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The attorneys at The Angell Law Firm, LLC have represented personal injury victims in Georgia for years. We are a highly experienced Atlanta personal injury attorneys firm. We know that seeking compensation from a corporation or individual who has harmed you can be complicated after an accident, but you don't have to do it alone. Let one of our personal injury attorneys in Atlanta help you. If you injured in an accident and looking for a personal injury attorney in Atlanta, Georgia area? Call our Atlanta personal injury lawyer today to solve all your injury and accident lawyer matters. We are available 24/7 to assist you. When you choose us at The Angell Law Firm, LLC Injury and Accident Attorneys, you get a team of professional injury attorneys who are dedicated to helping you obtain compensation for your medical expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. Call us now to get a free consultation.
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Atlanta Car Accident Lawyer

Anyone involved in a car accident is likely to have questions afterward. Do I need an Atlanta car accident lawyer? Am I entitled to seek compensation? How do I file a claim with my insurance against the other driver?
Here at The Angell Law Firm in Atlanta, GA, we understand how serious car wrecks are. With years of experience under our belts, we are ready and willing to assist you in this time of need.
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We Can Help Atlanta Car Accident Victims

According to the Georgia Department of Transportation, about one-third of all car accidents result in some kind of injury. No matter the circumstances of your car accident, we are ready to assist in whatever way possible.
If you or a loved one is injured in a car crash due to someone else’s negligence, we can help protect your rights and seek compensation.

What is a Negligence Lawsuit Case?

A negligence lawsuit allows the plaintiff to recover damages intended to compensate for physical, emotional, and financial injuries. In this case, it’s a car accident caused by another person’s negligence. To bring a successful negligence lawsuit, the plaintiff’s attorney must be able to prove that the defendant:

• Owed a duty to the plaintiff.
• Breached the duty owed and resulted in a car accident
• Engaged in behavior that was a cause of the plaintiff’s injuries in a crash

A Motorist’s Duty to Other Drivers

Every driver on the road in Atlanta owes a duty to others to act reasonably behind the wheel to prevent accidents. A person driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs or sending or reading text messages has breached this universal duty. If that person causes an accident, they could be held liable for the injuries they caused.
It’s important to note that proving these elements of a car accident claim can be challenging. For this reason, it is in your best interest to hire an Atlanta car accident lawyer.
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Types of Car Accident Cases We Handle

The term “car accident” can be somewhat misleading. It is a catchall phrase that often refers to multiple types of motor vehicle accidents. Our experienced team in Atlanta takes on cases involving:

• Car crashes: These are the most common, but that doesn’t make them any easier to handle when you’re the one involved. They often result in injuries, property damage, and emotional trauma.
• Motorcycle wrecks: Unfortunately, motorcyclists often take the brunt of the injuries in a wreck regardless of the responsible party. A motorcycle is much smaller than a car and provides a lot less defense.
• Wrongful death: Occasionally, car accidents will result in fatalities. In these cases, loved ones and family members typically have the legal right to file a wrongful death suit.
• Defective products: Sometimes, the responsible party isn’t another driver in a car accident. Manufacturers may be unaware of a product’s defect or, worse, refuse to acknowledge it. When the same product has injured you and others, we can help you file a mass tort against the manufacturer.
• Truck wrecks: Depending on the circumstances, the company employing the driver may also be at fault for the accident.

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What Are Common Atlanta Car Accident Injuries?

Depending on the situation, car wrecks can cause a wide range of injuries. One issue many injured parties face is how long it takes to recognize the injuries. While some injuries are immediately noticeable, others take longer to show up.
Some common car accident injuries include:

• Back pain
• Head injury
• Whiplash or neck injury
• Damage to the internal organs
• Broken bones
• Emotional distress or PTSD

Any or all of these injuries can significantly affect your life and livelihood. The majority of car crash injuries require a recovery period, either at home or in the hospital. During this time, it is often impossible to continue working and earning your income as normal.
That’s where we come in. Whether it’s working with your insurance to pay for medical bills, outpatient therapy, or lost wages, The Angell Law Firm is on your side.

Wrongful Death

In Georgia, if an automobile accident results in a fatality, the deceased’s spouse has the first claim. If there is no spouse, then the deceased’s children are eligible to file the lawsuit. From there, it goes to the victim’s parents, siblings, nieces or nephews, grandparents, and other descendants.
There are multiple types of damages that you can sue for with wrongful death. These include compensation for:

• Loss of comfort, companionship, and relationship
• Loss of consortium of the victim (for spouses only)
• Loss of household services
• Loss of financial support

The money involved depends significantly on the situation and is meant to pay for funerary or burial expenses, lost wages, and pain and suffering. There must be significant proof that the responsible party caused both the death and was responsible for preventing it.
Sifting through endless paperwork and complicated statutes while you’re grieving is just another burden to bear. To navigate these complex legalities, we can help you seek compensation for your loved one’s death.
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One word – AMAZING!!!! I’m happy that I trusted the reviews on this firm and decided to select them to represent me in a car accident. It was my first time being injured, getting into an accident, even having to go to the ER, and the Angell Law Firm was empathetic to that and made sure I was informed throughout the entire process. Breanna was my case manager, always available when I needed to reach her, called me for updates – seriously just went above and beyond! And they awarded me more than I would’ve ever imagined possible. – Vanessa V

Where Do Car Accidents Occur in Atlanta?

