A Strange Occurrence in a Graveyard

I’m a student of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S., Canada. I’m in my third year at this point and have a handful of friends that I hang around so as to not get bored in this extremely mundane town. I’m not the biggest on parties and drinking super hard (a shot with friends once in a while isn’t so bad), so there’s not much for one to do in town since the only places of interest - that aren’t another friend’s room to hang out in - are bars. But it’s still a fun town to wander around at night.

One of my friends - I’ll call him R - and I have been all over the area. We’ve walked along the old highway, the new highway, railroad tracks, through the local park, just across campus. It’s not something we every single day, but it’s more often than not that we just get bored hanging around his apartment (after three years, Halo night tends to lose its luster). So we walk.



Last night, while we were messing around in the park at around 1 AM, I made a suggestion. Behind our campus and across the highway, there’s an old and large graveyard on a wide hill called St. Ninian’s Cemetery. You could even see it from the student union building. Now I had been there as a child, when my mom wanted to go find the grave of her uncle, but I barely remembered the experience. So I asked R if he wanted to go and try to find my great-uncle’s grave. He said “hell yeah” and we were on our way back across town.

The journey there took us along the highway, but it was pretty dead at this hour, so we goofed around and walked down the middle of the road. We weren’t drunk or under any influence, I should add. Otherwise, we probably would have been slipping on all of the ice that covered the cemetery roads. Despite being January, the temperature had been a bit higher the last few days, and so there was lots of slush and water sitting on top of ice for an unfocused mind to slip on. There was still a cold wind though, and lots of snow on the ground, so we were bundled up appropriately. As we approached our target destination, R and I both jumped for a moment at how it looked like someone was wandering the place, as we both saw a light moving between the graves. But then we realized it was a combination of night lights on the graves and the reflection of other light sources as we got closer that made them appear to move. Regardless, it gave us a quick jump and kept us on our toes.

Not long after, we were crossing over the cold pavement with some haste to set foot on the frozen dirt road of the graveyard. There wasn’t a gate preventing us from getting in, so as far as we were concerned, it was open season. The sky was cloudy, so the night was fairly bright. Thanks to this, we were able to make out the basic layout of the cemetery from the entrance. There was a mausoleum right on the left as you entered, and to the left of that was a beautiful new cemetery shrine. The main road continued up the hill, where trees began to line the sides as you reached the top. At the top of the hill and a bit to the right was a massive crucifix. I took one picture of the cemetery later when we were climbing up the road, but it does not include the shrine or the crucifix. And I ain’t going back for another picture.

Entering a graveyard at night was a bit nerve wracking for no particular reason, so we decided to just take a look at the shrine right quick, which was heavily illuminated under some street lights. As we approached it though, I stopped dead in my tracks as I heard a “ha, ha” in the distant. It was an odd laugh, not a natural one, but disjointed - almost like someone just saying the words “ha ha”. I was already a little on edge after being fooled by the lights, so this just shot goosebumps down my back in an instant. I held my hand out to R, gesturing to stop and listen. There were no other sounds that followed, so I turned to R and asked if he had heard it. I suppose the question was unwarranted; his widened eyes told me everything before he nodded.

We scanned what we could see of the cemetery, but there were no signs of movement. I asked aloud, without shouting, if there was anyone else there, but got no answer. To take a moment to catch our wits before making our way into the cemetery, we stayed next to the shrine for a bit, comforted by the bright light and jokes about how it looked like something that would have a hidden passage in a video game. Then, once we were ready, we turned on the light features of our phones and proceeded up the road. R fell on his ass instantly, due to the incline and massive amounts of ice all over the dirt path. I nearly followed suit, so we tried to walk on the side without stepping on any graves. The wind was still gentle, but it brought with it a stink that we thought was manure from the many farms in the area. It was a common thing on campus during the spring and fall; random days where the whole campus smelled of cow pies.

I could vaguely remember the general location of my great-uncle’s grave, enough to know that it wasn’t right at the front of the cemetery, but somewhere at least on top of the hill. So we aimlessly wandered around, looking for my family name on one of the epitaphs. We found a few with the right surname, but the first name and dates didn’t match up. R went down for a second time, and I also took a tumble on the road. We laughed quietly and helped each other up, before continuing the search.



As I was wandering about, I shined the light down at my feet for a second to see where it was safe to step. What I found instead was this: a bone. After exclaiming in surprise, I called R over for him to take a look. He was also intrigued by the find. It had no meat on it, no blood splatter; it was simply stripped clean. It was pretty creepy to just find a bone lying in the middle of a graveyard like that, but the whole area was surrounded by forest, so it was more likely the remains of some feral cat or dog’s dinner.



Despite all of the doubts and explanations I was giving myself, I could feel a pool of dread beginning to fill in my heart. I couldn’t really tell if R felt the same way, mostly because we were telling dumb stories to each other to distract ourselves. As time wore on, it was getting a bit colder and R just wanted to head back soon. Since we were reasonable young adults, I said we should split up and search, since we both had our own light sources, which would make things go faster. R agreed to about another twenty minutes of searching, and so we split off.

Then, with only a few minutes left before we were ready to call it, I found it - my great-uncle’s gravestone. I felt an aura of pleasant surprise upon realizing it was the correct one, and I made sure to take a picture of it (I’ve hidden the name and dates for my own anonymity). I began to call out to R to tell him I’d found it, but we ended up interrupting each other. His shout, however, was much more panicked.

I stood up, hurried my way around the graves, and jogged across the ice to where he was shouting from. I met up with him halfway, but before I could ask what was going on, he simply grabbed my arm and yanked me to wherever he wanted to go. It was over on the right-hand side of the cemetery; I could tell thanks to the approaching crucifix. When we finally stopped, R pointed to the ground for me to look. At first I thought he was just showing me a grave in progress, but that was before I noticed the bones scattered about. Or the bloodstained snow. Finally, a waft of the terrible stench arose and hit me, and I was forced to keel over in disgust. R said that he nearly walked into the hole, but he had caught the strength of the wind’s stink increasing first, and stopped before he had fallen in. It was an absolute mess, the whole thing. The coffin lid was almost off its hinge, and what parts remained of the corpse inside it were flopped on top of each other. A half eaten skull stared at me; one side rotted but still intact, the other cleaned to the bone. And by how fresh the pile of soil was, we could only assume that whatever had done this, man or beast, was still nearby.

Obviously, R didn’t really give a shit anymore about seeing my great-uncle’s grave, and I completely understood. We decided to get the hell out of Dodge and rushed down the icy road as best we could. As we jogged, I took a look behind us, paranoid that whatever had dug up the grave was following us. I was right to be paranoid, but I wish I’d never looked. Standing there on the side of the cemetery road, I was able to discern the shadowy movements of a man in loincloth unfolding himself from lying on top of Jesus, before climbing down the crucifix. I kept my screams inside and whispered two words to R: “Fucking run.” I wouldn’t let him look behind us as we sprinted out of St. Ninian’s Cemetery and across the double lane highway to safety.