A Late-Night Encounter
A while ago, on a
walk late at night, I unwittingly wandered past a disused cemetery. It occurred
to me that I was looking at tombstones left unkempt in grounds untended,
ensconced between a road junction and a cluster of residences.
I was immediately in
a heightened state of anxiety, expecting, through the power of mental
suggestion, to see something, and yet dreading whatever it might be. My
rational mind insisted there was no reason to run; and on reflection, I
determined there was none to be afraid either.
An Impressionable
Mind
Even so, I know how
my impressionable young mind, in the past, has conjured apparitions, visible
only to me, of dreadful things I find difficult to talk about.
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Back in March, when
our apartment overlooked a Jewish cemetery from the seventh floor, we would
close the windows and draw the curtains once it grew dark, refusing to let our
avoidance of the unknown take hold.
Why Fear the Peaceful
Dead?
There is a strange
irony here worth pausing on. A cemetery is, by any rational measure, among the
most peaceful places we might ever be; quiet, still, and given over entirely to
rest. And yet we fear it.
That fear, I have
come to think, is not something the ground itself emits; it is something we
bring with us, inherited from the tales, fables, and stories we absorbed long
before we could question them. We frighten ourselves with a script written by
other hands.
The unknown, in many
senses, is precisely that: we have no inkling of what is out there, or of who
that patch of land once harboured or memorialised. But that very lack of
knowing should work in the opposite direction.
If I have no
association with these graves, no bond with those who lie beneath them, no
shared history at all, then why on earth would the dead, or any other world,
take the slightest interest in me? Why would they trouble to cast me as the
leading player in some living horror film, with themselves as the supporting
cast?
Nothing Buried Here
Put plainly, the less
connection there is, the weaker the hold it should have on us. Then I found
myself wondering about the humorous placebo effect of a tombstone planted as a
prank, with nothing buried beneath it, yet still exerting the full graveyard effect
on anyone whose imagination readily runs wild. It is proof, if any were needed,
that the fear lives in the beholder and not in the stone.
The least
association, then, should leave no true affinity, only a sheer, willing
victimhood scripted by a fearful mind. How hard it is to unlearn the tales,
fables, and stories of ghosts, ghouls, and banshees. On that night, I also knew
that if I were confronted with anything, I would engage with it and stand my
ground.
The Voice in the Dark
Then, out of the
recesses of a nearby building, someone appeared and said hello. This time I had
the presence of mind not to jump out of my skin, and as I made sense of it, I
realised it was a homeless man. He most certainly had not come from the graves;
and if he had, it was nowhere near as bad as I had imagined.
