SUPERNATURAL CEMETERY TALES
As a pastor in need of a break from the mix of politics and religion, I took a sabbatical from denominational ministry for a few years in the late 1990s. During most of that time, I worked a very unique and inglorious job.
I was a gravedigger.
From 2000 to 2006, I worked at Erie County Memorial Gardens in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was part of a large conglomerate of cemeteries, with over one hundred located in Pennsylvania alone. Although I was employed in such a macabre arena, I personally did not have any experiences with ghosts or other creatures of the undead that we most associate with cemeteries. I did, however, hear all kinds of stories. Most of them concerned the strange goings-on in cemeteries in western Pennsylvania. Here are a few of the highlights.
This story took place just before I began work at the cemetery. Like many graveyards in the corporation, it had a large mausoleum on its grounds. On any given day during the winter, the first task at hand was snow removal, so the customers could visit their dear departed without bothering with snowdrifts.
One of the head maintenance men was clearing snow from the sidewalks and offices early in the morning one day in the middle of January. It was still dark, but the freshly fallen snow illuminated the landscape in an eerie glow. The maintenance man decided to save gas and walk the quarter mile from the office building to start shoveling the snow around the mausoleum. Halfway there, he saw a figure walking behind the building. From the size, it looked like a child had just walked behind the mausoleum, but the worker could not be sure. It was a little odd but not entirely out of the ordinary that someone would take an early morning walk around the cemetery for exercise. But it was downright peculiar for someone to do it after a heavy snowstorm, let alone with a child. So, wearily, he surveyed the grounds for any sign of the child or parents who might be getting some brisk morning exercise.
But he saw no one as he neared the building.
He circled around to where he swore he saw the figure of the child, but there were no footprints in the snow.
As he looked up from the new snow, he saw a face peering from around the corner on the other side of the building, just fifty feet away from him. He could not make out features, but he saw the rough shading of eyes, mouth and nose from the shadowy figure that was examining him. It was about three feet tall, the size of a young child.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” he shouted and started to make his way through the drifts to the curious face. But as soon as he started to move, the head quickly disappeared from the corner. The maintenance man added some speed to his gait, but when he arrived at the corner, the child was gone. As he looked down to see where the young one had ran to, he once again saw no footprints.
Amazed and disturbed, he threw his shovel into the ground and mumbled to himself. He was sure someone was playing a trick on him, but he was clueless as to who it could be. For all he knew, he was alone in the seventy-acre cemetery—alone except for that small child who could disappear without leaving any tracks in the snow.
He shrugged and made a mental note to drill the other members of the crew when they came in to see if any one of them was up to shenanigans. If it were a trick, they would probably egg him on a while but then get their jollies at his expense. So, trying to push aside the oddness of the event, he went about shoveling the snow.
That was when he heard the voices.
At first, he thought it might be the wind. The mausoleum was out in an open field, and sometimes the wind whipped around the building fiercely and made all sorts of odd noises. But after a while, he knew it was not the wind. He heard the whispering voices even when the air was still. The whispering voices were barely audible, but to his ears, they were clearly distinct and individual voices. It was as if there were a large group of people gathered together in the mausoleum having a conversation. He silently moved around the sidewalk to try to get a location for the voices. They seemed very close but at varying distances. It was as if many people were having a whispered conversation from a distance. Suddenly one of the voices seemed to be a little closer, and his heart almost stopped when he realized where they were coming from.
The voices were coming from inside the crypts in the mausoleum walls.
Frozen in fear, he thought he was going insane, so he slowly moved closer to the cold, ice-layered marble slab. The icy slabs concealed the cement crypts that made up the inner and outer walls of the building. As he put his ear to the freezing stone, he heard a distinctive whispering voice say, “Shhh! He hears us!”
In an instant, he dropped the shovel from his hands and ran to the office building. He never heard the voices again, but he vowed to never shovel the snow around the mausoleum in the dark ever again, either.
However, that was not the end of caretakers and others seeing shadow people in the early hours on the cemetery grounds.
One morning, I had come in early to get ready for a trip to a neighboring cemetery that needed some help because someone had called in sick. The sun was just about to rise, and the supervisor and I were sitting at a desk drinking some coffee and discussing current events when an elderly lady came to the office door. She seemed quite distressed.
She was barely able to get inside and was hanging on to the front door as if it were a lifeline. She must have been in her early eighties and almost collapsed just as my supervisor caught her and helped her to a seat.
The woman had visited her deceased husband’s grave to put out a fresh flower arrangement before she went to an early-morning breakfast appointment with some friends. She was sitting on a blanket and arranging the flowers in the vase as the morning sun was just rising. While she was taking in the bright sunrise, she saw a figure move to her right. It was a lady dressed in a long black shawl, about forty yards away from her on the other side of the garden where her husband was buried. She saw no distinct features, but from the silhouette in the sunrise, she could tell it was a woman with a lithe figure who was standing erect with her head tilted down to the grave that she was standing over. The woman wondered who she was, because she had not seen her before as she had walked back and forth from her car to bring the flowers and water to her husband’s grave site. In fact, she had been fairly certain that she was the only one in the area.
She was considering these things as the sun rose over the treetops to the east and the rays of light began to filter into the garden with intensity. The figure seemed to fade a bit.
Then it slowly sunk into the ground. It was as if the earth sucked up the silhouette of the woman and ate her.
