The Graveyard Keeper

An old, abandoned church stood high on the small hill at the edge of town. The moonlight overhead, clung to the edges of the large wooden frame, and cast down eerie shadows from the steeple, adding to the sinister aura of the decaying centuries old building. Shutters hung crooked from the boarded-up windows; some had fallen completely to the ground. The large, double church doors were boarded together, holding them shut in hopes of keeping kids like us out of the crumbling structure. The churchyard in front of the building hadn’t been kept up on in more than a decade. Weeds grew throughout and overgrown bushes had overtaken the wrought iron fence.

We pushed our bikes up the hill and toward the back of the old church. The air was chilly, even for Halloween night but it wouldn’t stop us from completing our dare. We had come this far, we had to finish it. Behind the old church lay a graveyard that was a few centuries old as well. A local urban legend, one much like most small towns, was the graveyard was haunted by the ghost of an old graveyard keeper. How the man had come to pass changed with ever storyteller. In some he fell into a hole and was buried by mistake; another, states that he simply had a heart attack and lay forgotten amongst the graves. Others tell a story of a more sinister fate for the graveyard keeper.

“Adam, how long do we have to stay here?” Katherine asked snapping me from the trance I had fallen in to. I stopped walking and let my bike fall to the ground next to me. I looked to my left at the girl next to me, she stared up at the church with fearful brown eyes. Katherine was the jumpy kind of kid. She found something to be frightened about everywhere we went and other kids at school took advantage of her jumpiness daily. This is how we ended up roped into a dare of spending part of our night in a graveyard.

I turned to look at the boys behind me. Richie Layman, Carson Thomas, and Leo Walsh still perched upon their bikes looked down on us. Richie, the self-proclaimed leader of the pack, smirked at me before climbing off of his own bike and letting it fall to the ground.

“The deal was you would stay until sunup, Scaredy-Kat,” Richie taunted, using the nickname they had given Katherine three years before when she had moved to Westville, Pennsylvania. “Unless you’re too scared.”

“She’s not too scared, we can do this,” I intervened. I hated that they picked on her so relentlessly. My hope was that if we made it through the night, they would finally leave her alone and stop calling her Scaredy-Kat.

Leo laughed; his tanned face lit up against the moonlight. He wore a pull-over hoodie with the school’s mascot on it, the same one everyone on the swim team wore. “We’ll be down here watching all night, so don’t think you two can sneak off and we won’t notice.”

“Don’t worry we won’t,” said Katherine quietly. Her frizzy, tawny hair looked windblown and out of control. She turned to me and smiled half-heartedly. “Are you ready?”

I nodded and turned to look back at the three boys watching for us to fail, all of them smiled, sure that they would win the dare. I turned back to look at the church before the two of us began making our ascent up the hill toward the church.

We rounded the hill to the back of the church where the gate was to enter the graveyard. I pushed on the large, heavy wrought iron gate and with a loud CREEEEK, it opened enough for the two of us to squeeze through. The dark churched peered down at us eerily. I gulped, trying to keep myself calm, knowing if I began to feel fear for the night ahead of us, there was no way we would make it until the sun started to rise.

“What do we do around here for another two hours?” whispered Katherine, her eyes wide as she looked ahead. The graveyard was full of gravestones of all different shapes and sizes. The large yard was packed until the point they couldn’t fit anyone else. I knew a fair amount of them at the far end of the property, when the church was still thriving were from the Yellow Fever outbreak. It had spread from Philadelphia to this blossoming town and taken the lives of many of the citizens. Learning about it in history class, the plague had almost killed the town along with it’s citizens.

“Well we could sit out the night here, or we could walk around and check things out.”

“If we sit it out here that will leave us open for the graveyard keeper to sneak up on us,” Katherine’s voice shook.

“There are no such things as ghosts Katherine, you have nothing to be afraid of but if it makes you feel better we can walk the perimeter to keep our minds busy,” I told her with a small rub on her back in a poor attempt to comfort her.

She nodded and took my arm with her hand and we began walking along the perimeter of the large graveyard. The graveyard had been cleaned up recently, it was kept up by the new church that had been built down the road. The preacher thought it would be a shame not to maintain the final resting place of these people.

Some of the gravestones sat crooked over their graves, some of the limestone had oxidized and made it nearly impossible to read what the stones had once said. The leaves of the trees lining the property had changed and many had fallen. The crunch of the leaves and twigs beneath our feet started to put me on edge.

