Page 4 - Publishing Inspiration Christmas Card 2022

Waking the Dead
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I recently I had a chance to do a reader’s theatre for a group
interested in western history. The stories were a lot of fun, taken
from the journals of past residents of the valley where we live. But
there was one that I thought was particularly good that goes well with
this time of year.
The story was written in the journal of a girl I’ll call Laura,
who was a teenager at the time. She lived in a small western town,
and to earn money to help her family, she hired out as a domestic
servant for a wealthy family. After preparing supper for them, she
cleaned up and washed the dishes. It was usually quite late when she
headed home.
Her walk home took her quite near the town cemetery, but not
being a believer in ghosts, that didn’t bother her at all. But one
moonlit night, well after dark, she was on her way home when she
heard something. She was just passing the cemetery when, suddenly,
there was a loud commotion. She could see figures dressed in black
moving at full speed across the graveyard. Some of them seemed to
be falling over tombstones, only to rise up and move even faster.
It was an eerie scene in the dark and looked like they were
almost flying up and down as they ran. Laura felt a little chill, but
she reasoned that it couldn’t be ghosts. Surely if ghosts did exist,
they wouldn’t make nearly as much noise. She told herself it was
just a bunch of kids playing around, and she was not about to let it
frighten her.
But then something did frighten her. In fact, it scared her so
much, she couldn’t run if she had wanted to. Coming toward her,
almost floating, was a figure dressed in what looked like a white
nightgown. The figure continued toward Laura, stopping only a few
feet from her. Then Laura recognized who it was, and that frightened
her even more. The woman’s name was Rachel. She had just passed
away a few days before, and her funeral had been that very day. She
had been buried that same afternoon.

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