August 10, 2025 • 39 mins
People who work at Cemeteries and Graveyards share Strange and Scary things they have witnessed
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/best-of-reddit-stories-2025-cheating-true-crime-aita-and-nsfw-stories--6476242/support.
Best Of Reddit Stories 2025
Dive into the latest and greatest Reddit stories of 2025! From jaw-dropping "Am I the A**hole?" moments to heartwarming tales from r/HumansBeingBros, this collection brings together the most entertaining, shocking, and thought-provoking posts Reddit has to offer.
We’re covering everything from dramatic revenge stories and awkward family confessions to inspiring life lessons and hilarious fails. Whether you’re here for the laughs, the drama, or the unexpected twists, these Reddit gems will keep you entertained for hours.
Perfect for fans of storytelling, internet culture, and those looking to stay updated with the wildest posts from Reddit this year!
Love, lies, and deception—this podcast dives into the raw and unfiltered stories of infidelity. Each episode uncovers jaw-dropping tales of trust shattered, secrets revealed, and relationships forever changed. From scandalous affairs to shocking double lives, we explore the emotional fallout, the dramatic confrontations, and the unexpected twists in the lives of those involved. Whether you’ve been betrayed, are just curious, or love a good drama, Betrayal brings you real stories of heartbreak and resilience.
Think your ex was bad? Wait until you hear these stories! Cheaters Confessions brings you the juiciest, most shocking, and sometimes downright ridiculous tales of infidelity. From secret double lives to outrageous excuses, we’ll dive into the drama,
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/best-of-reddit-stories-2025-cheating-true-crime-aita-and-nsfw-stories--6476242/support.
Best Of Reddit Stories 2025
Dive into the latest and greatest Reddit stories of 2025! From jaw-dropping "Am I the A**hole?" moments to heartwarming tales from r/HumansBeingBros, this collection brings together the most entertaining, shocking, and thought-provoking posts Reddit has to offer.
We’re covering everything from dramatic revenge stories and awkward family confessions to inspiring life lessons and hilarious fails. Whether you’re here for the laughs, the drama, or the unexpected twists, these Reddit gems will keep you entertained for hours.
Perfect for fans of storytelling, internet culture, and those looking to stay updated with the wildest posts from Reddit this year!
Love, lies, and deception—this podcast dives into the raw and unfiltered stories of infidelity. Each episode uncovers jaw-dropping tales of trust shattered, secrets revealed, and relationships forever changed. From scandalous affairs to shocking double lives, we explore the emotional fallout, the dramatic confrontations, and the unexpected twists in the lives of those involved. Whether you’ve been betrayed, are just curious, or love a good drama, Betrayal brings you real stories of heartbreak and resilience.
Think your ex was bad? Wait until you hear these stories! Cheaters Confessions brings you the juiciest, most shocking, and sometimes downright ridiculous tales of infidelity. From secret double lives to outrageous excuses, we’ll dive into the drama,
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Redditors who work at cemeteries and graveyards. What strange and
scary stuff have you witnessed? Like and subscribe or I'll
haunt you tonight. I spend lots of time in a
local cemetery. The weirdest thing there to me is this
(00:22):
small section located a little bit off to the side
that's filled with many very old graves marked only by numbers.
I'm not sure how many there are exactly, but I've
seen the numbers go up past three hundred if I
remember correctly. Some of them have little flags by them,
indicating that they're a veteran. However, no name or dates
accompany the number. I never really figured out why they
(00:43):
were just numbered and had no identity. In the same area,
there's a grave that has no number, but does have
a name, dates of birth and death, and birthplace. But
it's entirely in Greek. Reading it reveals that they were
born in lin Katia, Greece, and they share a last
name and birthplace with another entirely Greek grave located all
the way across the cemetery. Not necessarily creepy, but I
(01:06):
thought it was interesting. I wonder why they weren't buried
closer together if they were related. There was also a
grave in one of the newer sections that had a
note posted next to it from the wife of the
man buried there, angry that some low life had stolen
the flower she had left by his grave. Seeing this
made me angry as well, so I picked some flowers
from my yard and left them there with my own note,
(01:27):
explaining that the idea of stealing flowers from a grave
broke my heart, and I'm sorry that someone would do
such a thing. I wonder if she ever saw it.
I hope it wasn't out of line for me to
do that. Also, I have seen things and felt things
in my presence while I walked alone between graves, nothing
too serious, just movement out of the corner of my
eyes and feeling like I'm not alone when truly I'm
(01:49):
the only one around in that area. I'm not entirely
sure if I believe in ghosts or not, but if
they are ghosts, I hope they don't mind me hanging
around so often. I really enjoy the peace and quiet
of the cemetery, as well as the beautiful monuments and
interesting history you can find there. My granddad used to
work at a cemetery in New Zealand, where I live.
(02:12):
He enjoyed his job in him, my grandma and their
three sons, my dad being the youngest, all lived on
a small house up the back. The cemetery is big
and goes over like a hill, so the house wasn't
out in the open or anything. One day, my uncle,
the oldest brother, he was a teen at the time,
drove home and noticed a little girl in a white
(02:32):
dress playing on the tire swing hanging off the big
oak tree. He didn't really care, as the cemetery was
right next to a neighborhood and children often wandered down
to play. At dinner, he made an offhand comment about
it to my granddad, who asked him to describe her.
He did, and apparently my granddad went very quiet and
said her service had been held that same morning. That
(02:53):
uncle now lives in Australia, so I don't see him often.
He told me this story a few years ago, and
I get chills thinking about it. My two times great
grandfather was a war veteran. After the war, he worked
on digging up graves for his fallen friends. It was
twelve midnight, as I can recall, my grandfather told me
(03:13):
that while my two times great grandfather was digging graves,
he heard people screaming in gunshots. As he climbed up
from the grave he was digging, he saw people Filipinos,
Americans and Japanese alike. He saw them fighting. This occurred
three years after World War II. By the way, after
that incident, he always kept a handgun under his bed.
(03:34):
My grandfather always told me that my two times great
grandfather would always visit by the mass grave and would
always talk alone. This often occurred eleven pm until one
am for three years straight. Oftentimes he would bring food, water,
and flowers to the grave. After his retirement from the army,
I used to work as a receptionist in a funeral home.
(03:57):
One busy Saturday, everyone left to go to the cemetery
with a family for the graveside service, except for the
one embomber who was downstairs working. I was doing paperwork
when my phone rang and it was someone calling the
internal line from the prep room where the embomber was.
I answered and I could hear the radio clearly playing
in the background, but nobody was on the line. I
(04:18):
walked ten feet into the office beside mine and the
Embalomber was sitting at the computer working on something. I
asked her who was downstairs in the prep room, and
she looked at me funny and said, there's nobody down there.
They all went to the cemetery. She was right, there
was no one else in the building. I don't believe
in spirits or anything of the sort, but that certainly
(04:38):
creeped me out. My boyfriend is a grave digger or
caretaker of an old cemetery right by us. Besides seeing
the typical disappearing person here and there, he doesn't really
have stories. However, I think the way he got that
job is amazing. Before working at the cemetery, my boyfriend
quit his farming job of nearly twenty five five years.
(05:01):
That left him unemployed for a few months and kind
of lost as a person who likes to have goals
and such. Anyway, one night I decide we should go
to that cemetery with a recorder and ask if there
is life after death. The aim was to get a
recording of a voice or a sign in some way.
Boyfriend seemed pretty cool with it until about five minutes
after we started walking through the cemetery. First thing I
(05:24):
noticed was my boyfriend had taken his hat off and
was holding it over his heart with a worried look
on his face, while I was holding the recorder and
giving our initial greetings to any potential spirits listening. I
said to the spirits, I hope we're not being disrespectful
by being here. We don't mean any harm. I only
have one question and then we'll leave. I then ask,
while my boyfriend is silent the entire time, if there
(05:47):
is life after death. Because I didn't hear anything, I
pushed it a bit, asking repeatedly. I had just decided
to ask for a sign blinking lights when my boyfriend
finally spoke, saying, I think we should of respect and
leave now. His eyes were watery. I could tell he
was having strong feelings about it, so we left. I
did review the video later that night and discovered that
(06:10):
although I couldn't see lights blinking while we were there,
on the video, they twinkled like stars. And that was
that until two days later. My boyfriend gets a call
he knows everybody, offering him a job at the cemetery.
