Being known in one’s professional circles helps to get gigs and assignments, but this kind of gig wasn’t what Debbie Delaney, professional photographer and reluctant ghost chaser, was hoping for. That’s because this assignment involved visiting a cemetery…

The recovery from my SRS (or GRS) procedures was slow, but recover I did. And, aside from the need for regular dilation (which I am supposed to taper down eventually after a year or so), I was practically, ummm, done.

Today was my first time to jog again (well, not jog but more a brisk walk) and I had just got back to my apartment. I had a few twinges, but I knew these twinges would be happening for a while. Par for the recovery. That’s fine - I can live with that.

“Hi, Mr. Smits,” I said to my building manager.

“Hello, Ms. Delaney,” he said. “Had a nice workout?”

“Pretty great. I was just gonna grab a bottle of water. Wanna come in for a drink?”

“Thank you, but I’m pretty busy.” He indicated the ladder he had on his shoulder. “No rest for the wicked,” He said and chuckled. For some reason, that phrase stuck with me, and had me worrying about Mr. Smits.

“Okay,” I nodded, stepping into my place. “Have a nice day.” Though a very nice guy, there was something off with Mr. Smits.

As I drank a cold bottle of water from my fridge, I picked up my mail, which I had dumped into a little bowl beside the door earlier before I went for my run. And there was a bunch of letters from the Parapsychological Association mixed in with the usual ones (as I found out when I met the guys from Flagstaff, the association was the main authority in the country on ghosts and goblins and monsters and anything that went bump in the night).

After participating in that thing with Flagstaff University’s Parapsychology Department last year, I suddenly found myself on the mailing list of the association. I had been getting emails and phone calls from their members until I changed phone numbers and installed a filter app to screen all my emails. It’s nice to have fans, but this isn’t exactly the fan base I wanted. Would you?

But there was no stopping them from sending snail mail to Flagstaff University (thank God I had kept my new address unlisted), and the University people would dutifully forward my letters to me. At least only a few letters a week arrived, and it had been tapering off for a while.

I looked at this week’s batch and dismissed most of them, but there was one that caught my eye, simply because the envelope was clean and neat, and my name and the return address was neatly typewritten instead of freehand in pencil, crayon or magic marker.

Thinking that I would regret it, I decided to open it and read the letter.

Minutes later, I was on the phone and talking to Dr. Tully.

Days later, I found myself on the road with Dr. Tully and his team, on our way to yet another haunting.

“So, Debbie,” Helen, the tall bubbly blonde said while giggling, “the old team back together again! Fun, huh?”

I was sitting in front with Dr. Tully driving. I could see her from the mirror in the visor. She was looking at me expectantly so I stuck my tongue out at her, and she responded with yet another giggle.

There were five of us in the van: Dr. Tully, Jackson the big guy with curly hair and the deft touch with electronics, Helen, the tall, giggly blonde, Lucy the brunette who, I think, was the bravest of us all, and me.

“We’re almost there, Ms. Delaney,” Dr. Tully said. “Why don’t you brief us again about why we’re here?”

I nodded.

“Well,” I began…

I explained (again) that I’d gotten this letter a week ago, and it came from this family that found their little town being terrorized by some kind of entity. Almost half of the town had already relocated while the rest all lived in fear of this whatever-it was that terrorized the town.

The man who wrote was an English teacher from the town’s one remaining school (the other two had shut down for lack of students). He had been living with this fear for over a year now when the association referred him to us.

The townies (as the teacher called the townsfolk) believed that the whatever-it-was came from the town cemetery, and the… terror usually started to happen at around eleven o’clock to midnight. Many people who were out and about at night reported being chased by some night creature - maybe some wild dog or wolf - and others were actually attacked. This couldn’t be corroborated because they were soon infected with some kind of wasting disease, like tuberculosis, and passed away in less than three weeks.

The rest listened to my recitation politely until I was done, and then Jackson said, deadpan, “we already knew that.” And everyone started to laugh.

