SHORT ENGLISH STORY

A Cemetery is a place full of tombs, spirits, bodies of the dead people, and silent as well as lonely place. Many people are generally afraid of death thus experience fear whenever they face cemeteries. A cemetery is associated with spirits because the spirits of the dead are believed to be present in cemeteries. In many cases people have heard stories where the spirits of the dead come back to haunt the living. In fact if a person woke up to find him or herself in the middle of a cemetery at midnight, he or she might just collapse to death.

One of the reasons why cemetery is a frightening, scary and anxiety-provoking place is because it symbolizes death. When human beings hear the mention of a cemetery, the first thing that comes into their mind is death. Human beings are always afraid of death, but whether we like it or not, all of us will die one time. However, human beings have always lived avoiding death in all means (Stephens 49).

A cemetery is a place where the bodies of the dead people are rested. If you happen to walk through a cemetery, you will definitely experience some strange feeling. One may even start running all of a sudden simply because he or she things someone from the dead may pull him or her to the underground world. Naturally, fear exists in human beings as a response to anything that threatens their lives. Therefore, since human beings fear death, we are prone to be frightened by anything that symbolizes death. In this case, a cemetery symbolizes death to human beings, thus cemeteries will always be scary places for human beings. One of the aspects that prove that human beings fear death is the fact that we have mortuary professionals to deal with the dead thus limiting our contact with dead people.

There are many scenarios which depicts a cemetery as a scary place. For instance we have the horror movies. In horror movies, most of the dangerous horrors come from cemeteries. In those movies cemeteries are depicted as the scariest places ever. In horror movies, the dead usually arise from the dead in the form of a skeleton and begin to eat people.

In addition, horror movies depict the dead as supernatural beings which cannot be conquered by anyone. These movies are created out of creativity then put into acting. In horror movies, most of these scary beings arising from the dead are just fictional to make a movie lively. However, human beings fear death. One may wonder why human beings fear death while they spend a lot of money and time preparing to bury a dead person by buying luxury casket, building a graveyard with walls and painting them with good colors.

This kind of relationship human beings have created with death only instills more fear of death to human beings. If dead people were just thrown away to be feasted by vultures, human beings would not be scared by cemeteries. However, the fact that cemetery is a sacred place set aside for burying the death, it creates a distance between human beings and the death thus instilling fear on human beings(Marlene 183).

A cemetery creates a sense of supernatural power to human beings thus provoking anxiety in human beings. One of the most settings used in describing a cemetery in scary stories is darkness and most the scary things happen at night. Normally, darkness and night represents evil and thus using a dark or night setting to write a story about cemetery only makes them scarier.

There are several things associated with cemeteries. In most cases, cemeteries are associated with scary things such as frightening voices at night, lights. For instance, the Silver Cliff Cemetery it’s famously associated with dancing blue lights. The witnesses of these lights describe them as small round and sometimes they appear in other colors apart from blue. These things associated with cemeteries make them even scarier. Some cemeteries are associated with crying voices at night.

You can imagine walking past a cemetery and then you hear a voice crying from the cemetery like someone in pain. Cemeteries are associated with spirits. It is said that the spirits of the dead are always moving around. In most cemeteries, people often visit them and leave flowers on top of the graves (Herring, Ann, Saunders, and Boyce (20.1)6). Other people leave drinks and food and when they return back to find out that the food is not there and the drinks have been taken; they believe that the spirits of the dead ate the food and the drinks. In other cases, cemeteries are associated with ghosts.

After staying for long periods without being taken care of, the cemeteries become bushy and scary. Therefore, they became a hideout for bad things. In some countries, vampires have been associated with cemeteries. For instance, in London England the Highgate Cemetery became spooky due to lack of maintenance and in 1970s; the Highgate cemetery was associated with ghosts and vampires. Cemeteries are mostly depicted as evil. This is evident in movies and stories. Most vampire and horror movies are shot at cemeteries which depicts cemeteries as scary places with frightening creatures. Ghosts and vampires symbolize death since they feed on human blood. Human beings are naturally afraid of death. This explains the reason why human beings go for body transplants whenever they have serious body complications. It is because they are trying to avoid death.

Cemeteries are expected to be respected and avoided because of their scary nature. In future, we expect more cemeteries to be scattered all over since everyone will die. This means that cemeteries will never end, they will always be there and human beings should understand and get used to them. Even in the history, cemeteries were scared places and used to be worshiped (Halsall, Guy Vol. 18).

The history of cemeteries narrates that the spirits of the dead used to help people during difficulties. Anyone who was found disrespecting the cemeteries was punished. In history, there were rules and guidelines on how to bury people in the cemeteries. In other cases, not everyone was allowed to enter into a cemetery. Only a special number of people who were deemed sacred were supposed to enter into the cemetery. There were consequences of violating the rules regulating the cemeteries. The spirits of the deed were said to attack and punish wrong doors in the society.

In African societies, they used to offer sacrifices and offering to the dead in honor and respect for them. In addition, the names of the dead were repeatedly commemorated and mentioned in prayers. The history of cemetery played a part in inflicting fear among human beings. The history of cemeteries it’s scary. Work cited

Epp, Marlene. "Purple Clematis and Yellow Pine: On Cemeteries, Irony and Difference." Mennonite Quarterly Review 74.1 (2000): 183.

Halsall, Guy. Cemeteries and society in Merovingian Gaul: selected studies in history and archaeology, 1992-2009. Vol. 18. Brill, 2010.

Herring, Ann, Shelley Saunders, and Gerry Boyce. "Bones and burial registers: infant mortality in a 19th-century cemetery from Upper Canada." Northeast Historical Archaeology 20.1 (2013): 6.

Parochetti, JoAnn Stephens. "SCARY STORIES FROM PURDUEi." Keystone Folklore Quarterly 10 (1965): 49.

http://books.google.co.ke/books?hl=en&lr=&id=w4rYAAAAMAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA49&dq=cemeteries+scary&ots=nRoM8qoqfo&sig=1QlKnyJBixOdwYYUI7v97nY4fPA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=cemeteries%20scary&f=false