Seven miles down Old Creek road, just east of I-52, is an old Indian burial site and cemetery. The burial site and cemetery dates back to the early 1700’s. However, for the last 25 years, the burial site and cemetery has laid unkempt except for the occasional harassment by adventurous thrill seekers. During the years, tombstones have been vandalized and knocked over, graves have been desecrated, and Ouija boards have been used to summons up the dead. It’s only been recent though, rumors have surfaced that the dead have started to harass those who have come. Suffering from years of disruptive peace, the dead are now starting to fight back.
Oct. 31st, 2009, Jim and Sonia, unaware of all of the recent hype, have arranged to meet a group of their friends at the cemetery an hour after sunset. The night carries a crisp cool breeze. For late October, the moon is bright casting shadows from the swaying trees. Upon arriving, Sonia sense an unwelcoming presence and shares with Jim they should reconsider the planned adventure. Jim turns, grabs Sonia’s hand and reassures her that nothing bad will come from this adventure and their evening out is all in good fun.
Their friends all arrive and as they open the gate to the cemetery a fast moving breeze sweeps through them all. Within the rustling leaves a faint whisper could be heard, “Don’t enter here. You are not welcomed.” Everyone stopped in their tracks. Not believing their ears, the group erupts in nervous laughter. Jim, startled but determined in pressing on, laughs lightly and states, “There is no possible way the leaves just spoke to all of us. Come on everyone, we are just super excited and are letting our imaginations get the best of us.” The group of seven, inched closer to each other, and proceeded. Jim sticking to the dirt path saw the first grave. The headstone was knocked over on its side. As Jim reached to lift the stone to read it, Jackie, his friend of 10 years, screams and jumps into the middle of the group. Jackie, while jumping up and down, points and says “Something just grabbed my ankle. I was right there and I swear something reached out and pulled on my ankle.” The group was quiet for the first time. Jim, pointing his flashlight where Jackie says something grabbed her, illuminated nothing but the dirt path. Off in the distance, a shadow passes among the tree line catching Bob’s eye. Bob, Jackie’s husband, then shushes everyone and asked if anyone saw the shadow. As the group remains silent, footsteps are heard within the brush. Sonia, with her heart beating in her eardrums, grab’s Jim and states, “This is ridiculous. We should not be here.” Others in the group agree. Jim, who has never believed in the paranormal, turned to the group and said, “The dead cannot come to life. Once the body is dead, it is dead. There is no after life. Life as we know stops to exists the day our blood stops pumping. We cannot haunt in the afterlife. We don’t stay in limbo. It’s unscientific and has never been proven. Everything we have just witnessed has been our own imaginations. I will prove it. If you all want to returns to the entrance, I will walk the rest of the cemetery alone. I promise, nothing will happen to me.”
The group, including Sonia, return to the entrance. Sonia tried to beg Jim to return with her but he refused. Determined to prove his point and turned away from the group and started down the dirt pathway alone. The group waited in silence. An eerie wind picked up. While the sky was perfectly clear prior, clouds covered the moon and off in the distant a coyote could be heard howling. After 10 minutes, Bob finally broke the silence and asked the others, “How long do you think it will take him?” Jackie pulling out an aerial map showed everyone that the cemetery was two miles in length. Bob did some quick calculations and said “If Jim walk’s fast, as I would, he should be back in about twenty minutes.” The look in Sonia’s eye said everything. She was frightened, she was breathing fast, and panic was creeping in. As Bob started to comfort Sonia, a distant scream could be heard. And what followed next moved everyone five feet further back from the entrance. As the distance scream concluded, it felt as if the trees were laughing. Jackie pulled Sonia into a hug and whispered, “Jim is okay. Everything is going to be okay.” Tears running down her face, she looked at the group and said, “I knew this was a bad idea. I knew it the moment I arrived. Please, he has got to come back.”
