PETER AND BOB’S NIGHT IN A GRAVEYARD

PETER AND BOB’S NIGHT IN A GRAVEYARD 

                Peter Mortenson and Bob Brown spent a night in a graveyard with my friend. We actually went on a series of nights, most recently Halloween, and that time Peter went alone. Why go to a glitzy, some different type of costume party when you can celebrate it the fashioned way with a good look of ghost hunt? A proper stake-out with sandwiches and cokes. We went armed with a torch, digital camera, voice recorder, and of course our own senses and judgment - probably the most important tool of all, but also the one most prone to error. Amateurish tech by proper ghost-hunting standards Peter knows, but you have to start somewhere. 

As with my previous tale, this one comes from the French town of the dome, specifically, an old graveyard and beautiful Dordogne river flow on the outskirts called the place de la Halle. It is a famous visit place but an older church apparently stood on the site as far back as the 1200s, so we're talking really old here. It was officially closed in 1868 when the town got a bigger cemetery and the gates have been locked ever since. However, that tale sounds apocryphal and made-up. What's more interesting is the scariest place. Again, don't just take this word because it is a kind of place. This is a place where fear begins. 

If you know the local area well enough, there are a few ways to get there, the most direct being through the woods. The gate is permanently locked and the wall more or less insurmountable, though there is a way in by standing on a tree stump around one side and mounting part of the wall. A cemetery at night was a petrifying thought when Peter was younger so simply being there in the dark felt like something of an achievement. The hardest part was probably entering in; you're never sure what's over the other side of that wall. Peter almost had to remind me that somewhere in here was the resting place of a one-time assassin named John grey, though most say it was really his brother who was guilty and that he was just part of the plot, that's a debate for another day. 

My photos were fairly spooky in themselves, showing dark trees and ruins looming up against a grey sky, not to mention the jagged metal of the cemetery gate, but there was nothing out of the ordinary, a few dust particles maybe. Then Peter set down his voice recorder and we left the graveyard, hoping to pick up something in our absence, and returned after a half-hour later. 

Just as the novelty of it all was wearing off, we took a seat on an overturned gravestone (sorry dead person!) and were gazing at the stars when a white streak of light came zooming past right above us. Bob thought it might be a shooting star, but it seemed much too low and small. Shooting stars travel in an arc whereas this light just shot straight by in a perfect line. If that was weird, it was to get even weirder. 

As we set out on our way home another one of these lights appeared just over the ruined church, zooming into the tree line. It was lucky for Peter and Bob to turn their heads around that moment to catch it; They wondered how many lights there were that we didn't see. There was no doubting it this time; it was way too low and minuscule to be a shooting star. Peter can only describe these lights as tiny white balls or globes which traveled very fast. Either it was a ghost (whatever that might be) or it’s a witnessed a strange light phenomenon, possibly something similar to what we might now call will-o'-the-wisps or something we don't know about yet. Maybe these lights were the 'punkies' identified by someone earlier. 'Punkie' is an old Scot's word which basically meant a strange light or glowing. 

The following evening Peter listened back to the audio from my voice recorder, all 27 minutes of it, and he did find something, however faint. In-between the gentle wind and car noises are what sounds like a tap followed by three or four footsteps. He rewound and compared it with my own footsteps at the start of the recording and the sound was practically identical. He also tried reproducing the 'tap' sound by touching the screen of the phone and playing it back, and that too sounded quite similar. The whole segment is unique in the whole footage. Was it simply another person, you might ask? Well, although the main road runs nearby, barely anyone walks this way, especially at night; it's a bit out of the way. And he thinks it's a pretty fair assumption that we were the only weirdest thing is going to happen in this place at night. He supposes the likeliest explanation is an animal, but the footsteps sounded too slow and heavy to be a squirrel or rabbit, though that's just my own personal judgment. 

Nothing happened on the other nights but that still can't diminish our experiences from the first time. Beginner's luck he supposed. In fact, the only vaguely paranormal thing we encountered on the second night was a noise outside my friend's house on the homeward journey. Then the thought came to me that what we call the paranormal probably works in a very funny way or, bizarre as it sounds, like fishing. You can go 10 times and only catch something once or twice. All my run-ins with 'ghosts' so far have had that kind of theme: there's something there, not overly clear or discernible but still quite out of the ordinary, then in an instant, it's gone or doesn't show up again. It's not as if you can catch it up close and take it back to test in a lab, but you know there was definitely a weird element about the experience. 

He doesn't give much credit to feelings of being watched or of a 'presence' (after all, that you feel scared is a fact about yourself and not your surroundings), but he supposed it's not a bad thing to say that at no point in the investigation was he genuinely frightened or alarmed.  even liked it in there, the magical stillness of it all. If one thing's for sure it's that the dead are less likely to harm you than the living, but whether they are all truly at rest, Peter still can't say. 

  ~THE END~

 ~ BY PRIYANKA RIYA