Originally published in the 2023 edition of My Hometown, a special supplement to The Daily Home.
“Thus refreshed I entered the weird and beautiful abode of the dead.”
John Muir
I saw a ghost in a cemetery once. At least, I think I did. The spirit wore a sheer white mist of a gown that wrapped itself around a tall weathered gravestone and then…vanished. You’re probably thinking, “Oh, it was just a trick of the light on a dark, cold evening.”
I wish.
My ghost made its daring appearance in the bright bold daylight of a cloudless summer afternoon.
While I don’t typically make a habit of walking through cemeteries, the time or two I’ve found myself meandering among the gravestones has been an oddly soothing experience. Maybe it’s the air, heavy with the weight of time and buried secrets.
A cemetery is one of the rare places on earth where past and present intertwine like a climbing vine, where the whispers of the dead mingle with the whispers of the living.
The headstones tell a brief story of these strangers’ lives. Beginnings and endings, connected by that all-important dash in the middle—a lifespan etched into a crumbling stone. Each monument has its tale to tell. Perhaps there’s a tragic love story here or a life cut short by sickness or war.
But it’s the forgotten graves, the ones obscured by time and encroaching nature, that hold the most intrigue. Here lie the remains of those who’ve been left behind by the march of progress, their stories slowly and silently erased from the collective memory.
If I linger too long among the tombstones, I feel the wavering fear of my eventual mortality, and I go a little cold in the toes. The veil that separates us from the other side grows thin, and maybe my eyes play tricks on me.
While I don’t know if I truly saw a ghost that day or even if I believe the spirits of the dead sometimes glide among us, I’m never more alive than when I feel the tingling wonder of life’s strange beauty and mysteries—the wonder of the unknown.
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