After reaching the far edge of the property, the wind had begun to blow harder and howled over the church and through the trees. Katherine pulled her hair up in the pink band she wore on her arm trying to keep her frizzy mop out of her face. I placed my baseball cap on her head hoping it would help keep the hair from blowing around her face even in the ponytail.

“We should have brought flashlights,” I said. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned on the dim flashlight. It didn’t do much to help us maneuver through the graves. I looked to my right and saw a large headstone with an angel on top. It was one of the few gravestones that could be seen from the bottom of the hill. I had always wondered who the grave had belonged to. “Can we go and look at that gravestone?”

Katherine latched back onto my arm and nodded. The two of us carefully and silently walked through the yard to the large gravestone. It read Margaret Poole 1845 – 1860, beloved daughter.

“She was our age,” Katherine whispered, “how sad. I wonder what she died from.”

A large THUD pulled our attention from the grave of Margaret Poole to somewhere behind it. It sounded like a gravestone had fallen over. Katherine trembled, and her nails had dug into the soft flesh of my upper arm.

“Hello?” I called out into the darkness. We waited a moment with no response. I turned to look at Katherine who had frozen in fear. “Maybe it was just the wind.”

“Who’s there,” a deep, gruff voice asked. I peeked around the large gravestone, Katherine peering over my shoulder. A man stood, hunched slightly a few graves away. His long hair was scraggly and blew in the wind. The darkness hid his face from us but his tattered clothes made it clear that he was the graveyard keeper. Katherine yelped causing me to jump and the two of us darted toward the back fence of the graveyard.

I ran behind Katherine, terror racing through me. The crunching of footsteps behind me made my heart skip a beat. I tripped over a rock near one of the graves and tumbled to the ground with a groan. Katherine turned to look at me, only able to look on with fear as the graveyard keeper hovered over me. I looked up and tried to stand up before he grabbed ahold of my arm.

The graveyard keeper began to chuckle, and two other figures came out from behind headstones to join him. I knew we had been set up by Richie and his goons once again. I stood up and brushed the dirt from my clothing. Katherine stepped forward to help.

“That was a terrible prank to pull, he could have gotten hurt,” Katherine scolded them.

“It would have been fine if you hadn’t been such a Scaredy-Kat,” Richie replied with a shrug.

Katherine glared at him and crossed her arms. I shook my head and finally faced the three boys in front of me. “Seriously guys, that wasn’t funny. How long were you planning this?”

“We came up with the plan this morning, right before we dared you two to come up here,” Leo proudly told us.

“Can we go home now?” I growled. “Our parents are going to be worried and this was a waste of time.”

Richie laughed and said, “Sure, we got what we wanted out of this Halloween.”

I turned toward Katherine and took her arm and began pulling her toward the graveyard entrance, next to the old church. I stopped in my tracks as soon as I saw it. A candle was lit in the window near the entrance. The old building was boarded up since before I was born, they had made it nearly impossible to get inside.

“How’d you guys get inside to light that candle in the second story window?” I asked looking back to them. They stepped out and looked toward the church.

“We didn’t light that,” Carson said. “There was no candle when we came in here.”

“Okay guys, the games are over, I just wanted to know how you got in, it’s boarded up pretty tight,” I said and began walking toward the church with Katherine in tow.

“Did one of you light it?” I heard Richie ask his friends. I heard Carson and Leo murmur something but didn’t pay any mind to what their words were. Then I heard a scream of terror causing Katherine and I to spin around.

Richie, Carson, and Leo all stood in terror as they faced a large man behind them. His long, pointed fingers had wrapped onto Richie’s muscular arm. The man had long, dirty hair that clumped together as it blew in the wind. A rancid smell of rot had floated through the wind into my nose. Katherine and I were also frozen in terror at the sight before us.

“Get out!” the deep, booming voice of the man yelled at us. He lifted his face enough for the moonlight to give us a glimpse of the rotten flesh, where a face should have been. All five of us screamed. Richie wiggled free and we all began running toward the entrance of the graveyard.

Katherine and I were the first to make it too our bikes but we could hear the heavy breathing of the boys behind us. We got onto our bikes and began to peddle as fast as we could away from the graveyard. Katherine and I made it to our neighborhood in half the time it normally took us to get there. I walked her to her door before bolting to my own across the street.

None of us ever mentioned that night again and no one ever called, Katherine, Scaredy-Kat, again. Even now, when the leaves begin to change, and the weather grows cold, I can remember the fear that coursed through me that Halloween night.

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