After our initial surprise, I said, you'd honestly be a
perfect person to work there. You clearly have respect for
the dead. It's been about four years now. My boyfriend
(06:33):
is the guy who stands with respect throughout a burial
gathering with the family and waits until he thinks everyone
is truly ready for the lowering of the casket. I
worked all last summer for a small town. Part of
my job was going out and we'd whacking and mowing
the cemetery once a week, meaning I spent eight to
sixteen hours a week out there, depending on what needed
(06:54):
to be done. There was a man out there who
would show upright beside the same grave every time I
was on the lawnmower. Every day, without fail, his shadow
would appear in the middle of the field, beside the
same grave, in the middle of a treeless section of
the cemetery. I think he was just a lonely spirit
on the way to the next life. After I quit,
I was packing up to move back to college, and
(07:16):
I was standing in the middle of a bedroom in
the basement holding an act to fry. The thing turns
on and beeps and runs for about thirty seconds, and
I'm holding the court and standing in the middle of
the room. I think he realized I wasn't coming back
and decided to mess with me a bit. Honestly, a
lot of the old guys from town were known to
be pranksters. The only other thing I can think of
(07:36):
is the squirrel carcasses that would appear. I think it
might have been a hawk, But every few days, without fail,
there would be about four to five new rodent carcasses,
funny skin, like a hunter had skinned them under an
old dead tree that I think freaked me out the most.
I don't work at a cemetery, but I do have
a story. Just outside my hometown, there is a small
(07:58):
castle brief history. It was a mod in eleven hundreds
and slowly progressed to a castle and Georgian residence throughout time.
There is a small burial ground outside of it, and
mine my friends decided to investigate the local rumors about
a shining light that shone in a powerless section of
the place. Anyways, we got there, saw the light, and
roam the grounds for somewhere near an hour. It was
(08:21):
a very uneasy place, so we decided to leave. We
got attacked by a flock of birds. When I got
back to my car outside the grounds to drive home,
I got an unexpected call from my mother asking was
I all right, and that she had gotten a very
bad feeling about me crossing her mind. I let her
know I was fine and would be home in the
next fifteen to twenty minutes, not to be worrying about nothing.
(08:43):
Cut to about five minutes later, after I had ended
the call and was beginning my drive home. I was
pulling out onto the main road and a car with
no lights on in the pitch dark came and smashed
into the side of my car. Nobody was seriously hurt.
If the car with no lights had been five second later,
she would probably have killed my friend in the following car,
as she would have hit his driver's door rather than
(09:05):
my rear door. I will always remember that night. It
felt as though we shouldn't have ever been there and
an incident was bound to happen with the feeling around
that place. Have never been there since. This was about
six years ago, not really a cemetery experience, but it
was still pretty freaky. My grandparents live out in the
middle of nowhere pretty much and is surrounded by woods
(09:28):
on their property. There was a whole family that owned
my grandparents property before them. From what I was told,
they were killed or something like that. A few years ago,
when I was still living with my grandparents, a relative
that was related to the dead family came up to
the property and wanted to remove the bodies from the land.
My grandpa was extremely happy about it because he wanted
(09:50):
to expand the house, but couldn't because he didn't want
to mess with the graves. So they got together and
I stood nearby watching them dig up four caskets. There
were three adult sides caskets and one child sized casket,
and they all looked really old. One of the bigger
caskets had holes and cracks all over it. That was
the one that my grandpa and the other relative was
(10:10):
carrying when the body fell out the bottom of the casket.
The body was pretty much bones, but it still had
old muscle and tissue on it. I remember feeling sick
to my stomach as I watched them uncomfortably put the
body back into the casket upside down. My partner and
I had just gotten back to the funeral home from
a house call for a thirty one year old woman
(10:32):
who died of cancer. As we were moving her body
from the cot to embalmbing table, we heard an audible
click and the radio across the room turned on full
volume of static. It's one of those old radios you
turn the volume dial until it clicks to turn it on.
We both looked at each other. He was an extremely
religious man and this event visibly shook him, and he left.
(10:52):
Not long after the incident. I shut the radio off
as I typically used my phone to listen to music
while embombing had finished the procedure and was attempting to
move her from the embalming table to a dressing table.
I heard that click from that old radio and it
turned on full volume yet again. At that point, I
was fairly freaked out and made my exit. Not long after.
(11:13):
My partner and I never spoke of it again, and
nothing like that ever occurred to my knowledge before or after.
I take care of a small family mausoleum. The family
that is buried there is no living descendants, so it
falls to me to clean out the facility and replace
the flowers inside the building. I also make sure that
there's no damage to the mausoleum. I've become very acquainted
(11:37):
with the family that is buried inside. One day, as
I was closing up my office, my phone rang, and
when I answered it. There was a very agitated woman
on the other end. She was very clearly under the
influence of something. She asked me repeatedly if I knew
where Jane Smith was. Jane Smith has been buried in
the mausoleum since the early nineteen hundreds. I asked her
(11:59):
why she needed to know. The woman very calmly asked
me to go to the mausoleum to double check that
Jane was still there, because she believed that she was her.
I assured her that I was pretty sure Jane was
still peacefully buried in Our phone conversation ended a few
moments later. Drugs and alcohol are a hell of a thing,
but it still creeped me out enough that I don't
answer my phone after five PM any longer, and I
(12:21):
make sure someone is with me when I go to
the cemetery. My dad purchased a cemetery when I was
in middle school, and I worked for him through high
school graduation. I did yard work, mowing wheat, eating flower beds,
et cetera. Aside from the occasional shadows seen out of
the corner of my eye, seeing people who turned out
(12:43):
to not be there, and hearing strange sounds. The cemetery
was actually a quite peaceful place. But the strangest is
when you have a burial in the crips. Basically you
dig down about four or five feet to expose giant
cement doors. You pull the cement doors off and drop
down into a little room. These rooms can fit two
coffins or years and years and years worth of cremated remains.
(13:07):
So back in the fifties and sixties, families would buy
one crypt and the entire fam would be cremated and
put in it. Some just put the cremated remains in
it and close her up, but others light candles and
leaf flowers and souvenirs and pictures and stuff. It's freaking
creepy opening up one of those bad boys after fifty
years and finding melted candles and old pictures of the
(13:28):
people inside. Plus when you hop down in there, you
have a weird realization that you are at the same
level and completely surrounded by bodies. I worked for a
county cemetery department years ago. We would go to all
the cemeteries in the county and mow or just do
basic upkeep. Occasionally, people mainly farmers, would stumble upon some
(13:50):
headstones in a field or a stand of trees, and
we would come out and prod the ground with dowel
rods to find more headstones and re establish the cemetery.
Soon after I started working there, we got a tip
about some headstones of farmer found while clearing out a
path through some trees for easier access to his field.
It turned out to be the oldest cemetery in the county,
dating back to the seventeen hundreds. After investigating some of
(14:14):
the names on the headstones, it got really creepy. The
story is that before the cemetery was there, a schoolhouse
stood there. The teachers were a husband and wife. It's
not clear on what exactly happened, but the students and
the husband and wife all died in the schoolhouse. The
information we found kind of made it sound like an
illness of some kind, and they were all quarantined in
(14:35):
the school until they all died. After that, the school
was demolished and the students and husband and wife were
all buried right where the school stood. So yeah, I'm
sure it's haunted. When I was in college, I worked
part time at a Jewish cemetery in reception or office management.
The cemetery was closed from Friday afternoon through Saturday evening
(14:57):
for Sabbath. We sometimes stayed a bit later in the
office on Friday afternoons to get bills out or checks processed.
We heard a loud commotion by the cemetery entrance, which
was locked and only staff could get in and out.
The office manager went to see what was going on
and made me come with her. We went down to
the gate to find an older woman, probably around seventy,
(15:18):
dressed to the nines, begging us to let her in.
She kept saying she needed to get back. This was
in the suburbs of New Jersey, so you needed a
car to get around, but we didn't see a car
or anything. She was just there in this beautiful dress.
We couldn't open the gate without the cemetery manager, so
we went to go get him. We brought him back
to the gate and no one was there. We looked
(15:40):
at video footage of the entrance and you could see us,
the office manager and me talking, but there was no
one on the other side of the gate. The cemetery
manager thought we were trying to trick him. I swear
to this day we saw a woman in a fancy dress.
Outside the gate. There were multiple cameras and not a
single one picked up anyone on the other side of
the gate, and you could see the whole gate. All
(16:03):
you could see was us. I don't know if it
was a ghost or what. The office manager and I
decided not to tell anyone else, but we would mention
it to each other every once in a while. It's
not quite the same, but I had an uncle who
tried working as in selling and doing drugs the graveyards
between ten pm and four am. He only lasted a
(16:24):
few nights in that area, then never went back. What
was it that scared him so badly that he felt
his soul rattle in his bones as his blood froze cold.
Prairie dogs, Freaking prairie dogs. What's so frightening about simple
ground squirrels, you might ask, those cute little fuzz balls
that scavenge whatever they can. Well, apparently they like to
(16:45):
randomly come out their holes in the middle of the
night and scream creepy. But that doesn't sound too bad,
right Well, now, imagine being surrounded by dozens of little
rodents you can't see in the pitch black of night,
surrounded by the day tweaked out of your mind, paranoid
as hell, and then suddenly hearing hellish, blood curdling screaming
all around you. His little group scattered like roaches, and
(17:09):
I think someone fell into a ditch. But he was
convinced it was an empty grave. He never did that again.
