It was already dark and there was no lighting in the cemetery, but the woman was wearing a bobble hat with some kind of reflective thread woven into it and was carrying a torch. The man standing by the gates had already decided that she was in some position of authority. Something about the notebook stuffed with scraps of paper and folded up brochures, the proprietary way in which she swung her light on the gravestones as if checking they hadn’t changed their inscriptions while she wasn’t looking.
“Can you help me?”
“Are you alright, sir?”
She gave him a smile as she came up. There were old sodium lights on the gates and in their orange shadows the man, in a dark suit and tie, looked grey and indistinct. He was breathing heavily.
“Someone was chasing me,” he said, “I think. There was someone behind me.”
“Oh dear,” said the woman, “Started already, has it? Just Halloween larks, I suppose. Don’t worry, you’ll be alright in here. No one comes in here on Halloween. You’d think otherwise, wouldn’t you? But no, they’re all at parties, or out trick or treating.”
“Ugh,” the man shivered, “I hate trick or treating. We never used to do that when we were young.”
“Well, no one’s trick or treating in the graveyard,” said the woman, “The last thing you’d want is a treat from any of these occupants.”
“Oh, don’t,” said the man, “That’s a bit gruesome.”
“Well, this is the ghost walk,” said the woman, gesturing at a sheet of A4 in a plastic sleeve tacked up on the gates. Halloween Ghost Walk, midnight, free to join.
“Oh,” said the man, “I didn’t… I don’t really like that kind of thing.”
“You and everyone else,” said the woman, “It's the same every year. Everybody’s got something better to do. But you come along. You’ll be alright with me. I’ll keep you company.”
She turned and started following the path running parallel to the cemetery wall, beckoning him after her.
“If you don’t mind,” said the man, following her, “It was a bit of a shock, that’s all. There was someone, you know, after me.”
“Well, I’ll try not to shock you too much,” said the woman, “This one, for instance, is more of a tragedy than a scare.”
She had stopped in front of a section of the wall covered with plaques bearing women’s names.
“The Great Waistcoat Fire,” said the woman, “It was infamous in its time. It was the fire that was great, of course, not the waistcoats. In the nineteenth century this area was the centre of the rag trade and all these women worked at a factory on the top floor of one of those tall buildings down by the market.
“It had been a dry summer and the building was wooden and stuffed with scraps of material. They think that the fire started because one of the clerks on a lower floor couldn’t be bothered to go outside to smoke. There's a description of the floating fabric dust catching fire, flames racing through the air. The lower floors caught first, leaving the women trapped in the attic.
“They climbed out of the windows, but there was nowhere for them to go. There was only one thing they could do. As the building caught fire behind them, they jumped. Many of them, friends, jumping in pairs, holding hands. Onlookers described their skirts billowing out as they jumped, like parachutes, so that they hung for a moment but then the skirts caught fire themselves, and they dropped. Six floors down, blazing comets, screaming. Onlookers said they never forgot the sound of the girls hitting the pavement, one after the other, the cries, the impact and the sudden silence in the mayhem of the fire.”
“Oh, those poor women, trying to escape and just finding themselves trapped again. It’s awful,” said the man, “I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I really like… could we not do the ghost stories?”
“I haven’t gotten to the ghost story yet,” said the woman, “That street was bombed in the war with incendiaries, and the fire wardens swore they saw women in old fashioned dresses falling from the buildings, even though they were sure the building had been emptied and they never found any remains afterwards.”
“The women haunt the factory?” said the man.
“So they say,” said the woman, “It’s a hot desking space now. Ironically.”
“They don’t haunt here,” said the man, “In the graveyard.”
“No,” said the guide, “But not many do. What is a ghost, after all? You get ghosts when there’s been some significant event in a particular place, don’t you? A murder or tragedy or some unresolved business or other? These things tend not to happen in graveyards. They tend to happen before. Graves are what happens after. No one here is up to much, usually. Apart from us, of course.”
“On a ghost walk,” said the man, “With no ghosts, though.”
“Well, of course, people tend to associate cemeteries with ghosts,” said the guide, “Not always a good thing, as this man would no doubt tell you if he could.”
She had stopped by one grave in particular.
“Back when this cemetery was first opened there was, in fact, a ghost scare. People in the area claimed that a man who had taken his own life had been buried there. Back then people had all kinds of strange opinions about this. You weren’t supposed to bury someone who had died that way in consecrated ground. So they became convinced that the man’s spirit would be unable to rest, that it would haunt the graveyard.
