Johnny and the Cemetery Late at Night

At the end of Johnny and Dan’s street there was a cemetery with a chapel and crematorium and lots of graves and headstones in rows. Some of the granite markers were from the Civil War, so the graveyard was there before Johnny’s house was built during World War One.

There were soldiers resting places for a number of wars over the last two centuries or so.

On a warm July early evening Johnny and Dan were on the sidewalk looking down at the end of the street and the green hills of the cemetery. The graveyard was a pleasant place to walk, and the keeper would not allow ‘bike riding’ along the paths anymore. There had been ‘incidents’ that some said would raise the dead.

“Yup! To the graveyard!” Johnny said as they headed south down the street toward the black wrought iron fence. The two whistled a marching tune as they trundled along.

“Were you ever afraid of the cemetery?” Dan asked.

“No, never, I just thought ghosts were in movies and on tv and in books, doesn’t the library have a whole section on ghosts or dead spirits and such?” Johnny mused as they crossed the side street to the gates and wall and fence.

“So,” Johnny added, “I don’t think they need a wall, since the people inside can’t get out, and the people outside mostly don’t want to go in. This girl ran up to me at the cemetery a while back and said "I need to pass through the cemetery but I'm scared to walk alone. Can you walk with me across?"

I said "Oh yeah of course. Don't worry, I used to be super scared of cemeteries when I was alive too."

As Johnny and Dan strolled through the main gate of the Cedar Grove Cemetery they saw the head grounds keeper Rusty. He had red hair and Johnny thought he had probably gotten the name…. Well, the name was not because of any rapid oxidation.

One dark night, the two men were walking home after a few drinks at the Eire pub and decide to take a shortcut through the cemetery. Just about in the middle of the cemetery they are startled by a tap-tap-tapping noise coming from the misty shadows. Trembling with fear, they find an old man with a hammer and chisel, chipping away at one of the headstones. They assumed it was Rusty.

“Yikes,” Johnny said after catching his breath. “You scared us half to death. We thought you were a ghost! What are you doing, working here so late at night?”
“Those fools!” the figure grumbled. “They misspelled my name!”

Just then grounds keeper Rusty called to them from far across the rows of graves, “Closed at night, get out!”

Later, at home as the two men watched ‘Creature Double Feature’ Johnny declared. “I still don’t believe in ghosts, that could have been an multidimensional being.”

“Or Big Foot, he was kinda big,” added Dan. The two ate popcorn. Another friend came over in time for the second movie, but, he was not a ghost, and did not believe in ghosts. But all three wanted ghost stories.

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