Some Things Just Follow You Home

**Please give me feed back, I want to get better!**

Our town had lots of hills, cluttered buildings, and thick woodlands that were fun to explore on a regular basis and never get bored. Somewhere between the nearly empty outskirts and the dense center were the graveyards. As children, we'd pretend they were haunted, but as always, when we grew up, we stopped believing.

But there was one that when you walked passed it, even during the day, it would unnerve you as though something was watching you. Waiting for you to put your guard down so it could snatch you up. It was called Aspen Grove Cemetery, but we just called Aspen. It had a sturdy stone wall with a few gates that let off onto the two main streets and the back road, and it was big with many trees and tall monuments cluttering it. You couldn't see the other side if you looked in, even on a clear, bright day. Some of the kids would dare others to go in and stay the night, and even though it was creepy, nothing ever happened. So we all just put it off to something else like the telephone poles or something equally as silly.

It was late October, when the trees were all golden and red and loosing their leaves so the skeletal silhouettes poked into the overcast skies, when my boyfriend and I were out for one of our regular wanders at 1A.M. after it had finished raining. We took a route that we rarely did, and found ourselves on the back roads. The crisp wind of Autumn nipping a little as we went. Our path brought us around to walk along the wall that separated Aspen from the sidewalk. The yellow light of the streetlamps shimmering off the water and oil on the concrete. I was uneasy as we walked along the wall, and insisted that we walk in the middle of the road instead of on the narrow sidewalk because of this. I just couldn't shake the feeling that something was watching me and if I turned my head toward the cemetery that I'd see whatever was staring at me over the stone wall. My boyfriend agreed, I could feel his tenseness as well, and we continued on as far from graveyard as we could be without being in the woods on the opposite side of the road.

When we got home again at around 3A.M. the feeling of being watched didn't leave us as it normally did when we walked by there. But we shrugged it off as some strange form of Halloween spirit. We went to bed, curled up on his small bed that wasn't big enough for the both of us, but we still felt... Unsafe...

He heard a strange buzzing and felt something very close to his face but didn't see anything. I felt that if I rolled over, since I was on the outside of the bed facing him and he was against the wall, I would come face to face with something horrible. But the thing was, I already knew what she looked like, I didn't have to roll over to see, it was clear as day in my mind, as if I had seen her before, over the wall to the cemetery... She was thin, shriveled, and pale, with dark hair that fell in scraggly chunks into her face, eyes like little black voids and mouth gaping and endless, wearing a light grey tattered dress. I told him this, whispered it, that I was scared to move because I knew she was there, almost touching my hair.

We both sat frozen for what felt like hours, terrified, though he didn't know what he was terrified of, he didn't see her. Eventually he leaped up off the bed, effectively startling me, and flicked on the light on the other end of the room. There as nothing there, but neither of us wanted to go back to sleep. So we didn't.

Since then, we haven't walked by Aspen, and we've moved several times, now living far from our home town. He hasn't felt endangered by anything.

Me on the other hand. I still feel her, there in the dark, watching me as I sleep, trailing her fingers on my cheek sometimes crooning something that I can't or don't want to understand. Waiting for something, but I don't know what.