Come Celebrate Spooky Season With Me

[Ninurta]

All of your adventures sound so exciting! I’ve been trying to talk my hubby into going with me to a cemetery close to here that is in the middle of nowhere. No luck yet but he’ll give in eventually.

Be careful of those cemetery trips. I'm gonna tell you a tale, a true one, that happened several years ago.

It was one year in the late '70s or early '80s, and I had been to visit a young lady who lived a couple miles from me. In those days, I walked just about everywhere I went around here, because I often went off road where nothing but a mule or goat could travel, and walking was easier than leaving a car beside the road and ending up walking anyhow when I went off-road.

It was actually Halloween night, Samhain, and there was a full or near full moon. I never carried a flashlight, because I had good night vision, and that night, with the moonlight bright and flooding nearly every nook and cranny, was almost as bright as day to me anyhow, so I didn't need one.

A little over half way home, there was a long hill called "Big Jim Hill", named after Big Jim Hess, I believe, and at the top of the hill stood an old barn with an old cemetery next to it. If you plug 36°57'18.89" N  82°00'49.49" W into Google earth or Google Maps and zoom in, you can see the barn and what appears to be a garden spot nearby, and the cemetery was a fenced-in area between the two.

So one thing led to another, and time slipped by faster than I thought it was slipping, and I got a little bit of a late start heading home from the visit. I left there at about 10:30 PM, and topped Big Jim Hill, on foot, at about 11:00 PM on that Halloween night. At the top of the hill, across from the cemetery, there is a low rock ledge, about seat height, and so I took a seat on it to rest and relax after climbing the hill. I was young and dumb, full of piss and vinegar, and was certain that I owned the night anyhow, so not much scared me. I wasn't worried about man or beast sneaking up and getting me, so I sat down for a relax, secure as could be.

I had sat there maybe 4 or 5 minutes when a breeze picked up, and running through branches and leaves, it made sort of a moaning sound that I was used to hearing, having spent most of my days and a good share of my nights outdoors in the fields and forests. So I thought nothing of it. Directly, I caught a bit of movement out of the corner of my eye in the moonlight, towards the little cemetery, and that drew my attention - being unafraid of the night is not the same thing as being oblivious to what is going on around you.

So I directed my attention to the movement, and lo and behold, across the dirt road in the cemetery, I saw in the moonlight what looked like columns of mist rising out of 5 or 6 of the graves in there. "What a curious thing" I thought to myself, and started to get up and cross the road to investigate, but about half way across the road, I realized that the breeze was strong enough that it ought to be dissipating those mists, yet there they were, rising like columns, undisturbed in the least by that breeze.

That struck me as just a little TOO curious, so I mended my direction of travel to the right, towards home, and picked up my pace a bit. A fairly BIG bit.

I have no idea what it was rising from those graves. A skeptic might say "decomposition gasses", but most of those folks had been dead and buried for between 50 and 100 years already, and to my mind should have already been as outgassed as they would ever be long ago. And there was the breeze to consider, the thing that first drew my curiosity. If it was natural decomposition gasses, or even a mere fog rising, why didn't that breeze blow it all willy-nilly? How did the rising columns stay discrete in the face of it?

So I hauled ass for home.
 
A further 300 yards or so down the road, the road passed under a rock cliff with a little hole or cave going back into it on my right as I passed. Just as I got under the cliff on my way, there was a bloodcurdling yowl from the top of the cliff. When I looked up, there sat a bobcat on the edge of the cliff in the moonlight, yowling at me. He looked like he was half again as big as any I'd seen before, but you know how your eyes can play tricks on you when the adrenaline is running high, so maybe not.

In any event, I mended my pace a bit more for speed, and made it back home in record time.

And that is my tale of that long ago Halloween night.


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