When I was a senior in high school, a story started about a local cemetery. The story was that there was a chair out next to one of the tombstones and an old man would come out at sit next to his wife’s grave. The cemetery was out in the middle of nowhere, located next to a field. There were no houses, churches or businesses close to it. The old man was not supposed to be a ghost. They said he lived close to the cemetery. The only thing about the story that was creepy was that it was at a cemetery. But that was enough for a small group of my friends. We decided to take a trip out to the cemetery to see it for ourselves.
We drove out to the cemetery which was at the end of a gravel road that went through several fields. We slowly pulled up to the cemetery which was on the right side of our car. There was an old metal kitchen chair next to one of the tombstones closest to the gravel road. We never got out of the car. We looked for the old man but never saw him. Across the field, we could see the lights of a few houses in the distance. We imagined that the old man lived in one of these houses. We also speculated that had seen us drive up to the cemetery. Someone suggested that he might get upset with us being there. He might come after us. We soon decided that we didn’t need to be there, and we sped away.
When we returned to town, we told more people the story of the cemetery and about our trip. Over the next few weeks, there were more trips with more people. Friends would take new groups. One of our teachers even went on one of the visits. Everyone saw the chair, but no one ever saw the old man.
My last visit to the cemetery included more people than had ever been before. We had three carloads of people and every car had at least 6 people. We were getting braver with each visit and people had started getting out of the cars. During this trip, everyone had gotten out and were walking all around the cemetery. We were still quiet because we were concerned out the old man. A couple of my friends broke away from the rest of the group and went to the back of the cemetery. They came up and one yelled, “YOU KIDS GET OUT OF HERE!” We were convinced that the old man had finally shown up and he was mad. Everyone ran to the cars and we hurried back to town. We didn’t know that it was someone in our group that had shouted at us until we were back in town. We stopped going to the cemetery after that. I don’t think anyone ever saw the old man. I don’t know if that part of the story was ever true. Someone could have set up an old chair in this nearly abandoned cemetery just for this joke.