The Hauntings That Follow Us

Case 1: Volendam Lutheran Church and Cemetery

My name is Takeo Nakamura. I became aware of the paranormal when I was a teenager. I had never been 'sensitive' to the paranormal as others might put it, and while I had heard of stories and legends about ghosts, I had never experienced one first-hand until I was in high school, not long after me and my friends had experienced a tragedy like no other.

The year was 2022. I was sixteen years old and had been living in the United States with the American side of my family for ten years in a small upstate New York town called Volendam. It was just west of Schenectady and Amsterdam, right on the edge of what most people would consider the Capital District, that being the region centered around Albany, New York's capital city. Aside from the two villages, one named Leesville and another also named Volendam, most of the town was empty save for a few very tiny hamlets. These hamlets, named South Volendam, Dana, and Amesbury, have little to them aside from a store or two, one, two, or maybe three churches, and a fire station each. The Erie Canal, and later the Barge Canal/canalized Mohawk River, provided the area with a steady stream of business for many years, as did railroads and later highways. With plenty of historic buildings and sites dating back to before British settlement in the area, there were plenty of places that townspeople alleged were haunted.

At the time, I had a pretty good friend group, the most important of which for this story being Jared Unser and Marie Desmomd, both of whom were the same age as me, and Ashley Yoon, who was a year younger than me. My then fourteen-year-old little sister, Yukiko, would also tag along a lot with us, with Marie and Ashley in particular bonding with her. If you have not yet guessed by now, me, my sister, and Ashley were indeed Asians, myself being of almost entirely Japanese descent while Ashley was half-Korean and half-white. Living in rural New York was not always easy for us, but we managed, and in Ashley's case, a girl named Naomi Smith was always there to comfort her if anyone gave her shit for her background.

Naomi was a cheerful girl, although she could have the mouth of a sailor at times. She had known Ashley for years, dating all the way back to elementary school, and when me, Jared, and Marie became friends with Ashley, Naomi of course came along in a package deal of sorts. It was joked among us that Naomi was secretly in love with Ashley, although those jokes ended up becoming reality when one day, Naomi and Ashley shared a kiss in front of us and came out. After that, things went well for a good seven months... Until July of 2022.

It was July 4th weekend when Naomi was killed. A drunk driver struck her while she was riding a side-by-side, mudding in the forest behind her family's house when she tried to cross the road. She never had a chance. That piece of shit drunk was doing seventy in a forty-five and had none of his lights on. He killed himself in the accident, so the worst part for us, or me at least, was that he could never truly be held accountable in court.

We were all heartbroken... And we were all so angry. She was so young, and the life she had ahead of her was taken away by a lowlife who did not know his limits. In the age of ride-sharing apps, drunk driving is a choice. You could get service even in our relatively rural town. There was no fucking excuse.

To put it mildly, Ashley was devastated. She had lost her girlfriend, the love of her life. We were young, but she truly did love Naomi with all her heart, and now she was gone. Even so, we all persevered in spite of her loss, with even Ashley pointing out the day after her funeral that her girlfriend would haunt each and every one of us if we let her death bring us down. It was that comment, however, that led us to finding out a secret from Marie.

Marie is a nerd. Well, let me rephrase that. We all were nerds, but she was definitely the most into things like anime and video games and whatnot. She is also amazing at cosplay, while the rest of us either were not really into it (Jared, Naomi, and Ashley) or were beginners (me, Yukiko). She has had a bit of a rough life in the past, including (in her own words, not mine) a half-hearted suicide attempt that occurred several months prior to Naomi's own death that she told no one about until much later, and I bring this up because it is actually rather critical to what she revealed to us.