Twenty-five minutes after Jim left, the sky cleared up, the wind settled down, and a faint white shirt could be seen walking down the dirt path. Bob was the first to see him and pointed his flash light down the path. The other joined and there they saw Jim walking out of the cemetery. Without a word, he first grabbed Sonia and said, “I am okay. See?” Within the embrace, Sonia noticed Jim had been sweating heavily and he felt to have been shivering. Looking into his eyes, she saw something different in them. She thought it was fear but as he kept saying over and over again, “I’m okay”, Sonia wasn’t sure. With Jim’s return, the group agreed to call it a night. As Jim and Sonia pulled out of the old parking lot, Jim said, “I am glad we can leave that behind us now. What an awful night.”
As Jim and Sonia arrived home, as normal, their dog and two cats greeted them at the door but instead of the warm welcome, Jim’s cats hissed at him upon first sight. Strikingly odd, Jim shrugged it off thinking the cats must be in one of their crazy spastic moods. Sonia feeling extremely fatigued from the adventure, enticed Jim to crawl into bed with her by 930pm. Prior to falling asleep Sonia made Jim promise that they would never again attempt to walk through a cemetery at night. Jim giggling lightly, feeling safe and secure in his own home, he turned to Sonia and said, “Really baby, there was nothing there. It was a bunch of old graves. I walked through the whole place and nothing happened. I swear.” Sonia replied, “Jim, while you were gone, we heard a distant scream. We all thought it was you. Was it?” Jim, recalling his walk, lied and said, “No. It was not me. I heard it too and I think it was some animal off in the distance. I do promise that I will never take you to do that again. It’s all behind us and we will never have to deal with it again. Let’s just forget about it. Okay?” Sonia knowing in her heart something more went on out in the cemetery than what Jim is indicating, she agreed to forget about it. Sonia kissed Jim good night and quickly fell asleep. Though the dead was yet to be finished with Jim, Jim feeling beyond belief fatigued as well, quickly fell into a restless sleep.
At 1033pm, Sonia and Jim were awakened to three faint wooden knocks. Sonia reached for Jim, as it appeared that the knocks came from within their bedroom. Lying awake, within seconds, three more knocks were heard. Jim jumping from the bed quickly turned on the light and feverishly looked for the sound of the knocking. Under the bed and in the closet, Jim was anticipating to find one of the cats at play. But none were to be found. Jim walked throughout the house. He checked the front the door and finally came back to bed and said nothing was to be found. Restless, Sonia gave Jim another kiss good night and fell back to sleep.
At 1123pm, one of Jim’s cats began pacing and crying creepily in front of the bedroom door. Waking Jim and Sonia, Jim turned on the light to check on the cat. The cat continued to pace and cry. As Jim approached, the cat stopped and looked at Jim and then looked the other way as if something was there. With turning on the hallway light, the cat stopped crying and pacing. Jim looking at the cat first, turned and looked down the hallway and saw nothing. Whatever was bothering the cat had ceased. Jim returned to bed and said, “I don’t know. The cat is acting weird tonight. Did you see how he responded when we came home? It’s nothing.”
At 1213pm, Charlie, Jim and Sonia’s dog barked once waking Sonia and Jim immediately. As they each opened their eyes, they found Charlie and their two other cats in a semi-circle surrounding and looking at them on the bed. As Jim reached to pet Charlie, Charlie moved out of his way but continued to look at both of them. Jim then turned on the light and with it, the cats stood up, paced back and forth and then jumped off the bed and ran off into the darkness. Charlie remained on the bed looking at the two of them and then in a protective move, Charlie laid down at the foot of the bed facing the door. Charlie’s normal bed time spot was on his doggie bed which was on the floor. Before Jim could shoo Charlie off the bed, Sonia said, “Leave him be.” Jim reached over and gave Sonia and kiss on the forehead and turned off the light. Getting back to sleep this time was difficult for both of them. With the animals acting weird, it just felt like something more was going on.
Finally falling back to sleep, Jim and Sonia were awaken again at 106am. This time neither of them got out of bed but instead laid awake to the sounds of footsteps echoing in the hallway. The footsteps walked up the hallway to the living room and then would turn and walk back towards their bedroom. On the second approach to the bedroom, Charlie sat up and whimpered, waiting for something to walk in. Nothing happened. The footsteps stopped and were never heard again. Jim and Sonia said nothing to each other. Knowing the night was not over they both independently tried to go back to sleep.
