Haunted Attractions

From my upcoming release: Musings From A Demented Mind

James stood before the crumbling tombstones of the Marshes Cemetery, a haunted cemetery down by Bloomington, Indiana. He had read a story about this cemetery in his Indiana Guide of Haunted Attractions and wanted to experience its haunting first hand. He could barely make out the names on the tombstones due to the thick moss and plants which had overtaken them over the centuries. There were still a few hours of light left. He wasn’t afraid of being there at night. He wanted to take some pictures with his digital camera before it was too dark. He snapped a few photos of each of the remaining tombstones.

A squirrel ran out of one of the bushes and stopped curious about what he was doing. He waived at the squirrel as it ran back into the bushes. He could feel a cold chill causing him to have goosebumps all over his arms. It wasn’t from the wind; it was from something else. He turned around, but didn’t see anything. As quickly as the sensation began, it stopped. Again, he could feel the heat from the hot summer night. As the sun descended and he could see the stars, he walked out of the cemetery and down the dirt trail leading to the main road where his midnight blue Dodge Neon was parked.

He drove away, stopping at the small convenience store to buy a Pepsi and a king size Reese before returning to his hotel. After eating his snack, he hooked his camera up to his laptop to look at the pictures he had taken. His eyes opened wide as he looked at each picture. In the background of each picture was a white mass that got bigger after each picture he took. He checked the lens on his camera, and there was no dirt or smudges. He continued to look at the pictures using the zoom function on his laptop to make the pictures bigger. As he looked at the last picture he took, he stared in shock. When he made the picture bigger, he could see what appeared to be someone’s eyes in the white mass. Was the ghost that had been haunting the cemetery since it had been first used been there with him the whole time? He could feel the goosebumps all over his body as he realized he had just encountered a ghost. He uploaded the photos onto his Facebook page with the caption: I just captured a ghost on film. Not too long afterward, people were commenting on the post calling the photos fakes, which didn’t bother him since he was used to dealing with skeptics.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and grabbed the Haunted Attractions book and opened it to the page he had bookmarked the night before. The chapter was about a haunted house in Gary, Indiana, which would be his next stop on his journey to visit every haunted attraction in the United States.