Why do the graves keep rearranging themselves? What causes the temperature to drop in certain sections? How do the shadows move between the tombs? Why do the locals avoid this place after dark? What secrets lie in the sealed mausoleum?
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You knows dat in New Orleans is not morning ‘til dee sun come up.
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
The iron gates of St. Roch Cemetery creaked open as I entered, the sounds carrying unnaturally through the dense Louisiana evening. Tall crypts and mausoleums loomed all around, their stone inhabitants keeping silent watch.
I wended my way down moss-shrouded paths, the sultry air heavy with the cloying scent of oleander and decay. Spanish moss dripped from gnarled oak branches like spectral fingers clutching at the intruder in their realm.
Pausing to examine weathered tombs, I brushed dust from names now unreadable by time. As my hand passed over the stone, I glimpsed fleeting images - smiling faces now sunken and staring, lives cut cruelly short. A phantom wind rustled through whispered secrets of the deceased.
Deeper in lay family vaults secured behind rusted bars. Flickering glimpses within revealed unquiet slumberers stirring at my presence, bones sliding sinuously over one another. Screams and sibilant whispers drifted from disturbed crypts as unseen things shuffled and scrabbled in the darkness below.
At the cemetery’s heart loomed a hill crowned by a crumbling mausoleum. Within lay generations of the Dubois lineage, their decay manifest. A dreadful keening arose, a dozen shrieks in chilling harmony from the damned souls bound to their rotting husks.
As the pitiful chorus reached its crescendo, unseen hands grasped at my ankles from fissures in the earth. I fled that languid city of the dead, pursued by the baying of ghosts loath to release their hallowed ground.