I once worked for a graveyard in Florida for a
couple months. One day they were digging a grave and
went home early. They left the excavator there, and on
my lunch break, I was sitting near it when I
heard someone banging on the machine. Now this ain't at settling, No,
(17:33):
this was someone taking a hammer and hitting it on
the machine. I figured someone was working on it, but
it just kept hitting. After seven minutes or so, I
walk over to see what's going on and nothing. No
one is there, and it stopped when I approached the machine.
I also lived down the street from this graveyard and
I go by it constantly. One time I saw a
(17:54):
lady roaming around the graveyard at night. I don't know
if it was an actual person or not, but it
creeped me up out a fair bed. My mom and
stepdad were the caretakers of a small cemetery for about
ten years. All of us kids, six between the two
of them, helped out at one point or another. One summer,
(18:14):
I was helping my mom with mowing and upkeep. It
was a super hot summer, so we would try to
go and get the mowing done early before the heat
became too unbearable. Well, we had trouble getting the truck
going one day, so we ended up starting a little
later than usual and were unable to finish up everything
that day. My mom had an appointment the next and
the day after that it was supposed to rain, so
(18:36):
I told her I would go up early the next
morning and finish up the trimming with the weed eater.
So it's about seven in the morning and I am
listening to music with my headphones and going around the headstones.
Everything was going well until I got to the oldest
section of the cemetery. That part was on a small
slope of a hill. Once you got to the bottom
and looked up, you couldn't see the road, but you
(18:58):
could see it again once you were about half way up.
When I finished up the last headstone, I turned off
my equipment and started back up the hill. I glanced
up in time to see a little girl in a
pretty red dress. She was running and disappeared behind a
large headstone. I figured her parents were visiting another grave,
and the little girl ran off to entertain herself. It
(19:19):
was around nine am at this point. I got to
the top of the hill and there was no car
or people around. The cemetery wasn't really close to any houses,
and the girl was too nicely dressed to have walked
out there. I looked around and shouted for her to
come out. I was able to see the headstone she
ran behind, and I would have seen her if she
ran out again. I couldn't find her anywhere. I called
(19:43):
my mom and told her what was going on and
asked if I should call the police and tell them
about this little girl. She looked to be about three
or four years old, so she certainly shouldn't be by herself.
My mom asked me if she was wearing a red dress.
I said yes, Why so she proceeds to nonchalantly tell
me that was just the ghost girl. Now, everyone who
(20:04):
knows me knows that I don't mess with ghosts. I
asked why she didn't tell me there was a ghost
in the cemetery. She said she needed my help and
was afraid I wouldn't go up if EL thought it
was haunted. Now, granted, I probably would have been more
leery of the place, but knowing no one else could
help her, I would have still helped her that summer,
but I would have be sure I wasn't there by myself.
(20:26):
I still go there sometimes, as I have relatives buried there,
but I am always with someone. Fortunately, I never saw
any other ghosts, and I have never seen the little
ghost girl ever again. I've had a number of odd
experiences with our crematorium. One such instance was in twenty twelve,
following a service for a very large man roughly three
(20:48):
hundred seventy five pounds. I got the retort cremation chamber
preheated while my wife set up a movie to watch
while the man was cremated. I used the elevating platform
and then slid him in using the door to the retort.
Afterwards and went to sit down. About five minutes after
I'd shut the door to the retort, we heard a thump.
(21:08):
Neither of us paid it much mind, but a few
moments later there was another, and then another. I stood up,
worried that the man may have had a pacemaker still
inside him, however unlikely, as he had had his organs removed.
The thumping and thudding got more hurried. We looked through
the front window of the retort and couldn't believe what
we were seeing. The man inside was flailing about. Both
(21:30):
of his arms and legs were bouncing around like he
was in extreme pain. Now, it isn't ought to see
parts move while someone is being cremated. As the limbs
are broken down, they will often contract as muscles and
tendons snap. But this was most decidedly not that. The
man's fingers were bald up in fists and were banging
against the windows, and his legs seemed to be kicking
(21:50):
downward as if to get out. The man's mouth opened
and first groans began emanating from within, then screams. There
was no way, absolutely no way whatsoever that he could
still have been alive, But for about twenty seconds after
we'd gone up to the retort, the man inside the
cremation chamber screamed and flailed his arms and legs about.
(22:13):
My family has owned a cemetery for nearly five generations,
and I've been working there since I was twelve. The
house that my family built on the property is about
thirty yards back from the main office. One night, when
they were kids, my grandpa and uncle were up late.
My uncle happened to look out their window and swore
to my grandpa that he'd seen someone walk behind one
of the trees. The lamp post illuminated the very first
(22:36):
handful of plots and headstones on the other side of
the road, but at that point they were undisturbed. My
grandpa and uncle stood at their window for a little while,
with my grandpa ultimately teasing my uncle for being scared. However,
when they woke up the next morning, the police were there.
In the hours between when they looked out the window
and saw the burial plots undisturbed about four a m.
(22:59):
And the time they noticed the commotion about seven am,
seven of the plots had been dug up. The headstones
were stacked very deliberately, like a house of cards, and
behind them in the caskets were atop one another, the
first one laying flat, the next one straight up, then flat,
straight up, flat straight up, with the final one flat.
(23:19):
With basic casket dimensions taken into account, that's nearly thirty
feet high I'm sure you can imagine, even with machinery
in the present day, that would take at least a
little bit of time to accomplish. But nope, back in
the nineteen fifties, this was somehow done in a span
of less than one hundred eighty minutes, with no one
that lived in the house able to hear it going on.
(23:43):
Dave is the oldest of the workers and has been
here forever. I ask him, Hey, Dave, have you ever
experienced anything creepy here? Dave replies, Back in the eighties,
I began working here with old Frank. One afternoon we
had a funeral for a child whose last name was
kind of odd and sticks with you, Eagleton. We loaded
the casket without a hitch. His family was gone. It
(24:05):
was just about eight of us. We started lowering the
vault cover that his family bought, and my rope surprisingly snapped.
My side came crashing down and took out the bottom
right of the casket. I looked down there and there
the kid was. All I saw was his leg, black pants,
creamy white shoes. I had to go sit down after
that while they fixed the cover. I was sitting literally
(24:27):
five feet from the guys on a bench when I
felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked over and
it was a young man. He had a watering cannon,
was in an all blue suit. I figured he was
going to water flowers at another grave or something. He
calmly chuckles, You're definitely not the first person to do that.
Don't worry about it. We all end up buried. I
(24:47):
laughed with him and watched him walk over to another
grave under a maple tree and started watering the flowers
at the stone. I walked over to check on the
guys and just making sure, because I do believe in ghosts,
ask hey, Fred, is that guy actually there? Frank responds,
that's not funny. Of course he's there. I laughed, but
the next time we look over, he's gone. I've never
(25:09):
seen Old Frank so startled in his life. He tells
me that grave is a single and hasn't been dug yet.
There's not supposed to be a tombstone. Old Frank pulls
me to the side and tells me to keep it
between us. I walk around ten paces to the grave
site and my jaw drops. There's not a thing there,
no tombstone, no nothing. A few years go by, and
(25:31):
Dave passes away. His burial was in an older section
that rarely has burials anymore. We were lowering him and
an innocent part time kid couldn't bear the weight of
the vault cover and dropped it. We finished it, and
I walked down to talk to the kid, telling him
not to worry. It happens to everyone. I brought a
pail of water to fill up next to the bench
(25:52):
so I can water the sad, lonely flower pot someone
brought for Dave. I put my hand on the kid's
shoulder and joked while filling it up. Started walking up
the hill and I noticed a grave with a name
I couldn't forget, Eagleton. I had tunnel vision right to
Dave's grave and up to the maple tree it was under.
I'm in shock and I look all over my body
while I'm wearing a navy blue suit. I immediately ran
(26:15):
to the record's cabinet to check to see when this
grave site was bought by Dave. I went through pages
and pages of years of binders filled with the records
of purchases and whose war Dave and his family never
purchased the grave. No one has ever purchased that grave.
I was originally hired because the cemetery had a period
of time where they experienced some people sneaking in to
(26:37):
perform rituals. I was twenty one years old doing this
as a side job with nothing to protect myself. I
was given a barcode scanner and was told to drive
through the entire cemetery every hour or soda patrol, and
to scan each of the pre posted bar codes to
prove I was actually doing it. Now, this cemetery was massive,
(26:57):
pretty much broken into three parts, the newer part, the
historic part, and the famous part where celebrities are buried.
I did this routine once and never did it again,
going so far as to break the barcode scanner so
I didn't have to do it. While I was driving,
it was pitch black coming around a long curved road.
My headlights picked up what I could have sworn were
(27:18):
a pair of legs walking across the path, but only
up to the knees. Shoes, pants, kneeds, then absolutely nothing.
