Curious things occur late at night on these cemetery grounds and believe me when I tell you stranger things happen in the day. Sometimes I am charged with running errands inside the funeral home. Recently Undertaker had to make a house visit and he requested that I sit in the funeral home and attend to any phone calls that may come through in the business office. I prefer my own work outside, with the dead, as opposed to work with the living via telephone, but nonetheless I agreed.
The house is immense, and the operations parts, such as embalming rooms and crematorium are located on the lower level. As soon as I eased myself down onto Undertaker’s chair in his office the telephone rang. I answered but no one responded. I hung up, and again the telephone rang. I picked up the telephone, gave my proper introduction and was greeted only by dead silence.
Then the doorbell rang.
With no one on the other line I hung up the telephone and made my way to the front door, where there was also no one present. Quite perturbed by it all I stomped back over to the Undertaker’s office and found the telephone off the hook, on the desk with the busy signal blaring. I hung up the phone again calmly, sat down and leaned back in the chair.
“I will be outside momentarily,” I said. “The Undertaker has requested that I sit here and attend to any business needs, but I assure you that I will be out of your house and back to the grounds as soon as possible.”
With that said, the strange incidents ceased.
Later that night I went to the movie theater to see the recent horror movie, Insidious. The movie began with a family of five; a mother, father, two little boys and an infant daughter, who had all moved into a rather large, old house. The home fit the classic haunted house mold, with multiple levels, and rooms, an impressive stairway, nooks and crannies and the must-have dark and shadowy cob-web-covered attic. After a fall off a ladder in the attic, one of the son’s, Dalton, falls into an unexplained coma. When the family starts hearing things, seeing things, and after the mother is attacked by a ghost in her bedroom it is time to move out of the haunted house.
However, sometimes the dead follow.
On moving day into the new home new ghosts appear. Quickly, the experts are called in. With the assistance of a paranormal investigative team the family learns that it is not either house that is haunted, but their comatose son, Dalton.
This film busts open the haunted house genre. There are plenty of unexpected moments, and there were also frightened screams throughout the movie theater. The film is intelligent, well planned, and overall well-paced.
I am very familiar with haunted houses. I grew up in one. I work on the grounds right outside of one, and I certainly know that they can surely be terrifying, but then again, I am the Gravedigger and so it takes a lot to scare me.
Go and see Insidious dears. You will be pleased.
-Gravedigger
