Salem's Graveyard Shift

“Dude. That’s just plain creepy! You’re going out there alone?”

“It’s not creepy! Well... it kinda is, but it’s not actually creepy. It just seems weird or scary or sort of ‘out there.’ Can we agree together that most of that is in our heads—not in the graveyard itself?”

“Maybe. But I’ve known you since, like, the seventh grade. You don’t like heights. You get spooked by black cats. And you’ve always been creeped out by Halloween. You think you are the best candidate for sleeping in the graveyard with a hundred and fifty people that have been dead for as many as four-hundred years?”

“That’s all true enough. But you do realize, Dr. Phil, that I am doing graduate research on fear? If I weren’t as you described--if I had ice water in my veins--then I wouldn’t be the best test rat, would I?”

And on it went. Back and forth. 

Ty Benning, in the name of research, is wanting to spend a night in a cemetery. His best friend and roommate, Giles Ellsworth, is just trying to be a friend; one who talks his best bud out of the seemingly bad idea of analyzing his vitals while hanging out with dead people. And, all the more so because the graveyard is in Salem Massachusetts. It's the one place in the whole country that is famously tied to witches.  

“You’ve got hundreds of years’ worth of data and research in a half-dozen of the best libraries in the world, within about a fifteen-mile radius. Tell me why you sleeping on cold, wet grass in a garden of gravestones is gonna give you some breakthrough insight on fear that no one's discovered before.”

“Maybe it won’t! Maybe you’re right! But I’m doing this. Tomorrow you can laugh at me; rub it in that you told me so. Or you can come to visit me in jail or the morgue or the hospital or the asylum. Lastly—potentially—you can sit there and watch me type up my research. No matter what, this is happening. So, either bye-bye for now, or it was awesome knowing you. But this conversation is not only not part of my study; it’s exhausting!” 

So Ty headed out the door with a book bag and a blanket for his solo night of research at the historic cemetery of Harmony Grove. Giles sheepishly wished him well and muttered something about needing to be sharp for his 8 AM physics course in General Relativity. “So, call me on my mobile if anything happens.” And that was that. 

Ty and Giles were both in graduate programs at Boston University. They rented rooms in an 18th-century manor home--a towering three-story block of dark-red bricks--in Gloucester with seven other students. 

There were dozens of other cemeteries on the North Shore that were closer to their house than Harmony Grove. Ty had told Giles that it’s “silly and just plain irresponsible to do a field study of the neurobiology of fear and not locate the study in the setting of the historic 17th-century witch trials.” 

Ty chucked his backpack in through the driver's side door onto the passenger seat of his rickety Toyota Camry. He clambered into the front seat, pulled the door shut, pushed out all his air, and laid his chest on top of the steering wheel. 

Looking through the top of the windshield, the night was pitch dark. It was forty-degrees of see-your-breath air and a vast blanket of faint cloud cover. The moon and stars had taken the night off. He noted that his pulse had quickened to the extent that he could feel pounding in his chest against the wheel. 

Ty! What have you gotten yourself into?

Ty knew the way to Salem and Harmony Grove. From Gloucester, it'd be a black and winding forty-five minutes, which would put him in the center of the gravestones by about 10:30 PM. He'd spend the night and head back home at about 5 AM. 

He heard the Bruins finish off the Chicago Blackhawks, four to two. He listened to State of Grace, Holy Ground, and Begin Again from Taylor Swift's Red album. And he flipped back and forth from sports news to FM country music. Amped up. Unsettled. 

He parked along Grove Street and shut off the engine. The cemetery closed at 5 PM. The big, black wrought iron gates hung between two broad stone pillars. 

He slipped the book bag through the gates and onto the asphalt drive. He balled up his blanket and perched it on top of the bag and after looking to see if anyone was watching, climbed up the righthand 7-foot tall pillar, hopping down inside the gate. He plucked up his stuff and dashed straight ahead toward a large structure. 

He reached what was a nearly two-hundred-year-old chapel, pivoted, and leaned his back against the building's stones. It was classic goth, with stained glass and pointy arches. He looked at his phone for the time. It was 10:50. 

OK. This is it. You can do this!

Having memorized a map of the cemetery, he set off from the chapel's left side, toward the gravestones of Harmony Grove. He rued that tonight was the most lightless night he'd ever seen. 

THUNK! "CRAP!"

Ty tripped over a fallen branch, plunging him forward and tossing his bag four-feet ahead of him and soaking his knees. 

He fetched his bag and continued--wet and now VERY cold. When he got to the first patch of headstones, he scanned for a large tree, dropped down, and propped his back against it. He opened his bag. He had brought along a flashlight, a journal, a batch of pens, some ibuprofen, three protein bars, and some bottled water. 

Ty heard footsteps from, what seemed like, 50 feet in front of him at an angle of about two-o'clock.