“So one man decided to try and catch it. With a shotgun of all things. What he thought he could do to a ghost with a shotgun, I can’t imagine, and we’ll never find out, because he didn’t find a ghost, he found this man.”
She indicated the grave.
“This man was a local baker whose bakery happened to be on that side of the cemetery and whose house happened to be on the other, so one twilight evening he’s walking home through the graves, his apron all white in the dim light, his shirt all white, his face all white with flour and then suddenly a man leaps out at him brandishing a gun. A man who thinks he’s just seen a ghost, his eyes starting, hair on end. So our baker takes to his heels and the man starts shooting. And sadly, a man dressed entirely in white makes for an easy target, even in the dark.”
“Oh, how terrible,” said the man, “That poor man, running for his life through here. Just what you’re afraid of in a graveyard.”
“The strange thing is,” said the guide, “Absolutely no one’s ever claimed to have seen the ghost of the baker. Isn’t that odd? A murder in a graveyard and no ghost? You’d expect one, wouldn’t you? And yet… not in this case.”
She held up a finger as a sign to stop and then pointed, “But…”
“But?” said the man, “But what?”
“We actually do have a ghost in this graveyard.”
“You do?”
“A Halloween ghost, in fact,” said the guide, “Featuring your dreaded trick or treat, or people in costumes at any rate.”
“Costumes?” the man had stopped on the path, actually looking a little nervous.
“This way,” said the guide, continuing, “This is about fifty years ago now. The story is that a bunch of teenagers were pranking commuters coming along from the station. All got up in scary masks, jumping out at people, trying to scare them.
“Anyway, there’s a man coming up from the station and they do it to him and instead of shouting at them and chasing them off or going along with it, they catch him completely unawares and he just goes, yelling, running away down the street. So they, they follow him, because of course they do, yelling too.”
“Monsters,” said the man, “That’s a horrible thing to do.”
“And he comes up to the cemetery gates and runs through, with the teenagers still hot behind him, and he’s running for his life through the graves, with these weird creatures all hooting and hollering around him, all between the angels and stones, and he’s looking for someway to get out, and he sees…”
Up ahead was a Victorian mausoleum of dark granite, a monolithic silhouette against the dim light from beyond the walls.
“The mausoleum,” said the man.
“The mausoleum,” said the guide, “And they’d just been interring a new family member so the door is open and, in a panic…”
“Oh no,” said the man, “I don’t like this.”
“What else could he do? All his options are bad ones,” said the woman, “He ducks inside the mausoleum, pulling the door up behind him, shaking in the shadows, hoping against hope that they haven’t seen him, listening to these pursuing monsters shrieking through the darkness outside. Listening to them come screaming right up to him and then past, fading away into the distance, and gone.”
“He’s safe, isn’t he?” said the man, “He’s safe in there?”
“So then he tries to open the door again,” said the guide.
“Oh no,” said the man, “I know what’s going to happen.”
“Oh yes, it is,” said the woman, “The door latch has caught and it won’t open. Mausoleum doors aren’t built to open from the inside. No one needs to use them from the inside and if they do, well, you don’t want them to get out.”
“I’d like to stop this, please,” said the man, “I don’t like this.”
“Neither did he,” said the woman, “For a moment he was glad the teenagers had gone and now he’s terrified that they won’t come back. And they don’t. It’s night in a cemetery on Halloween and no one is coming. The mausoleum is granite and the door is solid iron. Even if anyone came, they wouldn't hear him. And he wouldn’t hear them. He certainly doesn’t hear the ground staff the next day, when they pass and just assume someone else shut the door for them.”
“I know what’s going to happen,” said the man, “I don’t like it.”
“No one finds him,” said the guide, “Until years later when another family member dies and they open the mausoleum again.”
“He died,” said the man.
“He’s our ghost,” said the woman, “Every Halloween he walks the cemetery, looking for a way out that he never finds.”
“I’d like to go now,” said the man.
“There was one place left in the mausoleum,” said the guide, “And the family felt he deserved it, so they gave it to him to be interred in, properly.”
“Still here,” said the man.
“Still here,” said the woman, stepping in front of him and opening the door to the mausoleum, “The final resting place.”
The man stood, staring into the dark of the mausoleum.
“You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?” said the guide, “Same as every year, same walk, same end. Back you go.”
The man’s head dropped and he stepped hesitantly forward, into the darkness.
“That’s Halloween for another year,” said the woman, “That’s the end of our ghost walk.”
And, closing the door after him, she walked away, between the graves, occasionally stopping and examining one as if to make sure that it was still intact.