I stopped in the road and just watched this pair
of legs cross ten feet in front me. I put
the car in reverse, did what felt like the longest
k turn of my life and noped it straight back
to the parking lot. Normally, my then girlfriend now my
(27:42):
wife would drop by the cemetery around eight p m
and bring me dinner. Since I couldn't really leave, I
never told her about my weird experiences because I didn't
want to freak her out. As I'm walking her back
to her car to leave, I see her reach back
and touch her ponytail, then look around with a look
on her face. I ask her what's wrong, and she
says nothing. I must have got my ponytail caught in
(28:05):
a tree branch. I felt something, so I pointed out
to her that the closest tree was twenty feet away
and that's impossible. Then she gets really pale and says
it felt like someone ran their hand through her hair
front to back and then pulled on the ponytail. We
were both pretty freaked out and she left. She never
came and brought me dinner again. I worked the four
(28:28):
pm to twelve am shift. The cemetery generally closed at
six pm, so around five thirty pm I would lock
the main gate, then would start driving through the cemetery
to notify any visitors that we'd be closing soon. So
one day I'm in the middle of my final drive
through and see an old lady slowly walking the sidewalk
alongside a mausoleum. The mausoleum was hundreds of feet long,
(28:51):
about twenty feet tall, and had no brakes in it.
It was one long stretch. The road ran directly alongside
the sidewalk of the mausoleum, so i'd pulled behind the
lady to tell her we're closing. Get out of my car.
Take my eyes off of her for a split second
as I'm getting out of the car, and when I
shut the door and look up, she's gone completely vanished.
(29:11):
I didn't think anything paranormal at first. I just thought
maybe I lost sight of her, But the sidewalk and
road were completely empty. I ran all the way around
the check the back of the mausoleum, but no one
was there. Across from the mausoleum was a whole field
of graves, and I egilized every row. Not a soul
in sight. I finish up my round up and sit
(29:32):
in my car the rest of the night. In a
well liit area, I saw a fully visible person. I
know it. No tricks of light, no hallucination, plain as day.
The city wanted to develop on my family's cemetery about
one hundred years ago. My family agreed to sell them
the land we had. Of the city would then also
pay for a portion of the land next to it
(29:54):
on which my family could continue the business. When that happened,
my family had to inform all the other families with
buried loved ones that the remains of their dearly departed
were going to be moved into new plots. Work began
on that, and as bulldozers and other large shoveling equipment
wasn't yet common, it all had to be done by hand.
The ground was dug up, the caskets were retrieved and
(30:16):
moved along with their headstones, down to the new, freshly
dug plots. Back then, caskets were generally made of wood
with a decorative cloth laid over it. These wooden caskets
more often than not, weighed roughly equal to or less
than the body they contained. In many cases, the weight
of the body inside was discernible from the casket itself. Well.
(30:36):
When they got to the final northernmost third of the
land that the city had bought, the caskets became lighter.
The sounds of the corpses within slight sliding a jerky step,
making a limb fall to one side, hitting the inside
of the box. Et cetera, began to become fewer and
farther between. Eventually, with the last twenty or so caskets,
(30:56):
they felt like there was nothing inside at all. With
the mission of the families, the cemetery employees opened these
caskets they thought were empty and found just that to
be the case. The insides of the caskets were bare
and looked as if there hadn't ever been anything inside them.
One afternoon, my coworker and I were walking the paved
(31:17):
roads in there with a trash bag looking for litter.
We came upon a particular area of a cemetery that
has a lot of mausoleums and took the next lane
around a corner that goes along the side of one mausoleum.
As we rounded it, there was an older gentleman, maybe
in his late sixties or early seventies, standing with his
back against the side of the mausoleum, just looking at
(31:39):
a plot of graves nearby. Two things were kind of
weird about him. He was dressed a bit odd. His
clothes were a little out of date corduroy jacket in
eighty degree weather, in one of those newsboy type caps,
long pants, button up shirt. But when you think about it,
a lot of elderly people kind of dress in out
of date clothing anyway, so I shrugged it off. The
(32:00):
second thing, he had a coffee mug he was drinking
out of, not a thermis or a styrofoam cup with
a lid, an actual ceramic coffee mug that he was
sipping out of right in the middle of the cemetery.
We waved to each other and kept walking. We were
only a few feet away when the other girl said
that was a little weird, and we both looked over
our shoulders back at him, but he was gone. We
(32:22):
stopped and kind of took a few steps back to
see if he'd walked around the mausoleum or something, but
we couldn't see him any more. A couple days later,
we both showed up for work and found one of
the regular workers to let him know we were there.
We talked to him a few minutes, and I brought
up seeing the old man by the mausoleum in the
east section. The grounds keeper smiled and asked, did he
(32:44):
have a coffee mug? We said yeah. He said, yeah,
that's our ghost. He's not really there. We pressed for
more explanation, and he said he's always seen in that spot,
looking at a family plot, and always has a coffee mug.
He said there is a grave, the wife, two daughters,
and the husband. The husband's grave says that he passed
(33:04):
in the early seventies, and the wife and two daughter's
graves say they passed a couple of decades before, and
the three of them have the exact same date their
lives ended. They think he was the dad, and that
he maybe used to visit his wife and daughter's graves
a lot. He told us people only see him for
a few seconds, then he's gone. The cremation chamber naturally
(33:26):
has an exhaust. I was sleeping one night when my
wife shook me awake. I got up and went to
the window and saw that from the exhaust there was
thick smoke pluming out as if someone was being cremated.
Seeing as we're the ones who operate the crematorium and
neither of us were there, this absolutely should not have
been happening. I had my wife call the police while
(33:47):
I went over to check on things. A fire of
over a thousand degrees was likely burning inside one way
or another. It had to be turned off as quickly
as possible, or at the very least controlled. All the
lights were off and the doors were locked, as they
were every night. I went inside and the inside of
the retort was bright with flames, but there was nothing
(34:08):
inside it. We meticulously cleaned the cremation chamber after each use,
and while the flames alone would likely produce some kind
of smoke, the smoke that we saw coming from the
exhaust was the kind of thick, gray and black smoke
that could only be produced by something actually physically burning.
I shut it off and went around to check the
windows and postern doors, which were all intact and locked.
(34:30):
There is a ladder that leads to a ceiling exit,
but that too was locked from the inside. The police
showed up and took a report, but there was really
nothing to be done. It was attributed to someone having
left the retort on before leaving, even though my wife
and I both knew the other hadn't done that. That's
one that I'll forever ponder. It was a quiet day,
(34:51):
so I pulled my car around the back of the
old chapel to take a nap. The chapel was surrounded
by twelve foot high hedges, so I figured it was
a good spot to park for an hour and shut
my eyes. I fall asleep and wake up to see
my car completely surrounded by decomposing people, so real, so vivid,
so much detail. They were all pressed up against the
(35:13):
glass and windshield. They had on the outfits. They were
buried in suits, dresses, but all dirty and different stages
of decomposition. No one spoke, no one moved. They all
just stared like I was some zoo exhibit. Then I
woke up. I had been asleep and it was a dream.
The thing is, it felt so real. I have never
(35:34):
had a dream so real, so vivid before or after.
I took it as a message. I called my boss
and quit as soon as I left at four pm.
I wasn't intentionally seeking out cemetery employment. It happened accidentally,
but I quickly became smitten. It was pleasantly quiet, and
I was also able to connect with people, such as
(35:56):
those visiting late loved ones and participating in ceremonies, without
becoming overwhelmed. However, there is a particular statue of a
weeping angel in the cemetery that locals and even out
of state visitors are wary of due to the alleged
paranormal activities surrounding it at nightfall, in example, echoing cries,
foggy apparitions, the angel herself moving. Because of this, the
(36:19):
cemetery has become one of the top ghost hunting cemeteries,
much to my dismay. I will admit I sometimes feel
nauseous near the statue intend to only venture near the
lot if daylight is out, but I work third shift now,
so this is almost always unavoidable. I'm highly skeptical of
the paranormal, so I write it off as paranoia from
all the stories I've heard, but tending to anything near
(36:42):
it is not among one of my favorite tasks to perform.
I try to switch out with other groundskeepers, but no
one wants to do it. I mean, I've seen one
of my coworkers, who is a grown man in his fifties,
intentionally high from our superintendent to avoid it. So I
get a pretty well known cemetery in my city and
(37:02):
possibly state. I had gotten off early and walked from
the operations area for all the groundskeepers. I walked from
the back end to the front of the cemetery, by
the main office and the main huge mausoleum. This cemetery
is three hundred forty five acres and with three hundred
more acres of undeveloped land. I walked into the mausoleum,
where I had friends that worked in the front end
(37:23):
of the cemetery and had upkeep of the building. The
building has three floors available to the public and an
elevator that leads to the other three floors and the roof,
but the public do not have access to those floors
as the elevator has a specific switch you have to
hit and the stairs up there are blocked off. I
went there to rest and hang out as it was
mostly peaceful and quiet. Rarely would people go in there.
