text: The home where I grew up was adjacent to a cemetery. Some may have been creeped out by that, but it never bothered us because we used to ride our bikes up and down the smooth paved paths that they installed in the summer of ’97 or ’98. My sister and I spent plenty of time wandering those paths. We used to sit underneath one huge old oak that we called “The Big Tree”, which is what we still call it today because it’s still sitting in the middle of the cemetery; it’s gnarled knots growing thicker by the year. It’s overgrown a couple of the graves that are near it, they were dated around the time of the civil war if memory serves me correct. I used to go sit by it when I was reading, or if I wanted peace when my parents were arguing. They used to fight a lot back in those days. My parents still live in that same house and we have great memories of playing in the cemetery, especially in the winter because they pushed all of the snow that we would get in winter into a huge pile in the empty lot in the cemetery, before they opened it up for burials. They’d take all the snow from the neighborhood and push it into an acre wide and long parcel of land. We used to dig tunnels through the snow and I miss when they used to do it. We used to have sleepovers quite often in the summers, and would stay in one of the pop-up campers that we owned, if for no other reason to feel like we had our own place to hang out without parents buzzing around the area constantly. We’d occasionally sneak out and go wander around, the normal small town kind of stuff. I used to sneak out of it sometimes to go swimming at the high school pool. I’d have to jump the fence to get in but if the cops drove by you just ducked your face in the water and waited for their light to pass over your head, and they’d be on their way. During one of these sleepovers, I brought out my mom’s old Ouija board that I knew she kept hidden under the bed. She’d never been into that kind of stuff to my knowledge, even today she doesn’t like it. It was probably in a box of board games that she’d bought from a yard sale and didn’t realize that the board was in there until after she got it home and just hid it away and forgot about it, judging by the dust on it. We messed around with it for a bit in the camper and tossed it aside when we finished with it. Truth or Dare was the next game and it circled back around to a dare involving the board that still scares the hell out of me until this day. In the cemetery there is an enormous mausoleum that’s open to the public. It sits on the south side of the cemetery and an ugly red roof of imitation half-moon shaped clay tile tops the massive flat grey granite bricks. The door opens to a long, wide hallway lined on either side with the bodies of the dead, walled behind slabs of what looks like white granite with the names of the deceased etched into them. Some of them are from the mid-to-late 1800’s; some are as recent as the early 2000’s. Most of them still have little trinkets and baubles lining the small lip at the bottom of the graves where people have left them, as tributes to their lost loved ones. There are two small rooms on either side of the hallway when you enter, both have been locked and chained for as long as I’ve ever seen them. I used to think there were all kinds of horrors behind those doors, but after finding just the right angle at an old rusted-out keyhole I realized that one of them was actually the parlor, complete with piano where they would hold small funeral services. I never discovered what the other door was for and still wonder. Now, this Mausoleum was scary even during the day because the thick walls dampened all the sound, so even on hot summer days when they’d mow the cemetery, you couldn’t have even heard one even if they were right alongside the building. It was also always cold not matter what, it didn’t’ matter how hot it was outside, that building was freezing cold. It just felt weird being in there and it was one of the few places that we actively avoided during our adventures. We never really talked about how it scared us; we just didn’t acknowledge it was there most days. My sister had dared my friend and I to take the Ouija board to this mausoleum, which normally would have been an easy challenge during the day. But it was night, it was well into the early hours after midnight, and we were not fans of the idea. Sibling rivalries being what they are, we ended up being goaded into at least trying to use the board in there. I can still remember the sound of my flip-flops scraping on the black top of the street as we made our way onward, my friend in tow and both of us trying not to be the one that chickened out at the last second. As it were, neither of us bowed out of the challenge. Ouija tucked under my arm and only a streetlight guided my way. There were no lights mounted in the mausoleum, no electric of any kind now that I think of it. It looked like a rectangular black void cut into the fabric of reality where there could be only nothing, and everything. If we opened the doors far enough, we could get a little sliver of the streetlight