We arrived at the cemetery at around ten in the evening, and the man that wrote to me was impatiently waiting for us by the gates. After some quick handshakes, he gave us a quick tour of the deserted cemetery. Clearly, he didn’t want to be there because he rushed us through the cemetery and its main sections. After which, he jumped into his car.

“Wait! Where are you going?” Lucy called after him.

“It’s almost ten thirty!” he yelled back. “The fun starts about midnight. I only have about an hour and thirty minutes to get home! Sorry I can’t stay! Have fun!” He waved through his car window and sped home.

The cemetery was indeed spooky: headstones all over, covered with moss, and the rest of the cemetery overgrown with creepy plants and trees trailing little vines and rootlets. The guy said the cemetery hadn’t been in use for at least a year, and no one came and visited their loved ones anymore. It was disused, and it looked it.

There was no sound at all except for the wind, and all of us shivered in the cold.

“Dammit, it’s so cold!” I exclaimed.

Helen giggled. “Well, who decided to wear a miniskirt to a ghost hunt?”

“Haha. Very funny. Now what?”

We looked at each other sheepishly, at a loss of what to do next.

“Well…”

“Ms. Delaney, bring out your camera,” Dr. Tully said.

“What?”

“Just do it.”

I brought out my Canon DSLR that had Dr. Tully’s lens attached, switched it on and peered into the viewfinder. I gasped.

In my camera’s little viewfinder, I saw the cemetery in the greenish cast of Dr. Tully’s special lens and saw that we were practically surrounded by the ghostly spectral figures of people In normal everyday clothes, but all of them were clearly dead.

They weren’t gory or anything like the zombies from The Walking Dead, but they were standing like they did in that show, heads tilted and looking at us with blank expressions. I could see gravestones and trees through them. I’ve seen many ghosts since that first time in the theater and, though they still gave me the willies, I didn’t jump out of my skin. At least not anymore.

I started clicking the shutter. “Oh, my God,” I whispered.

And as I clicked, they lifted their arms and pointed to one direction.

I put down my camera and brought out a flashlight.

“Come on,” I whispered and gestured for the others to follow me.

From time to time, I would check my camera and followed where they pointed. We were slowly getting closer to the center of the cemetery. I pointed my camera to where we were apparently making for, and I saw one of the larger grave markers.

It was about seven feet tall, and had a large cross on top, or what should have been a large cross if the left side of the crossbar hadn’t crumbled away.

As we got close, we noticed that the dirt covering the grave of whoever this was, was actually disturbed.

I looked at Dr. Tully and he nodded.

“Jackson,” he said, “dig this up. I would help but I need to do something.” With that he walked away.

Jackson and the others looked at each other and shrugged. He picked up one of the shovels we brought and started digging.

I looked around and felt cold again.

I lifted the camera to my eye and looked into the viewfinder again. The specters were now all around us, looking at Jackson and the grave as he continued to dig.

Lucy, the most scholarly among the three, used her tablet to take a picture of the gravestone.

“What kind of writing is that?” I asked.

“Cyrillic, I think.”

“So. Russian?”

She consulted her tablet. “It’s Serbian. It says, ‘Ovdje lezi Petra Plogojovitz. Neka Bog oprosti njoj zbog svojih grehova, a ne dozvoljava joj da opet ugrozi zivot.’”

I giggled a bit. “What?”

“In English, it says, ‘Here lies Petra Plogojowitz. May God forgive her for her sins and not allow her to afflict the living again.’ The gravestone says she was buried in 1725.”

“Wow. More than fifty years before Independence. This grave is almost three hundred years old.”

I reflected on the translation. “Afflict the living?” I thought aloud.

When Jackson was almost three feet down, Dr. Tully returned. “I know what we’re up against,” Dr. Tully said. “Here.” He then handed each of us what looked and felt like pieces of wood, or rather, more like branches from a tree.

“Good thing we’re in Virginia,” he said. “Ash trees are plentiful.”

