The Fence

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.