I live near Buffalo (twelve miles out of Batavia, if you
know the area). This story happened to me on New Year's
Day, I think it was 1994. I had some of my friends over
for a New Year's Eve party that year,
we would have been ten at the time. We woke up late that
morning, because we stayed up several hours after the ball
dropped to play Lemmings, (remember Lemmings?) so it was late
afternoon when we decided to take my dog for a walk. I
went, my friend Tim and my sister Liz went, and possibly
someone else, I can't remember.
Across the field to the north of my house, there is a small
cemetery. It's old for my area; It's been full since not
to long after the end of the 1800's, and some of the people
in it are Revolutionary War Vets. Now that I'm older, I
realize this is sort of strange, but sometimes my friends
and sister would go play in it. Of course, being kids, we
always ended up running back to my house in terror. This
time would be no exception, but this time, we would have a
reason.
As we walked along my road, the dog decided to go into the
graveyard and look around. We had no problem with this, so
we all went in. We wandered around the graveyard
for ten or twenty minuets. Tim, Liz and I talked, joked,
and did whatever ten year olds do together.
Then, as my dog walked toward the back corner of the
cemetery, he caught his paw in his collar, and started to
choke. I quickly got his paw out of the collar, and he
stopped, for a second. Before I could even pick up the
leash again however, he began to choke again, only this
time his paws were fine. Thinking his collar must be too
tight, I loosened it. The dog kept choking. I continued
to loosen the collar, until eventually I took it right
off. My dog, however, continued to choke.
Because I was young, and I didn't know what to do, I
decided to take the choking dog back to my house. I told
my friends what I was doing, then I grabbed him by the
scruff of his neck, and we took off running across the
field. I don't know how I managed to cross the field that
fast. And I don't know how I managed to lead the dog by
the scruff of his neck, he was strong, I couldn't always
even hold onto his leash. It didn't matter though, we
weren't ten feet from the graveyard before he was fine
again.
I got home very out of breath. I spent some time with the
dog, but he seemed ok now. After a while, Liz and Tim got
back with the leash I had left in the graveyard (they
were running too, but I had run faster). Since my dog was
ok, and we had nothing else to do, we decided to go back to
the graveyard. We left the dog home.
Even if we had not just been there and noticed nothing, I
would not be able to explain what we saw when we got
there. At the very back of this cemetery, there is a
single headstone, I think it marks several family members
plots. Around this grave is an iron fence. It's made out
of 3/4" x 3/4" polls extending maybe two feet in the air.
At the top, two bars of the same dimension connect all the
polls, and it is topped off with some nice flowery trim.
The north side of this fence, the last thing my dog would
have walked by before he started choking was, for lack of a
better work, smushed.
I can not begin to imagine what could have happened to this
fence. At the edges it is fine, then as you go towards the
middle, the polls and bars get sort of bent and wavy, then
the whole thing is bent forward so that it's lying on the
ground by the time you reach the middle of the fence. But
nowhere is a single bar cracked or broken, nor is the trim
damaged in any way. The only way I can think to alter a
iron fence in this way is if someone heated it in the
middle until the iron became so pliable that it could not
stand against gravity any more and tipped over.
And like I said we were just there. I don't think we were
gone more than twenty minutes. I can't say for sure that
the fence hadn't been bent when we were there before,
because you don't notice when things AREN'T out of the
ordinary. Still, all three of us noticed it as soon as we
walked into the graveyard the second time, and none of us
noticed the first time, and we were there much longer.
Needless to say, we got scared and ran away.
Although it doesn't really fit in with this story, I want
to mention that just a few years ago, I was driving by
that same graveyard, when outside that graveyard, deep in
the field, where my headlights didn't quite reach, but
didn't leave black either, I saw something. It had red
eyes, was sort of dog shaped, and was the size of a deer.
It was jumping around, always leaping south, away from
cemetery, but though it moved east and west, it never got
any further away from the cemetery than that same distance
where my dog stopped choking.
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