Halloween Nightmare

07 September 2016 | Haunted locations, Your Stories

In October of 1971, some friends of mine told me about the old Confederate cemetery across the river from Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the small town of Lavaca. Trying to frighten me, because I am from Michigan, they challenged me to go to the cemetery on Halloween night.

With me driving and my friends giving me the directions, off we went to Lavaca to see the “ghosts” of the Civil War. The cemetery was right next to this small white church that we had to drive down a narrow lane between orchards to get to. There was a clock, on a timer in the steeple that gonged for every hour.

That Halloween night, when the clock struck twelve, the clock gonged thirteen times not twelve. When I looked over to my left at the grave markers, I and everyone else started to see a mist rising from behind the markers. Everyone was trying to get me to drive off. One of my friends said we had to leave before they left the cemetery. When I did finally try to drive off, the car didn’t want to! Now I’m no mechanic, but when a person puts her foot on the gas pedal and pushes it half way to the floor of the car, the car should respond by going faster than five, or six, miles an hour. But that’s what our car was doing.

grave yardBy this time, I had the gas pedal to the floor and the car was still only going five miles an hour! As I looked out the left driver’s window, there was a ghostly shape of a Confederate officer floating next to my window with his right arm stretched out to me. I shook my head and yelled to him that I couldn’t help him and he dropped his arm and slowly started to move back from the window. When I looked over to the right, there was another ghostly soldier floating along there. In the rear view mirror, I could see at least three or four old soldiers there with their hands on the trunk of the car.

About that time, the front wheels touched the pavement of the road between the orchards we were in and the orchards across the road from us, and the car shot out from under me and I had to do some fancy driving so we would not hit one of the trees now in front of us! We didn’t. When I looked up, we were now facing the other lane we had just left and we could see the ghostly soldiers floating back to the cemetery.

The next year, 1972, I tried to get someone, anyone, to go with me back to the old cemetery. No one would go with me to see if the ghosts would reappear. I returned to California in September of 1973, and as far as I know, no one else had gone back to the old Confederate cemetery.

Submitted by Black Cat

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