to shine halfway down the length of the interior, giving us just enough courage to actually go through with the whole ordeal. I didn’t want to give my sister the satisfaction of victory. My sister and her friend would wait outside the mausoleum while my friend and I would take the board to the very end of the hallway and try to use it to contact someone or something in the building. My footsteps were loud in the night and I could feel the cold floor radiating up through my sandals. It had to have been at least seventy outside and in here it felt as low as fifty. I cast a long shadow down the hallway when I first entered, which slowly bled into the darkness the further I got into the concrete and granite tomb. My friend slunk along behind, prepared to abandon me at the first sign of anything amiss, I’m sure. I can’t really explain the feeling that grew in me as I got further into the darkness, I would call it anxiety but at that time I’d never dealt with it so it’s hard to call it that. I remember feeling almost dazed or in a stupor, like my chest felt heavy and my legs might get tangled. We did eventually reach the end of our trek and we sat cross-legged on the cold floor, board spread open between us. We never got to use the board however, as my sister slammed the door shut at the entrance to the mausoleum. We were too scared to even move, the darkness that had been kept at bay by the incoming streetlight had swallowed us up in it’s inky black. I won’t tell you I wasn’t terrified, because I was, and I knew my friend was equally as scared, his heavy and jittered breathing quickly became whimpers the longer we stood in silence. I tried to let my eyes adjust to the dark, but there was no light to be found, we were in the complete black of night. I felt claustrophobic with the weight of how dark night could truly be in the halls of the dead. It could have been the sounds of his whimpers echoing down the long hall, but the longer I listened, the more it sounded like voices between ourselves and the direction that I believed the exit to be. Sure, it could have been the sound of my own blood pumping through my ears or just my imagination, but I would have sworn I heard footsteps, too. The latch on the door must not have caught completely; because it did slowly creak open just enough for a tiny splinter of light to cut down the hallway at us like a jagged razor. We wanted to move, but couldn’t. I tried to force my legs to cooperate with me, to just get me the hell out of this place, but neither of us seemed to be able to make an escape attempt. The closest concept I can find to describe it is sleep paralysis shared between two people at the same time while neither of us were sleeping. We stood there in terror as we watched the light cut away suddenly, reappear, and then suddenly it was back again. This happened several times before I understood that I was seeing the shadows of people walking from side to side of the mausoleum, like the spirits of the dead going to visit one another in their exclusive land of the dead. I don’t know how long we stood there, afraid to say anything and unable to move, but it seemed like a decade. We just watched as the dark shapes wandered from side to side, back and forth, crossways and long-ways. I was overwhelmed with fear, and although they didn’t exactly feel threatening, it felt as though we had been a part of something we were never meant to see that night. We had invaded the privacy of the dead and we were being taught a lesson by those who believed we deserved one. They wanted us to know that those halls belonged to them once the son sank below the horizon. My sister called for us down the hall, it seems we’d remained inside long enough for her to be genuinely worried about us. It seems like her voice was what was needed for us to shake the strange feeling out of our system, because we were finally able to get our legs moving. I remember just staring at the ground as I ran towards the light, trying not to catch sight of anything that might be lurking in the dark. I couldn’t promise I didn’t imagine it, but I would swear that at the edges of my vision I could see the pleated pants and shoes, black stockings and flats with little straps across them. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut but was too afraid that I might wander off course and run headlong into one of the memorial plates. It felt like miles, but had only been several hundred feet down the cold hallways until we burst out into the warm summer air. I hadn’t brought the Ouija board out with me; I would have to get it the next day when the dead were sleeping. We never played in the mausoleum again after that night, and the Ouija board is still under the old dresser in my old room at my parent’s house, where it’s sat ever since that night. The mausoleum is still there, too. When we go to visit my parents, my son always asks to go look inside of it. I haven’t let him let because I still try to avoid it as much as possible since that night, but eventually I’ll have to face the old ghouls inside my mind again and pay a more respectful visit to the halls of the dead.