Chapter 3: Chapter 3
"Okay Mac, you can work the camera. We'll take a few one-minute clips to look over later, just in some key places. We need to set up a base spot, some place that's easy to get back to and that can't be mistaken for anything else. It can't be too obvious either, the chances of getting caught in here are low but we still face trespassing charges." Ella stated, looking around the cemetery. "Maybe the mausoleum. It's by a hill that hides it from the gate and it's pretty central to the place."
"That's the concrete slab, right?" Nell asked.
"Yeah, why do you call it a mausoleum?" Scott asked.
"Well, I didn't bother telling you guys the backstory of everything last time because the trip was so quick and, you know, I didn't think you really cared, but since we're here all night, I might as well tell you guys the whole story."
"Oh great, here she goes" Mac rolled his eyes.
"Anyway," Ella glared, " The concrete slab used to be where a family mausoleum stood. It was pretty old and falling apart. No one from the family line was left to pay the repairs so the owners of the cemetery decided to just take it down. The bodies were in a vault beneath the structure and instead of moving them they just poured concrete into it and sealed it up. As you would think, that didn't turn out too well and ever since people have reported hearing voices coming from where the mausoleum used to stand. Angry voices, mad that their grave site was disturbed. At least that's what I assume they're saying, as you know, I haven't heard them."
"And this place with creepy voices and concrete with dead bodies in it, that's what sounds like a good base to you?" Nell challenged.
"What? It's just a few harmless voices." Ella replied.
"Yeah, we know you hear those in your head all the time, but the rest of us are a little less comfortable with it." Mac jeered.
"Ok, ok... somewhere else then," She said and continued walking down the path. As they sauntered on, the road took a sharp turn alongside a massive drop, or relatively massive compared to the flatness of the state. Ella walked up to the edge and looked out. About 100 feet down the hill's steep decline was a flat plain of gray stones.
"This is where the ghost lights would be. I know they exist I've just never been able to see them." Ella muttered, staring off down the slope. The ends of her hair brushed the nape of her neck, blown by the soft breeze of the summer evening. She was turning over ideas in her head as her friends walked up behind her, looking out on the plain.
'If only I could manage to get something on tape,' She thought, 'Then those ghost shows would have to take her more seriously. Then, when she wrote to them asking for an audition, some jerk-faced, arrogant executive wouldn't write back with 'It's cute that you're a fan, but we don't need another girl's screams in the show's background.'
Just as she started to get angry again, Scott spoke snapping her out of her daze.
"How do you 'know they exist' if you haven't seen them?"
"It's pretty well recorded, there have been so many sightings that it has to be a real thing. They exist, it's just not generally accepted that they really are ghosts. There are a couple other theories around about it." Ella explained.
"Oh right," Nell interrupted, "You said that last time. It could just be the reflections of headlights off the highway over there." Nell pointed past some trees.
"Yeah people have thought that, but I don't buy it. If it was, why wouldn't they be here every night, and why would it be only here. There's another theory that it's some kind of electromagnetic phenomenon, but no one has really fully explained that. I think the best theory is the supernatural one." Ella stated.
"That the lights are spirits?" Mac questioned.
"Yeah but not just random spirits. About 100 years ago there was a huge flood from the river nearby and and it washed up hundreds of caskets and bodies from that field because it's below ground level. When the water went down and they found the bodies, they had no way of identifying them so they made a mass grave over there next to the newer section. The rumor is that the lights are the spirits of the unidentified people wandering back and forth between their body and their grave."
There was a silence as Ella paused to let the story sink in.
"Great. That's really great." Scott said with a semi-disgusted look on his face, "And exactly how many angry spirits are supposed to live here?"
"Well I wouldn't exactly call the ghost lights 'angry spirits,' they're probably more confused." Ella replied.
"But the mausoleum ghosts?" Scott asked.
"Oh yeah," Ella answered, "those ones are pretty angry."
"Got it." Scott said, not looking reassured.