As you might expect in a city of nearly 500,000 people, motor vehicle accidents are not uncommon. Although the city of Atlanta has taken many steps in recent years to make driving and walking safer, a combination of reckless behaviors and more people have made the roads dangerous.
While Atlanta has more than its fair share of car wrecks, some places are known to be more dangerous than others.
The Federal Highway Administration found that one-fifth of all fatal car accidents happen at an intersection, and two out of every five non-fatal accidents happen at intersections.
The intersections in Atlanta statistically proven to be the most dangerous are:

• East Park Pl and Stone Mountain Hwy
• Covington Hwy and Lithonia Rd
• North Hairston Rd and Memorial Dr
• Covington Hwy and Panola Rd
• Peachtree Industrial Blvd and Jimmy Carter Blvd
• Peachtree Rd and Collier Rd
• Earnest Barrett Pkwy and Cobb Place Blvd
• Marietta Rd and Bolton Rd
• West Paces Ferry Rd and Habersham Rd
• Peachtree Rd and 14th St
• Peachtree Rd and Piedmont Rd
• Delmoor Ct and Delmar Ave
• Briarcliff Rd and North Druid Hills Rd
• State Bridge Rd and Medlock Bridge Rd
• Chattahoochee Rd and Howell Mill Rd

Of course, it’s not always possible to avoid significant intersections or highways. If you need to drive through them, be extra cautious and on the lookout for reckless driving.

Atlanta Accident Statistics

In 2018, Atlanta saw a drop in the number of collisions compared to the years before, but there were still nearly 50,000 reported to the county. In fact, despite the lockdown in 2020 for the majority of the year, Atlanta PD still recorded over 20,000 automobile accidents.
According to the Georgia Department of Transportation, in 2019, 1,507 people died on roads. Of those fatalities, 60% of them weren’t wearing seat belts. Additionally, only 16% were pedestrians, suggesting that most people killed were passengers and drivers in motor vehicles.
Three-quarters of car crash fatalities were found to be caused by unsafe driving. That includes:

• Distracted driving, including sleepy driving
• Texting or calling while driving
• Drunk driving: 29% of all crashes in 2019 were the result of driving while intoxicated
• Speeding: 30% of all crashes in 2019 were the result of speeding

Who Is to Blame After a Car Accident?
Legally, the blame for a car accident is assigned to someone known as the responsible party. The responsible party is the person or people who inadvertently caused the accident to happen. As the name implies, a car accident is technically an accident, and no one intended it.
Reckless behavior is known to lead to car crashes, so even if it was an accident, the responsible party still bears the blame. In Georgia, drivers legally have a responsibility to be cautious on the roads and avoid other vehicles.
The responsible party isn’t necessarily one person. Multiple people may be at fault for the accident. Sometimes, no one is at fault. Other times, the vehicle’s manufacturer is the responsible party.
In some cases, your negligence may be partly responsible for the accident. Even in those situations, you might still be eligible to seek compensation. Georgia law specifies modified comparative negligence in car accidents. If you are less than 50% responsible, you are still eligible to seek compensation.

Mass Tort Cases

If you and others are involved in motor vehicle accidents resulting from a product malfunctioning, you may all be entitled to compensation from the manufacturer for negligence.
Mass torts or class action cases are against the manufacturer under the assumption that the manufacturer had a responsibility to ensure the safety of their products before releasing them on the market.
Different types of product defects could cause injuries which include:

• Warning or marketing defect: The manufacturer should have marketed the product with a specific warning about potential hazards involving the product or how it could be used
• Manufacturing defect: As the name implies, the product is safe, but something went wrong during production to make it dangerous, even when used correctly and as intended
• Design defect: The rarest type and sometimes lumped in with marketing defect, design defects imply that while the product’s concept was safe, the blueprints of the product contained issues that made the product dangerous even when made correctly and used as intended

These cases can be complex and often involve a variety of plaintiffs against a single defendant with massive amounts of resources. That’s why it’s vital to hire an attorney with plenty of experience handling large class-action suits like The Angell Law Firm.

Do You Need a Car Accident Lawyer in Atlanta?

As is the case throughout the United States, you are not legally required to hire an attorney. You have the right and freedom to defend yourself in court and when filing claims. However, the benefits of legal counsel cannot be overstated, especially in a car accident case.
In the aftermath of a car crash, you deal with physical and emotional injuries. With an experienced Atlanta car accident lawyer on your side, you can focus on recovering while we focus on your claim. A lawyer provides invaluable experience with the legal processes, paperwork, and guidance along the way.
When you work with us, you’ll have help:

• Gathering evidence to support your claim, including eyewitness accounts, traffic camera footage, photos of the crash site, and police reports
• Finding all responsible parties, which could include other drivers, car manufacturers, property owners, or insurance companies, and providing evidence to prove negligence
• Communicating with insurance companies on your behalf
• Filing the correct paperwork by each given deadline

We have decades of experience with car accident cases and don’t charge any fees unless you win your case.

