Not to mention all of he graves were always completely clean. Like, would make Gordon Ramsey cry tears of joy type of clean. So pristinely white and unblemished that you could see your own reflection on half of them. All of them were so perfectly cut, engraved and cleaned that you’d think there’d be a whole legion of cleaners with scrub and spray in hand, washing the stones ‘round the clock. But there weren’t.
In fact, I had never seen any maintenance workers out. Ever.
I had never seen anyone cut the grass, anyone trim the trees, rake the leaves, or even put the seemingly always-fresh-flowers in the pots in front of the graves. And I had been to Willowcrest every time of the day, even night sometimes when I wasn’t suppose to, on the rare occasions I was dared to lick a grave or something. And in all those times, morning, evening, afternoon or night, it was always vacant. If it wasn’t so well kept, I would have assumed it was abandoned.
But I never really thought much of all this stuff. I mean, why would I? I was just a teen boy with too much time on his hands, making use of the newfound space beside his neighborhood with his friends.
But all of this really came on its head on one cold night in November.
I was having a sleepover at my friend Andrew’s house with a couple other guys. We were chilling around, talking about girls, eating pizza and playing some Mario cart on the Switch, usual Friday stuff. It was well after midnight when one of the guys, David, called for a game of truth or dare.
“Who’s up for a dare?” David called from behind the couch, turning off the console as he spoke.
A murmur of collective agreement could be heard around the room in response, minus the annoyed shouting of Isaac, who had been playing the Switch. We all quickly gathered around the foldable table, in a circle, and began the game.
I was up first.
“Truth or dare?” David asked me.
“Dare.” I replied. I was no pussy.
“I dare you…” There was a mischievous gleam in his eyes that made me instantly regret playing with him. David was known for his particularly harsh challenges, especially after he challenged Charlie to pull down an old lady’s pants last month.
I really had no clue what to expect from him, but I knew it wouldn’t be good.
“…To dig up a grave in Willowcrest.”
There was a collective gasp around the table. Dares were usually harsh at guy’s night, but this was a step too far. Way too far.
“What the actual hell?” Nathan quietly shouted. “That’s not even a dare. That’s straight up illegal.”
Several heads nodded in agreement with him.
“So what?” David challenged. “Are any of our dares legal?”
Nathan didn’t have a reply to that, so he shut up.
As I seat on my foldable chair thinking about the dare, I felt my blood run cold. The thought of digging up a coffin in the now pitch-black cemetery was beyond disturbing. I had done dares involving going out there after dark before, but still, nothing like this.
“David. I- I can’t do that.” I stammered. “That’s messed up.”
Low murmurs of agreement reverberated around the room.
“Oh, come on!” David’s arms flailed out in an exasperated plea. “Am I friends with a bunch of losers?”
Nobody responded.
“Just find a really old grave, one no one really cares about more. Then just dig it up, put it back, and call it a day. Not so hard, huh?” he continued. “Hell, I’ll even help him if it means Marcus doesn’t soil his pants while doing it.”
Silence filled the still room as David ended his plea.
I regret this decision more then anything, but I accepted the dare. I couldn’t chicken out, it wasn’t in my blood.
“I’ll do it.” I said.
I accepted it because I convinced myself it wouldn’t hurt anyone, especially if the grave was old.
I would go there with David, find a grave, dig it up, put it back, then get the hell out of there. Anything to not be labeled a wimp.
David and I got two shovels out of Andrew’s garage, on the promise that we’d return them–clean–immediately afterwards. We then continued to walk across the neighborhood, cutting through various lawns in the process, before reaching dark path that led into Willowcrest.
Going down to the cemetery after dark was always a surreal experience, but this time the feeling was exemplified by the act I knew I was about to commit.
The forest was naturally dark. Without a full moon, the cemetery and surrounding area was nearly pitch black. Luckily David brought a flashlight to guide the way. We twisted through the winding path until it opened up to the main area of the cemetery.
I basked in the sight of it for a moment. Darkness enveloped the rolling hills of gravestones, like a fog spreading over a marsh. The only small sources of light came from the graves, which impressively reflected whatever small light bounced off of them, to the point that they almost glowed.
“Which one are we going for?” I asked David, trying to hide the quiver in my voice. I was glad it was dark, otherwise he might have seen me shaking.
“Westside. Graves are oldest there.”
I’m pretty sure he was making that up, since all the graves looked exactly the same, and had no dates on them, but I wasn’t about to correct him. I just wanted it over with as soon as possible.
We walked for several minutes before coming across a a medium-sized patch of grass huddled between two large Willow trees, whose branches spiraled high into the night sky like the tendrils of an ancient sea creature.
“Here’s a good spot. It’s hidden from easy view.” David said.
“Which grave?” I asked. There were about half a dozen stones lined up between the two trees, all with similarly generic names engraved on them.
“This one.” He pointed to the one on the far right with his flashlight.
John Smith it read.
Seemed as good of a grave as any, but still I shuddered at the thought of what I was about to do with David.
David began rolling up his sleaves.
“C’mon. We don’t have all night.” He yelled.
And so we began. Shovel after shovel full of dirt was aggressively torn from the grass just below the grave, and into the increasing pile to the right of it. I hadn’t realized before how hard digging would be. It was long, hard, monotonous work.