(37:46):
The only people having the code to get in are
some workers and the families of the deceased that are
in crips there. This is a fairly short story, as
I was pretty spooked and got the hell out of
Dodge pretty quickly. I was hanging around in my coworkers
or friends had left the building to go do some
grounds maintenance outside. I walked downstairs to the lower level
to find the boiler room door open. One of my
(38:08):
coworkers must have left it, so I closed it and
thought nothing of it, and I continued to roam around
and read the names on the crips. I suddenly heard
what sounded like footsteps in the stairwell. I was a
little startled, and I waited to see someone walk out
into the main area, but no one ever appeared. I
looked through the building and found no one. I ended
(38:28):
back up on the main level and played around with
the organ that was set up for funeral services. I
eventually wandered back downstairs to find the boiler room door
back open. I looked inside the room to find nobody.
I ran like a bat out of hell, up the
stairs and out the main doors, not looking back. I
went back to the operations area in the back end
of the cemetery. I was so scared. I have no
(38:51):
idea how that door opened again. I asked everyone working
in there, but no one knew what I was talking about.
I got a ride from the front end to the
back again from a manager. He had told me many
of his own stories after hearing mine that had just happened.
We all almost believe in the paranormal after having our
own strange encounters
Redditors who work at cemeteries and graveyards. What strange and
scary stuff have you witnessed? Like and subscribe or I'll
haunt you tonight. I spend lots of time in a
local cemetery. The weirdest thing there to me is this
(00:22):
small section located a little bit off to the side
that's filled with many very old graves marked only by numbers.
I'm not sure how many there are exactly, but I've
seen the numbers go up past three hundred if I
remember correctly. Some of them have little flags by them,
indicating that they're a veteran. However, no name or dates
accompany the number. I never really figured out why they
(00:43):
were just numbered and had no identity. In the same area,
there's a grave that has no number, but does have
a name, dates of birth and death, and birthplace. But
it's entirely in Greek. Reading it reveals that they were
born in lin Katia, Greece, and they share a last
name and birthplace with another entirely Greek grave located all
the way across the cemetery. Not necessarily creepy, but I
(01:06):
thought it was interesting. I wonder why they weren't buried
closer together if they were related. There was also a
grave in one of the newer sections that had a
note posted next to it from the wife of the
man buried there, angry that some low life had stolen
the flower she had left by his grave. Seeing this
made me angry as well, so I picked some flowers
from my yard and left them there with my own note,
(01:27):
explaining that the idea of stealing flowers from a grave
broke my heart, and I'm sorry that someone would do
such a thing. I wonder if she ever saw it.
I hope it wasn't out of line for me to
do that. Also, I have seen things and felt things
in my presence while I walked alone between graves, nothing
too serious, just movement out of the corner of my
eyes and feeling like I'm not alone when truly I'm
(01:49):
the only one around in that area. I'm not entirely
sure if I believe in ghosts or not, but if
they are ghosts, I hope they don't mind me hanging
around so often. I really enjoy the peace and quiet
of the cemetery, as well as the beautiful monuments and
interesting history you can find there. My granddad used to
work at a cemetery in New Zealand, where I live.
(02:12):
He enjoyed his job in him, my grandma and their
three sons, my dad being the youngest, all lived on
a small house up the back. The cemetery is big
and goes over like a hill, so the house wasn't
out in the open or anything. One day, my uncle,
the oldest brother, he was a teen at the time,
drove home and noticed a little girl in a white
(02:32):
dress playing on the tire swing hanging off the big
oak tree. He didn't really care, as the cemetery was
right next to a neighborhood and children often wandered down
to play. At dinner, he made an offhand comment about
it to my granddad, who asked him to describe her.
He did, and apparently my granddad went very quiet and
said her service had been held that same morning. That
(02:53):
uncle now lives in Australia, so I don't see him often.
He told me this story a few years ago, and
I get chills thinking about it. My two times great
grandfather was a war veteran. After the war, he worked
on digging up graves for his fallen friends. It was
twelve midnight, as I can recall, my grandfather told me
(03:13):
that while my two times great grandfather was digging graves,
he heard people screaming in gunshots. As he climbed up
from the grave he was digging, he saw people Filipinos,
Americans and Japanese alike. He saw them fighting. This occurred
three years after World War II. By the way, after
that incident, he always kept a handgun under his bed.
(03:34):
My grandfather always told me that my two times great
grandfather would always visit by the mass grave and would
always talk alone. This often occurred eleven pm until one
am for three years straight. Oftentimes he would bring food, water,
and flowers to the grave. After his retirement from the army,
I used to work as a receptionist in a funeral home.
(03:57):
One busy Saturday, everyone left to go to the cemetery
with a family for the graveside service, except for the
one embomber who was downstairs working. I was doing paperwork
when my phone rang and it was someone calling the
internal line from the prep room where the embomber was.
I answered and I could hear the radio clearly playing
in the background, but nobody was on the line. I
(04:18):
walked ten feet into the office beside mine and the
Embalomber was sitting at the computer working on something. I
asked her who was downstairs in the prep room, and
she looked at me funny and said, there's nobody down there.
They all went to the cemetery. She was right, there
was no one else in the building. I don't believe
in spirits or anything of the sort, but that certainly
(04:38):
creeped me out. My boyfriend is a grave digger or
caretaker of an old cemetery right by us. Besides seeing
the typical disappearing person here and there, he doesn't really
have stories. However, I think the way he got that
job is amazing. Before working at the cemetery, my boyfriend
quit his farming job of nearly twenty five five years.
(05:01):
That left him unemployed for a few months and kind
of lost as a person who likes to have goals
and such. Anyway, one night I decide we should go
to that cemetery with a recorder and ask if there
is life after death. The aim was to get a
recording of a voice or a sign in some way.
Boyfriend seemed pretty cool with it until about five minutes
after we started walking through the cemetery. First thing I
(05:24):
noticed was my boyfriend had taken his hat off and
was holding it over his heart with a worried look
on his face, while I was holding the recorder and
giving our initial greetings to any potential spirits listening. I
said to the spirits, I hope we're not being disrespectful
by being here. We don't mean any harm. I only
have one question and then we'll leave. I then ask,
while my boyfriend is silent the entire time, if there
(05:47):
is life after death. Because I didn't hear anything, I
pushed it a bit, asking repeatedly. I had just decided
to ask for a sign blinking lights when my boyfriend
finally spoke, saying, I think we should of respect and
leave now. His eyes were watery. I could tell he
was having strong feelings about it, so we left. I
did review the video later that night and discovered that
(06:10):
although I couldn't see lights blinking while we were there,
on the video, they twinkled like stars. And that was
that until two days later. My boyfriend gets a call
he knows everybody, offering him a job at the cemetery.
After our initial surprise, I said, you'd honestly be a
perfect person to work there. You clearly have respect for
the dead. It's been about four years now. My boyfriend
(06:33):
is the guy who stands with respect throughout a burial
gathering with the family and waits until he thinks everyone
is truly ready for the lowering of the casket. I
worked all last summer for a small town. Part of
my job was going out and we'd whacking and mowing
the cemetery once a week, meaning I spent eight to
sixteen hours a week out there, depending on what needed
(06:54):
to be done. There was a man out there who
would show upright beside the same grave every time I
was on the lawnmower. Every day, without fail, his shadow
would appear in the middle of the field, beside the
same grave, in the middle of a treeless section of
the cemetery. I think he was just a lonely spirit
on the way to the next life. After I quit,
I was packing up to move back to college, and
(07:16):
I was standing in the middle of a bedroom in
the basement holding an act to fry. The thing turns
on and beeps and runs for about thirty seconds, and
I'm holding the court and standing in the middle of
the room. I think he realized I wasn't coming back
and decided to mess with me a bit. Honestly, a
lot of the old guys from town were known to
be pranksters. The only other thing I can think of
(07:36):
is the squirrel carcasses that would appear. I think it
might have been a hawk, But every few days, without fail,
there would be about four to five new rodent carcasses,
funny skin, like a hunter had skinned them under an
old dead tree that I think freaked me out the most.
I don't work at a cemetery, but I do have
a story. Just outside my hometown, there is a small
(07:58):
castle brief history. It was a mod in eleven hundreds
and slowly progressed to a castle and Georgian residence throughout time.
There is a small burial ground outside of it, and
mine my friends decided to investigate the local rumors about
a shining light that shone in a powerless section of
the place. Anyways, we got there, saw the light, and
roam the grounds for somewhere near an hour. It was
(08:21):
a very uneasy place, so we decided to leave. We
got attacked by a flock of birds. When I got
back to my car outside the grounds to drive home,
I got an unexpected call from my mother asking was
I all right, and that she had gotten a very
bad feeling about me crossing her mind. I let her
know I was fine and would be home in the
next fifteen to twenty minutes, not to be worrying about nothing.
