Kids and ghosts just seem to attract each other. Vance and I were always together. This night there was most of the group; Sharon and Dawn, and Jesse...the funniest guy I’ve ever met. We cruised. That was what life was for. There were always adventures to cruise toward. Searching for aliens, solving mysteries. Now that I look back, I wonder where the talking Great Dane was.
Nothing to do. The restaurant had put a bottom in our bottomless cup. You can only drink so much coffee before they look into the browns of your eyes and see you are just costing them money. We hopped in the old Plymouth; top down and the heat high and drove on to Main Street where everyone with nothing to do was looking for everyone else with nothing to do.
Still nothing; as was usual. Until we bumped into Larry, one of those talk-to-friends but not a hang-out-friend. He told us about “the glowing tombstone.” I’d been kicking around those parts for a few years off and on and I knew about the Black Cross, the haunted mansion, the headless guy that I could never find; heck, we even had a Lost Road. But I had never heard about a glowing tombstone.
Mystery. Key spooky music.
In Pennsylvania, towns were small and close. We had to drive through three of them to get to the graveyard in question, but only about half an hour. I drove up and down in front of the fence looking for the tell tale glimmer we had just heard of. I shut off the lights and turned off the 8track. Sharon was sort of my girl and she scooted close to me. I could see the anticipation in her oversize eyes. She had that grin of hers that said she was excited but a little scared. Dawn was hanging on Vance, though they weren’t a couple. Vance didn’t mind.
Jess mentioned something about Night of the Living Dead, but he had a way that everything out of his mouth was funny. We laughed and tensions eased a minute but about that time I saw the grave. It was true. I slammed the brakes and reversed to that one place that the stone was visible through all the others. My sudden change in direction and stop jarred them all into the back of their seats.
I’m no stranger to graveyards at night but there was something about sitting there looking at that far off glow. It was all the world like a Halloween prop; green like the glow-in-the-dark skull I used to carry in my car. In it’s brightness you could see it was a tombstone; cliché in its shape. There were mewls from the girls, like the sound of surprise just before you scream, but no one did. We sat in the car looking at the mysterious light. No sound.
Usually when you visit a spook site you find nothing special. The fun is in the anticipation of finding something. It’s the sound of your own heartbeat and the weird energy you generate. There we were with honest to god visual evidence of a true phenomenon. I parked the car to the side and walked to that place of the sighting. Vance came up with the girls and Jess. I looked at Vance. He looked at me. There was that unsaid comment “I’ll go if you go,” and we stepped into the graveyard.
As we huddled close Sharon held the sleeve of my coat in a death grip. It was a straight line of sight and we followed it, occasionally stumbling over a short stone in the dark. As we got closer the grave dimmed. When we arrived it was just a stone in the night.
We read the name that was chiseled into the polished granite hoping it was tied to a murder or some old-family legend. It was just a name. Not that I recall it. After a period of speculation we all walked back to the car, looking over our shoulders as the light intensified.
We visited that grave on other occasions as many did. You heard talk now and then and even an odd comment like “Don’t go there. Its evil,” and then some made up story about who died and who disappeared. But in all the talk I never heard anyone mention that new mercury vapor light on the farm across the street. I know I wasn’t the only one to solve it. But maybe like me, they just didn’t want to spoil the mystery.