The Scariest Night

I lived next door to a graveyard when we lived in Battle mountain, NV. It was like this: I could walk out the backdoor of our house and walk about three steps before coming to a chain-link fence. If I stood at that fence, there were graves inches from my feet. It was really creepy at first. Not that they were graves, necessarily. The thing that creeped me out is that so many of them didn't have headstones. Maybe the section over by our house was the paupers' area, but the lucky ones only had little plastic cards stuck into the dirt to identify the remains. These plastic cards reminded me of the things people stab into garden soil to differentiate tomatoes from cucumbers. Once the markers were knocked down by the wind, the graves became silent mounds of dirt. No grass, no flowers, nothing. It made me wonder how many unmarked graves there were in the world, and how often I stepped over someone's bones without knowing it. I remember standing there, fourteen years old, and pondering this, realizing that the graves were not so unsettling to me as the fact that they were unmarked, and that nobody cared about the people buried there.

When I tell others I used to live so close to human remains, lots of people shudder and shiver. They tell me they would have been creeped out all the time, and that they would never have slept in that house. Some even go so far as to insist that they would have somehow prevented their parents from renting there. The brave ones start to ask questions about what I experienced while I was living there. Did I ever smell decomposing bodies? No. Never a smell. Did I hear creepy sounds at night, like of someone singing? No, but then my bedroom was on the opposite side of the house from the graveyard. And I usually listened to music at night. Did I worry about ghosts? No. I never had any reason to believe that the people buried there might somehow wish me ill after their deaths. I felt sorrow and compassion for their loneliness, but not fear.

The truth is, you can get used to just about anything. It only took a few days for the cemetery to become commonplace. Since it didn't really assert its presence in my life, I was able to think about it only when I chose to do so. My mom could send me outside to get something out of the outdoor freezer that stood next to the fence, and I could do so without even thinking about it.

There was only one time the graveyard became creepy at all, and it was Halloween. A specific Halloween. There was something special about one Halloween when I was living there. If memory serves, It was a full moon, and the instance of a full moon on Halloween wasn't terribly common. I remember newscasters advising people to stay in their homes that year because there would be a higher possibility of Halloween mayhem. More to the point, people were advised to bring their pets inside just in case some crazy people decided to have an animal sacrifice.

I don't remember where my mom was, but it was just me and my dad that night. We decided to just stay home and hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. At one point, my dad walked past me through the living room, mentioning something about how he could hear our cat, Rugby, having a problem outside. He thought he would just go bring him in. A moment passed, during which I passively watched TV. My dad came back in with the cat in his arms, and both of them were seriously spooked. Rugby ran into my parents' bedroom to go back outside through a window they kept open so the cats could come and go, but my dad closed it. Rugby stood on his hind legs, with his front feet propped on the windowsill, growling and hissing. He wanted nothing more than to get back outside and show whatever it was out there who was boss.

My dad needed to talk about it. He slumped limply in the living room chair and described the scene. To my teenage mind, it sounded woefully anticlimactic: My dad went outside and found the cat pacing back and forth in front of the fence, growling and hissing at something he perceived in the graveyard. the full moon illuminated the area well, and my dad didn't see anything out there. No people, no cats, no raccoons, nothing. There was just...nothing there.

Again, I was a teenager. "Nothing" just didn't seem very frightening. To my dad, however, "nothing" was a lot worse that "something." If it had been raucous teenagers or feral cats, that would have explained why a big, tough tomcat like Rugby would feel threatened. Pranksters and animals can be chased off with shotguns and brooms. but nothing? What do you do about nothing? How do you fight it?

He didn't let it go. He kept talking about it throughout the evening, and he didn't sleep well that night. It took a long time for Rugby to calm down too. My dad kept getting up and looking out the window, hoping to see something tangible out there that would tell him the source of Rugby's agitation wasn't supernatural. He went back out with a flashlight but found...nothing. In the morning he took a walk into the graveyard to examine the soil. he was an experienced hunter searching for any disturbances in the soil, such as footprints, human or otherwise. he returned to the house grumbling and fretting about it. My mom told him to forget about it, but he couldn't. For weeks, he continued peeking out of windows and puttering around the corner of the yard where he'd found Rugby pacing. He settled down a little, but he never really got over it. He didn't stop telling the story, even after we moved away, even after Rugby died and there was no clear reminder of that night.

For me, I think the effect was cumulative. The events of that night didn't spook me at the time. It was years of hearing my father complain about it that made me start to feel a little unsettled. Also, it probably didn't hurt to outgrow my teenage imperative to Show No Fear. The graveyard became a little scarier when it was far away and I could no longer see it in daylight. The banality of the blank mounds faded under my dad's insistence that there must have been something out there that night. Something was lurking in that graveyard, he believed. We just couldn't see it.

watching my father succumb to fear of the supernatural made it the freakiest thing that ever happened when we lived next door to the graveyard.