(08:43):
Cut to about five minutes later, after I had ended
the call and was beginning my drive home. I was
pulling out onto the main road and a car with
no lights on in the pitch dark came and smashed
into the side of my car. Nobody was seriously hurt.
If the car with no lights had been five second later,
she would probably have killed my friend in the following car,
as she would have hit his driver's door rather than
(09:05):
my rear door. I will always remember that night. It
felt as though we shouldn't have ever been there and
an incident was bound to happen with the feeling around
that place. Have never been there since. This was about
six years ago, not really a cemetery experience, but it
was still pretty freaky. My grandparents live out in the
middle of nowhere pretty much and is surrounded by woods
(09:28):
on their property. There was a whole family that owned
my grandparents property before them. From what I was told,
they were killed or something like that. A few years ago,
when I was still living with my grandparents, a relative
that was related to the dead family came up to
the property and wanted to remove the bodies from the land.
My grandpa was extremely happy about it because he wanted
(09:50):
to expand the house, but couldn't because he didn't want
to mess with the graves. So they got together and
I stood nearby watching them dig up four caskets. There
were three adult sides caskets and one child sized casket,
and they all looked really old. One of the bigger
caskets had holes and cracks all over it. That was
the one that my grandpa and the other relative was
(10:10):
carrying when the body fell out the bottom of the casket.
The body was pretty much bones, but it still had
old muscle and tissue on it. I remember feeling sick
to my stomach as I watched them uncomfortably put the
body back into the casket upside down. My partner and
I had just gotten back to the funeral home from
a house call for a thirty one year old woman
(10:32):
who died of cancer. As we were moving her body
from the cot to embalmbing table, we heard an audible
click and the radio across the room turned on full
volume of static. It's one of those old radios you
turn the volume dial until it clicks to turn it on.
We both looked at each other. He was an extremely
religious man and this event visibly shook him, and he left.
(10:52):
Not long after the incident. I shut the radio off
as I typically used my phone to listen to music
while embombing had finished the procedure and was attempting to
move her from the embalming table to a dressing table.
I heard that click from that old radio and it
turned on full volume yet again. At that point, I
was fairly freaked out and made my exit. Not long after.
(11:13):
My partner and I never spoke of it again, and
nothing like that ever occurred to my knowledge before or after.
I take care of a small family mausoleum. The family
that is buried there is no living descendants, so it
falls to me to clean out the facility and replace
the flowers inside the building. I also make sure that
there's no damage to the mausoleum. I've become very acquainted
(11:37):
with the family that is buried inside. One day, as
I was closing up my office, my phone rang, and
when I answered it. There was a very agitated woman
on the other end. She was very clearly under the
influence of something. She asked me repeatedly if I knew
where Jane Smith was. Jane Smith has been buried in
the mausoleum since the early nineteen hundreds. I asked her
(11:59):
why she needed to know. The woman very calmly asked
me to go to the mausoleum to double check that
Jane was still there, because she believed that she was her.
I assured her that I was pretty sure Jane was
still peacefully buried in Our phone conversation ended a few
moments later. Drugs and alcohol are a hell of a thing,
but it still creeped me out enough that I don't
answer my phone after five PM any longer, and I
(12:21):
make sure someone is with me when I go to
the cemetery. My dad purchased a cemetery when I was
in middle school, and I worked for him through high
school graduation. I did yard work, mowing wheat, eating flower beds,
et cetera. Aside from the occasional shadows seen out of
the corner of my eye, seeing people who turned out
(12:43):
to not be there, and hearing strange sounds. The cemetery
was actually a quite peaceful place. But the strangest is
when you have a burial in the crips. Basically you
dig down about four or five feet to expose giant
cement doors. You pull the cement doors off and drop
down into a little room. These rooms can fit two
coffins or years and years and years worth of cremated remains.
(13:07):
So back in the fifties and sixties, families would buy
one crypt and the entire fam would be cremated and
put in it. Some just put the cremated remains in
it and close her up, but others light candles and
leaf flowers and souvenirs and pictures and stuff. It's freaking
creepy opening up one of those bad boys after fifty
years and finding melted candles and old pictures of the
(13:28):
people inside. Plus when you hop down in there, you
have a weird realization that you are at the same
level and completely surrounded by bodies. I worked for a
county cemetery department years ago. We would go to all
the cemeteries in the county and mow or just do
basic upkeep. Occasionally, people mainly farmers, would stumble upon some
(13:50):
headstones in a field or a stand of trees, and
we would come out and prod the ground with dowel
rods to find more headstones and re establish the cemetery.
Soon after I started working there, we got a tip
about some headstones of farmer found while clearing out a
path through some trees for easier access to his field.
It turned out to be the oldest cemetery in the county,
dating back to the seventeen hundreds. After investigating some of
(14:14):
the names on the headstones, it got really creepy. The
story is that before the cemetery was there, a schoolhouse
stood there. The teachers were a husband and wife. It's
not clear on what exactly happened, but the students and
the husband and wife all died in the schoolhouse. The
information we found kind of made it sound like an
illness of some kind, and they were all quarantined in
(14:35):
the school until they all died. After that, the school
was demolished and the students and husband and wife were
all buried right where the school stood. So yeah, I'm
sure it's haunted. When I was in college, I worked
part time at a Jewish cemetery in reception or office management.
The cemetery was closed from Friday afternoon through Saturday evening
(14:57):
for Sabbath. We sometimes stayed a bit later in the
office on Friday afternoons to get bills out or checks processed.
We heard a loud commotion by the cemetery entrance, which
was locked and only staff could get in and out.
The office manager went to see what was going on
and made me come with her. We went down to
the gate to find an older woman, probably around seventy,
(15:18):
dressed to the nines, begging us to let her in.
She kept saying she needed to get back. This was
in the suburbs of New Jersey, so you needed a
car to get around, but we didn't see a car
or anything. She was just there in this beautiful dress.
We couldn't open the gate without the cemetery manager, so
we went to go get him. We brought him back
to the gate and no one was there. We looked
(15:40):
at video footage of the entrance and you could see us,
the office manager and me talking, but there was no
one on the other side of the gate. The cemetery
manager thought we were trying to trick him. I swear
to this day we saw a woman in a fancy dress.
Outside the gate. There were multiple cameras and not a
single one picked up anyone on the other side of
the gate, and you could see the whole gate. All
(16:03):
you could see was us. I don't know if it
was a ghost or what. The office manager and I
decided not to tell anyone else, but we would mention
it to each other every once in a while. It's
not quite the same, but I had an uncle who
tried working as in selling and doing drugs the graveyards
between ten pm and four am. He only lasted a
(16:24):
few nights in that area, then never went back. What
was it that scared him so badly that he felt
his soul rattle in his bones as his blood froze cold.
Prairie dogs, Freaking prairie dogs. What's so frightening about simple
ground squirrels, you might ask, those cute little fuzz balls
that scavenge whatever they can. Well, apparently they like to
(16:45):
randomly come out their holes in the middle of the
night and scream creepy. But that doesn't sound too bad,
right Well, now, imagine being surrounded by dozens of little
rodents you can't see in the pitch black of night,
surrounded by the day tweaked out of your mind, paranoid
as hell, and then suddenly hearing hellish, blood curdling screaming
all around you. His little group scattered like roaches, and
(17:09):
I think someone fell into a ditch. But he was
convinced it was an empty grave. He never did that again.
I once worked for a graveyard in Florida for a
couple months. One day they were digging a grave and
went home early. They left the excavator there, and on
my lunch break, I was sitting near it when I
heard someone banging on the machine. Now this ain't at settling, No,
(17:33):
this was someone taking a hammer and hitting it on
the machine. I figured someone was working on it, but
it just kept hitting. After seven minutes or so, I
walk over to see what's going on and nothing. No
one is there, and it stopped when I approached the machine.
I also lived down the street from this graveyard and
I go by it constantly. One time I saw a
(17:54):
lady roaming around the graveyard at night. I don't know
if it was an actual person or not, but it
creeped me up out a fair bed. My mom and
stepdad were the caretakers of a small cemetery for about
ten years. All of us kids, six between the two
of them, helped out at one point or another. One summer,
(18:14):
I was helping my mom with mowing and upkeep. It
was a super hot summer, so we would try to
go and get the mowing done early before the heat
became too unbearable. Well, we had trouble getting the truck
going one day, so we ended up starting a little
later than usual and were unable to finish up everything
that day. My mom had an appointment the next and
the day after that it was supposed to rain, so
(18:36):
I told her I would go up early the next
morning and finish up the trimming with the weed eater.
So it's about seven in the morning and I am
listening to music with my headphones and going around the headstones.
