My friends, I am deeply ensconced in Decatur, purported to be one of the most haunted towns in Illinois. After making a pitstop at Sonic to sample a pumpkin pie shake (verdict: thousand-yard-stareworthy), my sister Kim and I stuttered our way down south. The city itself does unsettle me a little bit, which is strange, since I wouldn’t label myself as particularly sensitive to phenomena.
We arrived too late to do any proper reconnaissance, but that didn’t prevent us from driving around Decatur anyway. After we found the Lincoln & Avon theaters, Greenwood Cemetery (located, oddly, smack dab in a neighborhood), and more churches than you can shake a stick at, we turned to go back to the hotel. After all, it was 8:15 pm, way past our bedtimes. Then, off to the right, we saw a cemetery unnoted on our maps.
And its gate was wide open.
I’ve never been in a cemetery at night before. Turns out, it’s really hard to see. Plus it was pretty close to Millikin University, so remote it was not. Still, we managed not to get arrested or locked in, and we found a nifty place to add to our explorations during the day. Kim snapped some pretty nice pictures, but her Compact Flash card and my laptop don’t jibe.
Later tonight: hot handmade Ouija board action. Pray that our souls don’t get sucked into the hoary netherworld!
Jealous I am. I’ve never been in a cemetery at night either. I’ve been outside of one in Indiana somewhere that a friend said had some local legends about it, but it was closed. Fortunately, it didn’t have a chain-link fence, just some low, wooden one. So we stood outside for a bit, snapped some pictures, just got a feel for the place in a perfectly legal way.