After about twenty minutes of constant digging, we barely scratched half a foot into the soil.
“How deep are graves anyway?” I asked David, sweating away while burying his foot in another shovel-full of dirt.
“Shut up and keep digging.” Was all he said in reply.
We kept at it for what seemed like hours, making very small progress at a time. Every time we got deeper, it became harder to dig. The dirt seemed to keep getting harder, and the hole quickly became so narrow only one of us could dig at a time.
I started getting more nervous the deeper we got. My heart started fluttering the more I thought about the complete illegality of what we were doing.
Right before I was about to call it off, dare or no dare, David hit something.
Clank. Came the sound of the shovel hitting something hard.
We were maybe three feet into the dirt, which I thought was way too shallow for anything to be buried. But my assumption was quickly disproven as David wiped dirt away from the uncovered hard substance, revealing the top of a wooden coffin.
“Eureka.” He said.
Seeing the actual coffin made me rethink everything. It suddenly became very real, what we were doing, and it made me incredibly uncomfortable.
“Holy–” I began. “David, listen… I just don’t think we should be–”
“Marcus.” He looked up at me from inside the hole. “I’m gonna do this whether you go home or not. So, are you gonna be a fucking pussy and go home? Or are you gonna help me get this damn thing out?”
There was no going back after that. Nerves or no nerves, I was gonna get it done.
We continued to dig. We didn’t need to go deeper anymore, we just need to dig more around the sides to expose it. My arms were so sore at that point, that each shovel of dirt felt like a hundred-pound weight at the end of a stick, but we kept on. There was no chance I was gonna be called a pussy by David. Not this time. I ignored my beating hart, increasingly speeding up the more we uncovered.
At some point, after the billionth shovel full of dirt, I bean to worry that we’d be out there all night. The dark air seemed to grow thick around me, reminding me that I wasn’t suppose to be there. My mom would be looking for me if I wasn’t home in the morning.
I knew this had to be fast. I continued to dig.
After another half hour or so of digging, the coffin was finally fully exposed. What stared back at us from beneath our freshly dug hole was abnormally clean.
It was a fine mahogany coffin, strapped with iron casings that ran the length of its five and half foot lid. It was pristine, like the graves, despite having sat in the dirt for who knows how long. Which was the oddest part about it, and gave me a noticeably uncomfortable feeling.
It gave me shudders, for some reason. I felt like I should have been anywhere but there. I felt like I was looking at something I shouldn’t have been looking at.
“So?” David roughly pushed me. “What are you waiting for?”
“What do you mea–”
No. He wouldn’t. I wasn’t gonna open that thing.
“You can’t be seriously asking me to open it, right?” I asked nervously. “That wasn’t part of the damn deal.”
He took a seat on the outskirts of the hole, his feet dangling mere inches from the lid of the coffin
“We already did the work,” he started “so why not? I’ve always wanted to know what these things looked like inside.”
The way his voice bubbled with curiosity gave me second guesses about the meaning behind this dare.
“Well I’m not.” I finally put my foot down, and my shovel. I was officially done with this whole thing. If he wanted to do it, I wouldn’t stop him. But I did my part, that’s all I needed to know.
“Okay then, loser.” He scoffed, as I walked towards the nearby Willow tree and sat below its branches to catch my breath. “I’ll just do it myself.”
I closed my eyes for a moment as I sat against the tree, soaking in everything that had happened. If my mom ever found out I had been digging a–
“WHAT THE FUCK?”
My eyes flew open. That couldn’t be good.
I quickly got up and ran over to David, who was leaning over the coffin, looking into it with a white face and pale fingers clutching the flashlight.
As I got closer, I followed his view, and looked into the hole.
At first, I couldn’t tell what it was. It took several moments for my eyes to adjust to the contents of the dark coffin. All I could see was the white outline of something.
“It’s… Plastic” David stammered behind me.
“It’s fucking plastic.” He kept repeating over and over like a broken record.
I took the flashlight from his cold hands, shining it on the hole.
What stared back at me, I’ll never forget.
It was a skeleton. Not just any skeleton, but a pristine, white as snow skeleton. No blemishes, no dark spots, no decaying tissue or rotten flesh just… A perfectly white skeleton.
Looking at it closer, shining the flashlight across it, the bones had an unmistakable gleam of…. Something. I don’t know what it looked like, but it didn’t look like human bones, despite the fact that I’d never seen them before.
Taking a chance, I reached down in the hole, leaning my hole body off of it, and reached out my hands to touch the sternum of the skeleton.
It felt like plastic. Hollow plastic.
“What the hell?”
As I hung off the side of the hole, looking down at the skeleton, I felt dread wash over my body. It was plastic, David was right.
I didn’t know what to do with that information. I couldn’t process it, so I just hung over the hole, staring into it.
After several moments, I heard David taking off behind me, probably running home to forget this whole night had ever happened. I felt his feet pounding away as I continued to stare into the dark abyss long after he left.
I did my best to cover up everything. I shoved most of the dirt I could back in, and smoothed it out with my shoes.
I ran back home that night with equal parts confusion, fear and resolve boiling in my chest. I knew never wanted to look in another coffin again, and I knew I could never stomach going to Willowcrest ever again after what I saw.
My local cemetery is not haunted, but I’m still never going back.
It’s hard to be haunted when there are no souls inside.