Everything was going well until I got to the oldest
section of the cemetery. That part was on a small
slope of a hill. Once you got to the bottom
and looked up, you couldn't see the road, but you
(18:58):
could see it again once you were about half way up.
When I finished up the last headstone, I turned off
my equipment and started back up the hill. I glanced
up in time to see a little girl in a
pretty red dress. She was running and disappeared behind a
large headstone. I figured her parents were visiting another grave,
and the little girl ran off to entertain herself. It
(19:19):
was around nine am at this point. I got to
the top of the hill and there was no car
or people around. The cemetery wasn't really close to any houses,
and the girl was too nicely dressed to have walked
out there. I looked around and shouted for her to
come out. I was able to see the headstone she
ran behind, and I would have seen her if she
ran out again. I couldn't find her anywhere. I called
(19:43):
my mom and told her what was going on and
asked if I should call the police and tell them
about this little girl. She looked to be about three
or four years old, so she certainly shouldn't be by herself.
My mom asked me if she was wearing a red dress.
I said yes, Why so she proceeds to nonchalantly tell
me that was just the ghost girl. Now, everyone who
(20:04):
knows me knows that I don't mess with ghosts. I
asked why she didn't tell me there was a ghost
in the cemetery. She said she needed my help and
was afraid I wouldn't go up if EL thought it
was haunted. Now, granted, I probably would have been more
leery of the place, but knowing no one else could
help her, I would have still helped her that summer,
but I would have be sure I wasn't there by myself.
(20:26):
I still go there sometimes, as I have relatives buried there,
but I am always with someone. Fortunately, I never saw
any other ghosts, and I have never seen the little
ghost girl ever again. I've had a number of odd
experiences with our crematorium. One such instance was in twenty twelve,
following a service for a very large man roughly three
(20:48):
hundred seventy five pounds. I got the retort cremation chamber
preheated while my wife set up a movie to watch
while the man was cremated. I used the elevating platform
and then slid him in using the door to the retort.
Afterwards and went to sit down. About five minutes after
I'd shut the door to the retort, we heard a thump.
(21:08):
Neither of us paid it much mind, but a few
moments later there was another, and then another. I stood up,
worried that the man may have had a pacemaker still
inside him, however unlikely, as he had had his organs removed.
The thumping and thudding got more hurried. We looked through
the front window of the retort and couldn't believe what
we were seeing. The man inside was flailing about. Both
(21:30):
of his arms and legs were bouncing around like he
was in extreme pain. Now, it isn't ought to see
parts move while someone is being cremated. As the limbs
are broken down, they will often contract as muscles and
tendons snap. But this was most decidedly not that. The
man's fingers were bald up in fists and were banging
against the windows, and his legs seemed to be kicking
(21:50):
downward as if to get out. The man's mouth opened
and first groans began emanating from within, then screams. There
was no way, absolutely no way whatsoever that he could
still have been alive, But for about twenty seconds after
we'd gone up to the retort, the man inside the
cremation chamber screamed and flailed his arms and legs about.
(22:13):
My family has owned a cemetery for nearly five generations,
and I've been working there since I was twelve. The
house that my family built on the property is about
thirty yards back from the main office. One night, when
they were kids, my grandpa and uncle were up late.
My uncle happened to look out their window and swore
to my grandpa that he'd seen someone walk behind one
of the trees. The lamp post illuminated the very first
(22:36):
handful of plots and headstones on the other side of
the road, but at that point they were undisturbed. My
grandpa and uncle stood at their window for a little while,
with my grandpa ultimately teasing my uncle for being scared. However,
when they woke up the next morning, the police were there.
In the hours between when they looked out the window
and saw the burial plots undisturbed about four a m.
(22:59):
And the time they noticed the commotion about seven am,
seven of the plots had been dug up. The headstones
were stacked very deliberately, like a house of cards, and
behind them in the caskets were atop one another, the
first one laying flat, the next one straight up, then flat,
straight up, flat straight up, with the final one flat.
(23:19):
With basic casket dimensions taken into account, that's nearly thirty
feet high I'm sure you can imagine, even with machinery
in the present day, that would take at least a
little bit of time to accomplish. But nope, back in
the nineteen fifties, this was somehow done in a span
of less than one hundred eighty minutes, with no one
that lived in the house able to hear it going on.
(23:43):
Dave is the oldest of the workers and has been
here forever. I ask him, Hey, Dave, have you ever
experienced anything creepy here? Dave replies, Back in the eighties,
I began working here with old Frank. One afternoon we
had a funeral for a child whose last name was
kind of odd and sticks with you, Eagleton. We loaded
the casket without a hitch. His family was gone. It
(24:05):
was just about eight of us. We started lowering the
vault cover that his family bought, and my rope surprisingly snapped.
My side came crashing down and took out the bottom
right of the casket. I looked down there and there
the kid was. All I saw was his leg, black pants,
creamy white shoes. I had to go sit down after
that while they fixed the cover. I was sitting literally
(24:27):
five feet from the guys on a bench when I
felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked over and
it was a young man. He had a watering cannon,
was in an all blue suit. I figured he was
going to water flowers at another grave or something. He
calmly chuckles, You're definitely not the first person to do that.
Don't worry about it. We all end up buried. I
(24:47):
laughed with him and watched him walk over to another
grave under a maple tree and started watering the flowers
at the stone. I walked over to check on the
guys and just making sure, because I do believe in ghosts,
ask hey, Fred, is that guy actually there? Frank responds,
that's not funny. Of course he's there. I laughed, but
the next time we look over, he's gone. I've never
(25:09):
seen Old Frank so startled in his life. He tells
me that grave is a single and hasn't been dug yet.
There's not supposed to be a tombstone. Old Frank pulls
me to the side and tells me to keep it
between us. I walk around ten paces to the grave
site and my jaw drops. There's not a thing there,
no tombstone, no nothing. A few years go by, and
(25:31):
Dave passes away. His burial was in an older section
that rarely has burials anymore. We were lowering him and
an innocent part time kid couldn't bear the weight of
the vault cover and dropped it. We finished it, and
I walked down to talk to the kid, telling him
not to worry. It happens to everyone. I brought a
pail of water to fill up next to the bench
(25:52):
so I can water the sad, lonely flower pot someone
brought for Dave. I put my hand on the kid's
shoulder and joked while filling it up. Started walking up
the hill and I noticed a grave with a name
I couldn't forget, Eagleton. I had tunnel vision right to
Dave's grave and up to the maple tree it was under.
I'm in shock and I look all over my body
while I'm wearing a navy blue suit. I immediately ran
(26:15):
to the record's cabinet to check to see when this
grave site was bought by Dave. I went through pages
and pages of years of binders filled with the records
of purchases and whose war Dave and his family never
purchased the grave. No one has ever purchased that grave.
I was originally hired because the cemetery had a period
of time where they experienced some people sneaking in to
(26:37):
perform rituals. I was twenty one years old doing this
as a side job with nothing to protect myself. I
was given a barcode scanner and was told to drive
through the entire cemetery every hour or soda patrol, and
to scan each of the pre posted bar codes to
prove I was actually doing it. Now, this cemetery was massive,
(26:57):
pretty much broken into three parts, the newer part, the
historic part, and the famous part where celebrities are buried.
I did this routine once and never did it again,
going so far as to break the barcode scanner so
I didn't have to do it. While I was driving,
it was pitch black coming around a long curved road.
My headlights picked up what I could have sworn were
(27:18):
a pair of legs walking across the path, but only
up to the knees. Shoes, pants, kneeds, then absolutely nothing.
I stopped in the road and just watched this pair
of legs cross ten feet in front me. I put
the car in reverse, did what felt like the longest
k turn of my life and noped it straight back
to the parking lot. Normally, my then girlfriend now my
(27:42):
wife would drop by the cemetery around eight p m
and bring me dinner. Since I couldn't really leave, I
never told her about my weird experiences because I didn't
want to freak her out. As I'm walking her back
to her car to leave, I see her reach back
and touch her ponytail, then look around with a look
on her face. I ask her what's wrong, and she
says nothing. I must have got my ponytail caught in
(28:05):
a tree branch. I felt something, so I pointed out
to her that the closest tree was twenty feet away
and that's impossible. Then she gets really pale and says
it felt like someone ran their hand through her hair
front to back and then pulled on the ponytail. We
were both pretty freaked out and she left. She never
came and brought me dinner again. I worked the four
(28:28):
pm to twelve am shift. The cemetery generally closed at
six pm, so around five thirty pm I would lock
the main gate, then would start driving through the cemetery
to notify any visitors that we'd be closing soon. So
one day I'm in the middle of my final drive
through and see an old lady slowly walking the sidewalk
alongside a mausoleum. The mausoleum was hundreds of feet long,
(28:51):
about twenty feet tall, and had no brakes in it.
It was one long stretch. The road ran directly alongside
the sidewalk of the mausoleum, so i'd pulled behind the
lady to tell her we're closing. Get out of my car.
