Christmas in the Crypt

My first case was zombies.

I was traveling on Christmas Day, no less, through Mississippi and resting at a small bed and breakfast near the tiny town of Rolling Fork. I'd told the owner of the B&B what I did for a living, and I suppose she was in constant communication with the sheriff of Rolling Fork, because not two hours later he knocked on the door of my bedroom as I was unpacking and told me to sit for a spell.

On Christmas morning, according to the sheriff, thirty-nine corpses were found lying in a neighborhood street not a quarter mile from the town cemetery. It was a prank, the officer claimed. But it was odd.

"It's like they got up and walked," he joked.

We both laughed; I didn't believe in zombies at the time. But I was open to the possibility. As a paranormal investigator, you must be. The sheriff, however, was extremely superstitious, wanting clarification that no "acts of the devil" were happening in his sleepy town. I assured him I'd take a look, for little pay, as I was only wetting my feet in the profession.

The sheriff went off to attend his Christmas dinner, and I arrived at the site where the bodies were buried to meet the undertaker, a square-faced man with a perpetually-bent brow.

"Well I don't believe in that, course," the undertaker spat tobacco. "But I can't explain it otherwise. The body snatchers or pranksters or what-have-you were bonified professionals by the looks of it."

"Professionals of what?" I inquired.

"Of prankin'. Just look at them graves."

I indeed took a look. It appeared as if the corpses had simply crawled out themselves. There was no evidence of digging, and the paper-thin layer of snow around the soil didn't seem to have any dirt in it, as it would if someone was shoveling a pile onto it.

"Look at this," the undertaker pointed to the snow, which had skeletal footprints. "As if they ripped the legs off them corpses and walked 'em through the yard themselves. 'Cept there ain't no shoe prints. And them corpses had their legs on when we found 'em in the street like we did. For the most part, anyhow." He shrugged. "Don't know how they did it."

"Interesting." I inspected the prints. There were indeed up to thirty sets of prints, leading all the way up the village. "I assume the prints lead up to the neighborhood street where the bodies were found."

"You assume correct."

"But there are shoe prints," I noticed, and I pointed to them. "Boot prints, right there."

"Could have been the sheriff. We had a whole group of volunteers come down here to rebury 'em in this pit next to us. No regard to put them back in their graves."

"Odd though, isn't it?" I said, looking at the graves. "The pranksters must have grabbed the corpses by their heads and pulled them upward out of their graves. Fragile as corpses are." I scratched my chin. "I don't believe that's possible."

"In all my years of doing this, fella, I never once saw nothin'like this. Never snows here, neither. Maybe once every ten years. Strange things happenin' more and more these days." He gave me an odd look. "You're a what-kind of investigator, you said?"

"Paranormal," I pressed my glasses up. "Some things you may have heard aren't real, actually are. I've seen them myself." I sighed and shook my head. "Zombies certainly aren't one of them."

Right as I said that, not a second later, a dirt-covered hand shot through the soil.

"Lord!" the undertaker shouted, and bolted up the hill.

I stared at horror at what I was witnessing. The hand opened its palm out towards me, as if in desperation, and I heard what I thought to be suffocating from underground. I stood back and gulped, rolled my sleeves up, stepped forward and grasped the hand. And pulled up.