“What’re these for, Doc?” Lucy asked.

“I’m sure you can figure it out.”

“Oh…”

Helen searched around and handed us large rocks.

“Now, what are these for?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “it’d be pretty hard to pound down a stake with your bare hands.”

“Are you done now, Jackson?” Dr. Tully asked.

“I think so, Doc,” he said. “I hit something. Sounds wooden and hollow.”

“I would have assumed the coffin would have disintegrated hundreds of years ago. Let me help. See if you can open the thing. And hurry, Jackson, it’s almost midnight!”

Jackson pounded on the side of the coffin and he eventually grunted in satisfaction. He must have gotten it open.

“Doc!” He grated. “Help!”

He was in trouble!

“Hold on, Jackson!” I cried. I was the nearest so I got there ahead of the others. Looking down, I saw him being strangled by a woman in a tattered black cloak inside the coffin. In the dark, her eyes seemed to glow. The others crowded around me and peered down as well.

For some reason, I lifted my camera and took several pictures. Is there anything like a photographer’s instinct?

But that was just for a moment. Another kind of instinct took over. Dropping my camera and allowing it to hang from my neck, I grabbed Lucy’s rock and stake and jumped in. Transferring the rock and stake to one hand, I grabbed Jackson by his collar.

With all my strength, I was barely able to wrest him from the… thing’s grip on his throat, and I leap-frogged over him.

Without thinking, I rammed the rudimentary stake into the woman’s chest, causing her to fall back.

With that, it gave me an opportunity to use my rock and start pounding it onto the top of the stake.

The rough point that Dr. Tully had carved wasn’t too sharp, so I wasn’t really doing much. But Jackson grabbed the stake and rock from me and, with his stronger muscles and larger size, he was able to pound it into the creature.

A scream like a banshee’s echoed through the cemetery and she tried to pull the stake away from Jackson. I squeezed in beside him and tried to hold down the woman’s arms. The feel of her skin was unpleasant - she was cold and a bit slimy, and as I increased my grip, her skin started to tear.

I guess I was helping because Jackson was able to pound the stake in deeper. And, with each strike of the rock on the stake, the screams became weaker and weaker until the screams faded away.

Not taking any chances, Jackson continued pounding, and only stopped when he felt the stake punch through and into the wood. At which point, I let go of the woman’s arms.

In Dr. Tully’s flash, I saw that I really had torn the skin of the woman’s wrists. I saw what looked like bone and muscles exposed but, curiously, no blood.

We looked at the woman but she wasn’t moving.

“So,” Helen called down, “is she dead?”

We stayed there for the rest of the night, taking turns watching over the body and waiting for dawn. Dr. Tully had also asked us to document as much as we could, so we started treating the thing like a kind of archeological dig. For me, I acted like it was more like a crime scene and I was a CSI photographer.

While we worked, the Doc just stayed in the shallow, three-foot-deep grave and watched over her with another stake in hand. “Just in case,” he said.

As we worked, I couldn’t help but notice that we were still surrounded by dead people, but, somehow, the atmosphere around us had also changed despite the ghosts.

I looked through the viewfinder and a lot of them were still there. Some looked down into the grave and walked away, and as they got further away, they faded into the night.

But dawn was coming, and they were starting to thin out.

One of them, a tall man in a suit and tie, looked at me. He looked like some well-to-do businessman who was just on the way home or something. The only thing that ruined it was the blood dripping from his mouth, and the fact that he was a transparent ghost.

I couldn’t hear it, of course, but I knew he said “thank you.” I could read his lips.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

He nodded to me and smiled, turned and walked away. I followed him with the camera until he faded away.

“Who were you talking to?” Lucy asked.

“Oh, no one. Just some guy.”

And then the sun peeked over the horizon.

Note - The picture was a collage made from publicly accessible pictures of the Sena Kashiwazaki character and other pictures. No ownership is claimed. No IP infringement is intended.