Take my eyes off of her for a split second
as I'm getting out of the car, and when I
shut the door and look up, she's gone completely vanished.
(29:11):
I didn't think anything paranormal at first. I just thought
maybe I lost sight of her, But the sidewalk and
road were completely empty. I ran all the way around
the check the back of the mausoleum, but no one
was there. Across from the mausoleum was a whole field
of graves, and I egilized every row. Not a soul
in sight. I finish up my round up and sit
(29:32):
in my car the rest of the night. In a
well liit area, I saw a fully visible person. I
know it. No tricks of light, no hallucination, plain as day.
The city wanted to develop on my family's cemetery about
one hundred years ago. My family agreed to sell them
the land we had. Of the city would then also
pay for a portion of the land next to it
(29:54):
on which my family could continue the business. When that happened,
my family had to inform all the other families with
buried loved ones that the remains of their dearly departed
were going to be moved into new plots. Work began
on that, and as bulldozers and other large shoveling equipment
wasn't yet common, it all had to be done by hand.
The ground was dug up, the caskets were retrieved and
(30:16):
moved along with their headstones, down to the new, freshly
dug plots. Back then, caskets were generally made of wood
with a decorative cloth laid over it. These wooden caskets
more often than not, weighed roughly equal to or less
than the body they contained. In many cases, the weight
of the body inside was discernible from the casket itself. Well.
(30:36):
When they got to the final northernmost third of the
land that the city had bought, the caskets became lighter.
The sounds of the corpses within slight sliding a jerky step,
making a limb fall to one side, hitting the inside
of the box. Et cetera, began to become fewer and
farther between. Eventually, with the last twenty or so caskets,
(30:56):
they felt like there was nothing inside at all. With
the mission of the families, the cemetery employees opened these
caskets they thought were empty and found just that to
be the case. The insides of the caskets were bare
and looked as if there hadn't ever been anything inside them.
One afternoon, my coworker and I were walking the paved
(31:17):
roads in there with a trash bag looking for litter.
We came upon a particular area of a cemetery that
has a lot of mausoleums and took the next lane
around a corner that goes along the side of one mausoleum.
As we rounded it, there was an older gentleman, maybe
in his late sixties or early seventies, standing with his
back against the side of the mausoleum, just looking at
(31:39):
a plot of graves nearby. Two things were kind of
weird about him. He was dressed a bit odd. His
clothes were a little out of date corduroy jacket in
eighty degree weather, in one of those newsboy type caps,
long pants, button up shirt. But when you think about it,
a lot of elderly people kind of dress in out
of date clothing anyway, so I shrugged it off. The
(32:00):
second thing, he had a coffee mug he was drinking
out of, not a thermis or a styrofoam cup with
a lid, an actual ceramic coffee mug that he was
sipping out of right in the middle of the cemetery.
We waved to each other and kept walking. We were
only a few feet away when the other girl said
that was a little weird, and we both looked over
our shoulders back at him, but he was gone. We
(32:22):
stopped and kind of took a few steps back to
see if he'd walked around the mausoleum or something, but
we couldn't see him any more. A couple days later,
we both showed up for work and found one of
the regular workers to let him know we were there.
We talked to him a few minutes, and I brought
up seeing the old man by the mausoleum in the
east section. The grounds keeper smiled and asked, did he
(32:44):
have a coffee mug? We said yeah. He said, yeah,
that's our ghost. He's not really there. We pressed for
more explanation, and he said he's always seen in that spot,
looking at a family plot, and always has a coffee mug.
He said there is a grave, the wife, two daughters,
and the husband. The husband's grave says that he passed
(33:04):
in the early seventies, and the wife and two daughter's
graves say they passed a couple of decades before, and
the three of them have the exact same date their
lives ended. They think he was the dad, and that
he maybe used to visit his wife and daughter's graves
a lot. He told us people only see him for
a few seconds, then he's gone. The cremation chamber naturally
(33:26):
has an exhaust. I was sleeping one night when my
wife shook me awake. I got up and went to
the window and saw that from the exhaust there was
thick smoke pluming out as if someone was being cremated.
Seeing as we're the ones who operate the crematorium and
neither of us were there, this absolutely should not have
been happening. I had my wife call the police while
(33:47):
I went over to check on things. A fire of
over a thousand degrees was likely burning inside one way
or another. It had to be turned off as quickly
as possible, or at the very least controlled. All the
lights were off and the doors were locked, as they
were every night. I went inside and the inside of
the retort was bright with flames, but there was nothing
(34:08):
inside it. We meticulously cleaned the cremation chamber after each use,
and while the flames alone would likely produce some kind
of smoke, the smoke that we saw coming from the
exhaust was the kind of thick, gray and black smoke
that could only be produced by something actually physically burning.
I shut it off and went around to check the
windows and postern doors, which were all intact and locked.
(34:30):
There is a ladder that leads to a ceiling exit,
but that too was locked from the inside. The police
showed up and took a report, but there was really
nothing to be done. It was attributed to someone having
left the retort on before leaving, even though my wife
and I both knew the other hadn't done that. That's
one that I'll forever ponder. It was a quiet day,
(34:51):
so I pulled my car around the back of the
old chapel to take a nap. The chapel was surrounded
by twelve foot high hedges, so I figured it was
a good spot to park for an hour and shut
my eyes. I fall asleep and wake up to see
my car completely surrounded by decomposing people, so real, so vivid,
so much detail. They were all pressed up against the
(35:13):
glass and windshield. They had on the outfits. They were
buried in suits, dresses, but all dirty and different stages
of decomposition. No one spoke, no one moved. They all
just stared like I was some zoo exhibit. Then I
woke up. I had been asleep and it was a dream.
The thing is, it felt so real. I have never
(35:34):
had a dream so real, so vivid before or after.
I took it as a message. I called my boss
and quit as soon as I left at four pm.
I wasn't intentionally seeking out cemetery employment. It happened accidentally,
but I quickly became smitten. It was pleasantly quiet, and
I was also able to connect with people, such as
(35:56):
those visiting late loved ones and participating in ceremonies, without
becoming overwhelmed. However, there is a particular statue of a
weeping angel in the cemetery that locals and even out
of state visitors are wary of due to the alleged
paranormal activities surrounding it at nightfall, in example, echoing cries,
foggy apparitions, the angel herself moving. Because of this, the
(36:19):
cemetery has become one of the top ghost hunting cemeteries,
much to my dismay. I will admit I sometimes feel
nauseous near the statue intend to only venture near the
lot if daylight is out, but I work third shift now,
so this is almost always unavoidable. I'm highly skeptical of
the paranormal, so I write it off as paranoia from
all the stories I've heard, but tending to anything near
(36:42):
it is not among one of my favorite tasks to perform.
I try to switch out with other groundskeepers, but no
one wants to do it. I mean, I've seen one
of my coworkers, who is a grown man in his fifties,
intentionally high from our superintendent to avoid it. So I
get a pretty well known cemetery in my city and
(37:02):
possibly state. I had gotten off early and walked from
the operations area for all the groundskeepers. I walked from
the back end to the front of the cemetery, by
the main office and the main huge mausoleum. This cemetery
is three hundred forty five acres and with three hundred
more acres of undeveloped land. I walked into the mausoleum,
where I had friends that worked in the front end
(37:23):
of the cemetery and had upkeep of the building. The
building has three floors available to the public and an
elevator that leads to the other three floors and the roof,
but the public do not have access to those floors
as the elevator has a specific switch you have to
hit and the stairs up there are blocked off. I
went there to rest and hang out as it was
mostly peaceful and quiet. Rarely would people go in there.
(37:46):
The only people having the code to get in are
some workers and the families of the deceased that are
in crips there. This is a fairly short story, as
I was pretty spooked and got the hell out of
Dodge pretty quickly. I was hanging around in my coworkers
or friends had left the building to go do some
grounds maintenance outside. I walked downstairs to the lower level
to find the boiler room door open. One of my
(38:08):
coworkers must have left it, so I closed it and
thought nothing of it, and I continued to roam around
and read the names on the crips. I suddenly heard
what sounded like footsteps in the stairwell. I was a
little startled, and I waited to see someone walk out
into the main area, but no one ever appeared. I
looked through the building and found no one. I ended
(38:28):
back up on the main level and played around with
the organ that was set up for funeral services. I
eventually wandered back downstairs to find the boiler room door
back open. I looked inside the room to find nobody.
I ran like a bat out of hell, up the
stairs and out the main doors, not looking back. I
went back to the operations area in the back end
of the cemetery. I was so scared. I have no
(38:51):
idea how that door opened again. I asked everyone working
in there, but no one knew what I was talking about.
I got a ride from the front end to the
back again from a manager. He had told me many
of his own stories after hearing mine that had just happened.
We all almost believe in the paranormal after having our
own strange encounters
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!