At 232am, Sonia nudges Jim. Sonia states, “The ceiling fan just shut off.” Jim replied, “Yep, I noticed that too. I think the power might be off in the neighborhood.” Sonia then said, “If that is the case, why then is the alarm clock still on?” Jim glances over at the alarm clock, shook his head in disbelief, and before he could provide an answer, the ceiling fan clicks back on. Jim pulls Sonia close to him and whispers, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Lightly sleeping now, at 304am, Jim hears a faint whistle originating from the master bathroom. The whistle sounds off again and this time reaches Sonia ears as well. Jim, tired from all of the nightly occurrences, makes a daring move and decides to whistle back. Hoping against all odds, Jim exhales heavily when his whistle is responded to with another whistle. Sonia panics and turns on the light. She turns to Jim and says, “Aren’t you going to investigate?” Jim shaking his head replies, “No. There’s no point. What is there I won’t be able to see in the physical sense. It’s made its point. I know it’s here.” Sonia attempted to question Jim, but Jim wouldn’t have of it. He turned her light back off, snuggled up against her and said, “If I am right, we will be awakened one more time and then it should be over.” Sonia again attempted to question, but Jim shushed her and said, “Try to get some sleep.”
As Jim predicted, at 412am, the hallway closet lit up with a light. The light itself didn’t wake Jim and Sonia; it was the cats scratching at the bottom of the closet door. The light illuminating from within the closet was not coming from the closet light but something else. As both Sonia and Jim opened the door, they saw the flashlight they took to the cemetery and it was on. Ironically enough, underneath the lit flashlight was the direction to the cemetery. Jim shook his head. He turned to Sonia and said, I threw away these directions at the cemetery.
Jim said, “Okay, I can’t keep this from you any longer. I believe that cemetery is alive. I do. As I walked and passed each grave, the more and more I sensed the cemetery was coming alive. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I kept seeing shadows appear. And at one point, I counted seven shadows. They were right ahead of me on the path, like almost blocking the pathway. It was then that I made the connection. I had passed seven graves. Looking at these shadows it occurred to me that they all had something in common. I went back and looked at each date on the grave stone. Each person died on October 31st. And as if that is not weird enough, using the single digit sum theorem (i.e. taking the entire date as an integer and adding each number to a sum and converting it down to a single digit), if you convent the entire date + year to a single digit, the converted number is 7 for each death.” Jim being a math professor at the local university quickly ran through all the years in which he saw at the cemetery: 1712, 1721, 1730, 1739, 1748, 1757 and 1766. And then using one date as an example, 10/31/1712, he converted the entire set of digits down to one number, 7 (1+0+3+1+1+7+1+2 = 16; 1+6 = 7).
Goosebumps developed all over Sonia as she was shocked to hear all of this. Jim continued, “Its then in the cemetery that you heard me scream. Never in a millions years did I ever believe in the afterlife, but all of this was just too coincidental to not believe. As I walked through the rest of the cemetery, I felt their presence. Trying to convince myself this was not happening, I kept saying out loud – This is not real. I think I may have said that seven times, oddly enough, and on the seventh time, all seven shadows appeared on the dirt path again. Closing my eyes, I pushed through the shadows. As I walked through them, it was electrifying, not to mention, the temperature seemed to have dropped.”
Jim, without taking a moment to relax, continued, “Sonia, I don’t really know why they are here, however, they have made their presence known to us seven different times tonight. I do know, that each time they have attempted to communicate with us, if we were to add the digits of the time they interrupted our sleep, the time would converted down to a single digit of seven. All I can say is if this is an attempt to make me a believer in the paranormal and afterlife, I willingly admit that I believe.” Just as Jim finished his sentence a huge gust of wind passed through the entire house, the front door opened and then slammed shut, shaking the house. Jim frightened at first, sat in silence for a minute. Within that minute of time, calmness and peace washed over him. He looked at Sonia, smiled and said, “They are gone. They are absolutely gone.”