Scary Stories and CreepyPasta's!

Grave Diggers

It was a cold autumn night. A dense fog had rolled across London, it was impossible to see anything more than five feet ahead of you. The mist reduced people to vague, ghostly figures, or disembodied voices.

In short, it was the perfect Halloween night.

Fifteen year old Michael Blake shivered as he walked through the fog with his best friend, John. On John's insistence, he'd managed to give his parents the slip so that they could perform that time-honored Halloween ritual- to walk through a deserted cemetery in the middle of the night. Conveniently, there was a supposedly haunted neighborhood cemetery nearby.

Trust John to come up with an idea like this, thought Michael. But he wasn't going to complain. One of John's ideas had once saved his life. Somehow, John always seemed to know the right thing to do, even if it seemed absurd at the time.

And then, out of the fog, the cemetery gates suddenly appeared before them-old and disused. The iron had rusted to brown so that they looked like twisted pieces of wood that had been bound together. In fact the entire cemetery was in disrepair, the authorities weren't bothered about it and the relatives of the people in the cemetery didn't complain. The cemetery is abandoned and unloved, thought Michael, perhaps just like the souls of its residents. Then he chided himself. Why did he let such weird thoughts enter his head?

John kicked the cemetery gates, which swung open with a loud groan of protest. Michael looked around nervously, but nobody seemed to have heard them.

As they entered the cemetery, John suddenly stopped.

"I almost forgot," he said casually. "We'll have to watch out for gravediggers."

"Gravediggers?"

"The poorest of London's poor. They're usually homeless and jobless. They go about stealing from the dead. They rob graves of glasses, watches, even the clothes worn by the corpse, if they're desperate. And most of them are armed with knives."

Nice of him to tell me now. Michael shivered. But once again, he didn't complain, and followed John into the cemetery.

This is so cliché, Michael thought to himself.Two friends performing a Halloween dare get a lot more than they bargained for. He could see the phrase on the back cover of a dozen cheesy horror flicks.

John kicked aside a pebble. It skittered and came to a stop in front of an old tombstone. Despite the fog, Michael could make out the words inscribed on it-

Here Lies FRANK JONES
Died as he lived- in the pursuit of justice

He must have been a policeman, thought Michael. It was a strangely comforting notion.

They continued onward through the cemetery. Michael had to admit, it made him irrationally nervous, even though he had thought that he had long since ceased to be afraid of ghosts. But the cemetery itself scared him. Unlike in a typical cemetery, there were trees planted at seemingly random spots, casting long shadows in the foggy moonlight. Birds squawked and chattered in the trees. The idea behind the planting of the trees was that the remains of the dead would give rise to new life. However, the trees had never been trimmed, and at this time of night, they only heightened the uneasiness one would naturally feel in a cemetery. They made the entire place look wild and overgrown. Michael imagined those branches reaching out to grab him...

He shivered and trudged forward, trying to keep up with John, who had gone totally silent. John went through these moods- he would be happy one moment, surly in the next. Right now he was making Michael feel nervous.

Don't be stupid, he said to himself. It was the cemetery creeping him out, not John. He had no need to be afraid of John, or to be distrustful of him.

In front of him, John suddenly stopped, and pointed to a spot a few feet in front of him. The fog parted and Michael saw a crouching figure. He seemed to be digging into the ground.