"I'll tell you guys which ones are supposed to be more vengeful after we get a plan and a base, but for now we should work on figuring that out. Also, I wouldn't be too worried Scott, most ghost just want to communicate with the living, not harm them." Ella stated with a mockingly reassuring pat on Scott's shoulder.
"And your extensive knowledge comes from where exactly?" Mac questioned, "Reality TV or Goosebumps novels?"
"If ghosts are real," Ella retorted, "then the common knowledge rules about them must be real too. We have nothing to go off but rumors and myths right now and like I said, any of you are welcome to sleep in the car if you're not okay with that."
"Yeah, maybe I will then." Scott said angrily. He turned toward the entrance and barely had one foot in that direction when they all heard the eerie sound of metal scraping concrete coming from where the entryway was.
"No." Scott muttered.
He jogged up the slope in time to see the lock being clicked onto the chain between two gate doors. Luckily for the group and very unluckily for Scott he was too far off to have gotten the attention of the gatekeeper before he turned and walked back into his house. Scott stood there staring at the locked gate, and the incredibly unclimbable fence surrounding it, in disbelief.
"I take that back," Ella said, merely amused, "Looks like you're out of options." She turned from Scott and kept walking down the path they had been headed down.
"Let's go guys," She yelled over her shoulder, "I know where our camp should be."
* * * *
Ella dropped her things in front of a flagpole in the civil war memorial section of Greenwood.
"See, it's the perfect place; high flagpole that can be seen from far off, towards the back of cemetery so it can't be seen from the entrance, and no rumors of angry ghosts." She said,n looking quite pleased with herself.
Mac set his bag next to Ella's and the others followed. "So there's no ghost stories about this part at all?" He asked.
"Oh, no. I didn't say that, just that the ghosts here aren't angry." Replied Ella.
Mac rolled his eyes as he sat down next to his bag on the cement path that encircled the flag and it's large brick-like base.
Mac scanned the surroundings. Off to the right, the path broke away to a pyramid of cannonballs, stuck together to support an old, presumably civil-war era, cannon at the top. Both the flag and the cannon structure were situated at the top of the hill dedicated to the memorial. He glanced over the gravestones that spread out from path. Some of them were set slightly lower on the hill's decline but they all seemed to form a circular pattern around the large flagpole.
"So you mentioned something earlier that I think I'm gonna need you to go back to for a bit." Mac said.
"What about?" Ella said, sounding defensive.
"You mentioned the words 'gate to hell' while you and Scott were in the middle of your little spat. Please, do go on." He mocked.
"Well, it's a bit of a long story." Ella said as she leaned over and dug her notebook out of her backpack. "But it is only eight now, so we have some time before it gets really dark."
She sat down next to Mac and opened the notebook which was stuffed with printed and highlighted pages. She pulled her thermos from the side of her bag, carefully pouring some of the coffee into the thermos lid. As the steam wafted up to her face, a smile curled across her lips and she took a sip. Nell and Scott sat down opposite from the two on the path and Nell attempted to position her bag so she could lean on it.
"So to start with, this place, this whole town in fact, used to be an indian burial ground." Ella began, "The legend is that the Native American people chose their grave sites very carefully and that they would only pick spots that they believed had closer ties to the afterlife. It was supposed to be a pathway for the dead. Anyway, this entire town wasn't inhabited by any indian tribes, but multiple tribes used it to bury people. And, the last time this place was used to bury Native Americans, they were massacred by some moonshiners that had moved into the area."
She glanced down at her book and pointed to a picture on one of the printed pages of a large rock pile in a creek. "This is where they put their bodies." She looked over to Mac, "It's a ravine that runs along the side of this cemetery. They dragged the murdered indians there and threw all these rocks on top of them and the rock pile is still standing today." She paused for effect, "Not that that necessarily has anything to do with the whole 'hell gate' thing but it certainly doesn't help the situation.
