While warching a horror flick the other night I got to thinking about what scared me when I was a kid. One source of a few scares was a graveyard next to the grade school I attended. I was a latchkey kid (do people still use that word) and on my way home I either walked around or through that graveyard. One cold and rainy fall day (I’d like to say it was during October but my memory may be playing with me) in third grade a few friends and I were sharing scary stories toward the end of the day. They were typical Scooby Doo style scary stories until an eighth grader decided to join the conversation.
His story was about a group of teenagers who drove their car into a tombstone while driving through the graveyard. All of the teenagers, save one, gathered around the damaged tombstone, mocked the deceased, and laughed at the damage they caused. Later, the teenagers were in another accident, this time hitting a telephone pole. All the teenagers, save the one, died in the accident. A couple of friends and I cut through the graveyard that day after school to verify the eighth grader’s story. There was indeed a tombstone near the access drive that was damaged. We didn’t say much the rest of the walk home. I lived the farthest of my friends so those last three blocks alone in the cold and rain was an eerie kind of quiet. The quiet was broken by the sound of skidding tires on wet pavement, probably a car simply stopping short at a stop sign. It was enough for nine-year old me to sprint that last half block, lock the door, and turn on every damn light in the house.
I was visiting my mother a while back and took her hound dog for a walk. We took a round about way through the neighborhood and cut through that graveyard on our way back. I took a moment to look at that tombstone and with quite a bit of life experience behind me I concluded the damage was from time and weather. But as I stood before that tombstone my heart began to race. For a brief moment I felt that fear, maybe not the fear but the memory of the fear from that afternoon in third grade. H.P. Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” As we grow older and gain life experience less and less remains unknown so less and less remains scary, but now and again the memory of unknown creeps up and scares us.
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