We calmed the woman down and gave her some water. I went out to investigate and found her small blanket at the foot of the grave and the fresh flowers arranged in the vase just as she said. But I saw no other person on the grounds. A few minutes later, my supervisor came out with the woman, and we asked her where she saw the figure. I walked out to the opposite side where she gestured but saw nothing out of the ordinary. So I called to her to have me move where she thought she saw the figure vanish into the ground. When she had finished directing me, I looked down. I was standing over the grave of a young teenage boy who had shot himself earlier during the year with his father’s gun. He had been an honor student with a bright future to look forward to. Then a random school drug search found a few ounces of cocaine in his locker. He was kicked out of school and faced serious charges. Instead of facing a bleak future, he chose to take his own life.
But the family tragedy did not stop there. Within a few months, the father had gunned down the boy’s mother and a coworker with whom he had suspected her of having an affair. Then he put a bullet into his own head as well, just as his son had done just a few months earlier. The graves were all together. Father, mother and son slept together for eternity.
But according to the woman, something had visited the son early in the morning’s twilight. Was it the mother? A figment of her imagination? Or just an illusion of the diffused lighting coming through the pine trees in the east? Or was it a dark entity that had influenced the family to commit such tragic and needlessly violent acts that still lurks at the grave site?
I have no idea. All I could do was pray that God would have mercy on their souls and grant them peace.
There were other stories that were more dramatic than chasing shadows and spectral voices. One of the most disturbing stories that I heard involved a wandering corpse that some of the workers called the “Mold Man.”
In the late 1970s, a cemetery near Pittsburgh had built a new mausoleum. It had been promised for years, and the salesmen, eager to make a lucrative commission, had pre-sold crypts long before they were available. Many makeshift, cement, aboveground crypts were quickly built for those who had purchased mausoleum spaces and had passed on before they were built.
When the mausoleum was finished, it was the job of the gravediggers to disinter the bodies and place them in their new crypts. It was a disgusting and dirty job, for many of the caskets leaked the liquefied remains of the deceased.
To make matters worse for the gravediggers, everybody had to be physically identified by a mortician who had originally embalmed the body, and clothing or jewelry was noted to make sure the corpse in the casket was the person named on the makeshift crypt.
The supervisor remembered each decaying face, for they were burned in his memory, but one stood out. Most of the bodies had long since dried up and became desiccated. If any flesh was left, it was almost tanned leather hanging off the bony skeleton. Some looked as if they were made out of Jello, as the corpse had decomposed into a liquid goo. But one was odd.
When they opened the coffin of the old man, it was like he had just been laid to rest, except for one disturbing and obvious fact: he was covered with a furry gray-green fungus. All of his flesh had been eaten by the fungus, but it held the shape of his face so well that it shocked the superintendent and the undertaker. Except for the odd color and the fleece-like look of his skin, he looked like he might just open his eyes or mouth at any moment. They quickly got over the initial shock and noted that yes, he was who he was supposed to be and put the coffin in the second level in the back of the newly constructed mausoleum.
On Monday morning, when the maintenance crew came to open up the office, they noticed the mausoleum door was open. As they neared the open door, they immediately knew something was wrong. Something was smeared on the glass door of the mausoleum, and as they looked inside, one of the crypts was open.
And it was empty.
Fearing they had been targeted by grave robbers, they went to call the police. As they rounded the corner to head back to the office they passed the old makeshift cement crypts.
One was open, and it held a casket.
It was the casket of the Mold Man, right back in the place he had been interred for the last five years. To be sure everything was all right and they did not have a grave robber playing a joke, they opened up the coffin. The body was still there, and the jewelry he wore was still intact. They called the police, but there was nothing they could do but file a vandalism report. The body was placed back in the mausoleum.
After they sealed up the crypt again, the staff noticed that the smear on the door was the same color as the mold that covered the man. Another disturbing detail was that there seemed to be small pieces of the stuff on the carpet that covered the floor from the crypt to the doorway. The body did not look molested at all, and the casket had shown no visible signs of forced opening, but it was still very troubling.
Two weeks later, it happened again. Everything was the same: the crypt was opened, and the casket was found resting in its old spot. Even the smear and pieces of mold scattered here and there was the same. But one thing was different this time. It had recently rained, and the ground was soft. A single trail of footprints ran from the mausoleum to the makeshift crypt, and they were almost erased by the tracks left by the dragged coffin.
There was only a single set of tracks.
It was then that they noticed the handles of the coffin were also smeared with the gray-green mold. It was if the Mold Man had somehow came out of the coffin and dragged it back to his original resting place.
But that was physically impossible. Wasn’t it?
Nevertheless, a close look at the corpse and the fallen mold made everyone present shiver. They were the same material. Once again, the body was laid to rest in the mausoleum, and the funeral director brought in a Catholic clergyman to once again give Last Rites and a blessing on the tomb.
Mold Man stayed put this time.
After that, the maintenance crew always gave his crypt special attention. They always feared that one morning they would find it open again and see the evidence of Mold Man once again walking the earth.
When y ou work at a cemetery for any length of time and meet others who have lived the life of a gravedigger for years, you hear some strange and unexplained stories. You always hope that you are not the next one to come in the next morning with fear in your eyes as you tell the others, “You are not going to believe this but…”