"Anyway, it was shortly after then that the town started to use this spot as their own cemetery, around 1840. It has a long and eventful history, but the rumors of 'Hell Hollow' didn't start until the 1950's. At that time, the whole place was in a state of complete decay. The owners couldn't keep up with maintenance costs and they were losing about two-thousand dollars a year. Eventually they just let it go and most of the place was overgrown and abandoned. That's when some strange things started happening on the gravel road that leads up to the back entrance of the cemetery. At first it was just some satanic symbols and a few murdered rabbits and squirrels but then, in 1956, they found a boy's body there.
"He was laid out in the center of a pentagram with an upside-down cross cut into his stomach and his heart had been removed. They never found it actually." She paused, giving them all grim looks.
"I'm super sure that happened." Mac said in an incredulous tone.
Ella glared in his direction.
"I mean come on Ella, there's no way that's real. It sounds like the plot of some B-list horror film."
"Well, just telling you what I read." She insisted. "Anyway," she drew the word out, conveying her disapproval of Mac's interruptions, "There was another major incident after that where some vandals broke into the cemetery using the 'satanic' gravel backroad. They damaged a lot of graves and the weird thing was that the broken graves were knocked down in a pattern. Not sure if that means anything but you have to admit it's a bit strange.
"That happened in the 70's so the town decided to close the road. They replaced the gate there with more fencing and blocked the road from public access. They said it was to keep vandals from entering the cemetery and not because of the weird reports and local myths of Hell Hollow, but I'm not so sure."
"So we can't even get to this 'Hell Gate' anyway?" Mac asked with a note of disappointment.
"No, but I think it's better off that way." Ella surmised. The look on Scott and Nell's faces showed that they thought so too.
"When I was reading all the stories and reports, something seemed off to me. They never found the vandals and no one ever came forward with information. I think it's because they didn't survive the night after they knocked over all those gravestones."
"Oooooooooooooooohhh," Mac mocked, "Spooky."
"Yeah Ella, you really have no evidence for that." Nell agreed. "Just because no one wanted to admit to trespassing and destroying property doesn't mean they died."
"Ok, ok, that's fair. I'm embellishing a bit, but just to be safe let's not desecrate any graves tonight." She conceded.
"Fine." Mac agreed, "Always gotta ruin the fun, don't you."
"So, did anything happen there after they closed the gate?" Scott asked.
Ella was puzzled by his sudden curiosity. "Well, right after that the cemetery owners gave up the place to the city because they couldn't maintain it. That's when it started getting better. I mean a few bad choices were made in the reparations, like the mausoleum being destroyed and the bodies cemented over, and the public mausoleum was taken down too, but those bodies were moved. Nothing else was reported at Hell Hollow. Of course, there are still rumors, but no dead bodies."
"Oh, that's good then." Scott muttered, sounding barely reassured.
"So should we start taking some EVP's?" Ella asked looking around at the group.
"What? Here?" Nell remarked.
"Yeah, guess what happened here." Ella said with a bit too much enthusiasm for the topic.
"Um...someone was murdered?" Scott tried.
"No, but I like the attempt." Ella encouraged, "So, this is the memorial for the Union soldiers right, but there are Confederate soldiers buried here too. This town used to be a stop for the prisoner of war train. They would drop off all the Confederates who hadn't survived the trip up and the town had them buried in a mass grave at the bottom of this hill. Union soldiers from the town that died in battle were buried at the top of the hill and a memorial was made for them. But, around the early 1900s, about the same time as that big flood, there was a mudslide on the hill that opened up the mass grave and took several bodies from the Union graves down into it. Since it's a bit harder to tell the difference between gray and blue-gray uniforms after 50 years of decay, they just buried all the bodies that were questionable up here."
"Such a smart solution." Scott said.
"When will they learn to stop burying people on hills in a flood zone." Mac commented.
"So, does that mean more angry spirits?" Nell asked.
"Well the reports say more confused spirits." Ella informed.
"Wouldn't they be mad? Being buried in the same grave as their enemy?" Mac questioned.
"Well, I don't know, let's ask them." Ella said with a smile pulling a recorder from her backpack.
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