It's the site of a former Presbyterian church that's more than 150 years old, which a while ago sold the property and moved to another location. It still gets used for photo ops, and for weddings; and of course for funerals, because it has a large open and active cemetery. (I mean active in the sense that it's maintained and in use, not in the sense that every Halloween the dead all get up and throw a head-banger of a party, but if you know differently than I do on that score, please feel free to share.) The place employs a caretaker who cares for the lawn meticulously, watering the grass and raking things when needed, among other responsibilities.
Like most other cemeteries, Crossroads Cemetery has accumulated a few ghost stories over the years. The land once belonged to a farmer named Robert Johnston. As the story goes in the spring of 1799 when the winter's snows melted, Johnston found the body of a small boy in his woods. Unable to locate his parents, Johnston decided to bury the boy by the spot where he had found him, which happened to be near where he had buried his sister-in-law three years earlier. In 1800, he dedicated that small piece of his land to be a cemetery.
Supposedly on some wintry nights you can see the boy struggling to find shelter. There are a few other stories associated with the place, much of which are bollux, like the supposed "Monroeville strangler" buried there, whom teens claim to have seen while they were walking through the cemetery at night, or Caroline Cooper, who legend says hated kids when she was alive and will pull you down into her grave if you walk on it. Standard stuff.
I tell you this not because I think it's particularly credible, but because it helps you to understand what happened back in July 1984.
My brother Steve was 12, and like most boys that age, was determined never to let people think of him as a chicken. And if you must know, he wasn't. When he was 15 and we went skiing for the first time, he dived headlong into it and was swooping down the intermediate slope before he had figured out how to brake or steer, because he was determined to enjoy himself and the beginner slope was too dull. (I pretty much stayed on the beginner slope the entire time I bothered trying to ski, and was ready to go far sooner than he was.) Maybe because he's the youngest of four brothers Steve has always been one to jump into things with both feet.
So when we dared him to walk through Crossroads Cemetery, he wasn't about to back down even after we'd been telling stories about Caroline Cooper and the Monroeville Strangler, especially once Bill started egging him on.
Blair and I were worried about getting trouble if our parents found out, but Bill was enjoying watching Steve squirm too much to let that stop us. We were soon all loaded into the car, with Bill at the wheel, on our way down Saunders Station Road and headed toward Monroeville.
Along the way, Bill spelled out the terms: Steve had to walk through the graveyard, from one corner to the other and back, right through the middle both times; and then had to repeat the process with the other two corners, while we watched. If he did this, Bill would give him ten dollars.
We got to the church parking lot, and after a little stalling, Steve got going. The moon wasn't out, and it was a little cloudy, so although we were doing our best to keep track of him, we kept losing him and then finding him again a minute later. After about ten minutes in, we were getting bored, and wondering if Bill would let Steve out of the bet early, when Blair noticed that Steve was slowing down. Then he stopped moving, and disappeared completely.
Later after he had recovered, Steve told us that he was actually a lot more frightened than he had let on. He'd been thinking of Caroline Cooper's ghost, and wondered where her grave was; and kept thinking of all the times he'd heard that story or others like it. And then there was that serial killer. But he'd pressed on, telling himself "There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts."
He was about five minutes in when he felt something brush his ankle. But he steadied himself, and kept going. "There are no monsters and there are no ghosts."
Now in the dim light, there were plenty of shadows, and plenty of places for things and people to hide, and we'd been feeding his imagination with plenty of stories earlier that evening. So it shoudn't be a surprise that when something actually grabbed his ankle, Steve started to panic.
"There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts," he told himself again, out loud this time, and he took another step.
Whatever was holding his ankle tightened its grip. He pulled harder, and so did it. After a moment, it gave way a bit, but only a bit. Something caught his other ankle, and slowed him down further.
"There are no monsters and there are no ghosts," he said, even louder, and he admitted by this point he didn't care if we heard him or not. He was getting that panicked.
He took another step, and something lunged at him from out of the darkness and knocked him out cold. He had time to scream, and he went down.
Back in the church parking lot, we heard him scream, and the three of us ran down to find him. I think we were all starting to wonder if there was some truth to the ghost stories, or if someone was hiding there to waylay people or just avoid police. We were worried about our brother, and we were worried what we were going to say to our parents to explain what had happened.
We found him almost on the other side of the cemetery, by Caroline Cooper's grave. His feet were wrapped in a garden hose, and he was out cold from being hit in the forehead after stepping on the caretaker's rake.
Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.
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