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD! It starts this quickly? I just got here. Am I imagining this? The footsteps are getting louder, and he could somehow make out a dark-black outline of a large person against the black sky. IS THIS MY MIND PLAYING A CRUEL TRICK? 

Louder the footsteps. Larger the outline. Footsteps crushing dead leaves had never sounded more ominous. What an idiot! Why didn't I anticipate that I'd encounter PANIC-MODE? What to do? What to do? Think, Ty!

"TY! Is that YOU?" Giles. 

"What the hell are you doing, YOU FREAKING MORON!"

"OK. Or, how 'bout 'Giles. You're such a great friend to come and find me and make it so that I don't have to spend a long and creepy night alone with a bunch of dead people and, potentially, a coven of witches!'" 

"You nearly gave me a heart attack--not a common affliction for a twenty-two-year-old."

"So, put it in your logbook."

"You really are a moron!"

"It's great seeing you too!"

Then, in hushed tones, they traded stories of how they each broke-and-entered Harmony Grove. Giles asked Ty what they should be looking for, and what the overall research would accomplish.

Roughly, he'd chronicle the introspection of his thoughts about being in a highly charged and characteristically ominous setting. He'd regularly take his vitals--mostly from smartwatch data. And he'd write down any strange events or circumstances. He'd then mix all of this with journal articles and tons of work by Joseph LeDoux, Ty's favorite neurobiologist.

Beginning at 1 AM, they took turns having an hourly walk with a flashlight throughout the grounds. They encountered hundreds and hundreds of shadowed gravestones. One read: Agnes Wightly. 1613 to 1632. Hanged.

After the 3 AM walk, Giles returned, ashen. He'd tripped on the heel of the boot of a sleeping drunk. And so, after unleashing on Ty a steady stream of whisper-shouted expletives, Giles pulled two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from his jacket pockets, which were hideously mangled and somehow delicious! They sat and ate, quiet as the night. 

They watched their breath billow out in massive streams from their noses and mouths. They listened as their teeth chattered. And they traded stories of how they each had met the comely sophomore, Abby Langston. Neither of them, to date, had mustered the courage to ask her if they could phone her and take her to Picco's for the best pizza in Boston. 

They heard an old hoot owl, and quietly talked about how its sound can either be creepy or comforting. Then Ty set out for the last journey of the night, the 4 AM walk. 

When he wasn't back by 4:20, Giles had a gnawing sense of uneasiness. Suddenly each minute equals twenty. Time crawled to 4:28. Giles stood, brushed himself off, threw a splayed hand through his hair, and gasped out all his breath. Here we go. 

So Giles Ellsworth set out into the black night at Harmony Grove Cemetery, in Salem Massachusetts, to find his friend. Ty had the flashlight, so Giles used the flashlight function on his smartphone. 

He saw the snoring drunk. He heard bats and sneering feral cats and sinister black night sounds.

He steeled himself for seeing all sorts of dreadful gravestones and their grave reports and epitaphs. He yelled "TY!" in a hush-toned, four in the morning shout. "TY!" He wandered and circled and yelled. Nothing. 

Giles got back to their basecamp at 4:49 AM, bewildered, and increasingly unnerved. He slumped down and took a long chugging gulp from Ty's water bottle--a simple task made difficult, owing to his riotous staccato breathing. 

"DUDE!" 

Giles jumped out of his skin and nearly swallowed his tongue. "TY! WHAT the...!" 

Ty tried explaining that he'd spent the final hour hunched up on the back corner of the gothic chapel, hoping to interview Giles about his solo experience through this final hour; the heightened uncertainty and the extent to which the setting fueled his fear. 

"So, you hid for an hour and used me as your test rat? And without my consent! That was a good idea?" What followed was a fleet of profanities. Ty gave a soft defense about how Giles hadn't been part of the study at all, but that by showing up uninvited, he effectively volunteered to be part of the study.

"DUDE! I HEARD BATS NEAR MY HEAD!" Giles huffed and ranted and then Ty raised both his hands over his head as a veritable white flag. "OK. I give. You win!"

"Huh? What do you mean, I win? Do you mean that, rather than interviewing me, you'll just type up a log of your pulse before and after you heard the piercing siren of the Eastern Screech Owl?"

Grinning, "I mean that you win the only thing that really matters. You. Abby. Picco's. You win! And--for the record--that's the real study in fear!"

"You are such an idiot!"

They looked at one another and they both formed their mouths like a smile. Then Ty Benning and Giles Ellsworth wagged their heads, grabbed their stuff, and headed out of Harmony Grove. It was a long, but good night in the graveyard with all the dead people and the witches, notably discreet if they were there at all. 

After hopping over the gate, Ty put his arm around his old friend. "Dude! That was the graveyard shift, wouldn't ya say?" And all Giles could do was let out a breathy glad-that's-over-with laugh.