Get Evidence, Strengthen Your Claim

You can not recover compensation for your car accident injuries unless you have evidence that proves liability for the other party. You will also need to provide the insurance companies involved in the claim with evidence that clearly shows the extent of your injuries and the damages you have suffered due to these injuries.

At the Scene of the Car Accident

There is a variety of types of evidence you should collect following a car accident. This includes photographs of the vehicles involved and the surrounding scene. You should also obtain a copy of the official police report. On top of that, ask witnesses for their contact information before leaving the scene. Take photographs of any visible injuries you may have suffered in the crash.

After the Accident

After the car accident, be sure to hold onto any evidence you have acquired. This includes copies of any vehicle damage repair receipts, medical bills, doctor’s notes about your injuries, medical exam results, and lab results. The more evidence you have supporting your claim, the better. The more evidence, the more likely you will receive full and fair compensation.

Pursuing Compensation After a Car Accident in Atlanta

We take on the heavy lifting of filing a lawsuit against the responsible party in your car accident. Successful cases are when the responsible party compensates you for your losses.
Depending on the situation, these losses can range from lost wages to medical bills to property damage. Those are known as economic damages because they can be labeled and calculated to a precise number.
Another type of loss you can receive compensation for is known as non-economic damages. This might include emotional distress, disfigurement, or wrongful death cases. As the name implies, non-economic damages can’t be calculated or easily given a price.
Whatever you’re going through, The Angell Law Firm is here to aid you. We make visits to your home or your hospital room, depending on where you feel the most comfortable. Your comfort and recovery are our first priorities throughout the entirety of your case.

Call Today for a Free Case Evaluation

If you have been injured in a car crash, call The Angell Law Firm at (404) 924-7950 for a free case evaluation with an Atlanta car accident lawyer. Our office is standing by 24/7 to help you seek compensation and protect your rights after a vehicle accident.
Name of Law Firm: The Angell Law Firm LLC Injury and Accident Attorneys
Address: 3391 Peachtree Rd NE UNIT 110, Atlanta, GA 30326, USA
Phone: 404-390-2264
Phone: (770) 217-4954
Website URL: https://georgiainjurylawyer.com/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/atlantalawyers/

From "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America" (1989), written during his travels around the US in 1987 & 1988
I headed east for Savannah, down Interstate 16. It was a 173-mile drive of unspeakable tedium across the red-clay plain of Georgia. It took me five hot and unrewarding hours to reach Savannah. While you, lucky reader, have only to flit your eyes to the next paragraph.
I stood agog in Lafayette Square in Savannah, amid brick paths, trickling fountains and dark trees hung with Spanish moss. Before me rose up a cathedral of exquisite linen-fresh whiteness with twin Gothic spires, and around it stood 200-year-old houses of weathered brick, with hurricane shutters that clearly were still used. I did not know that such perfection existed in America. There are twenty such squares in Savannah, cool and quiet beneath a canopy of trees, and long straight side streets equally dark and serene. It is only when you stumble out of this urban rain forest, out into the open streets of the modern city, exposed to the glare of the boiling sun, that you realize just how sweltering the South can be. This was October, a time of flannel shirts and hot toddies in Iowa, but here summer was unrelenting. It was only eight in the morning and already businessmen were loosening their ties and mopping their foreheads. What must it be like in August? Every store and restaurant is air-conditioned. You step inside and the sweat is freeze-dried on your arms. Step back outside and the air meets you as something hot and unpleasant, like a dog’s breath. It is only in Savannah’s squares that the climate achieves a kind of pleasing equilibrium.
Savannah is a seductive city and I found myself wandering almost involuntarily for hours. The city has more than 1,000 historic buildings, many of them still lived in as houses. This was, New York apart, the first American city I had ever been in where people actually lived downtown. What a difference it makes, how much more vibrant and alive it all seems, to see children playing ball in the street or skipping rope on the front stoops. I wandered along the cobbled sidewalk of Oglethorpe Avenue to the Colonial Park Cemetery, full of moldering monuments and densely packed with the gravestones of people famous to the state’s history—Archibald Bulloch, the first president of Georgia, James Habersham, ‘a leading merchant,’ and Button Gwinnett, who is famous in America for being one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and for having the silliest first name in Colonial history. The people of Savannah, in a careless moment, appear to have lost old Button. The historical marker said that he might be buried where I was standing now or then again he might be over in the corner or possibly somewhere else altogether. You could walk around all day and never know when you were on the Button, so to speak.
The business district in Savannah was frozen in a perpetual 1959—the Woolworth store didn’t appear to have changed its stock since about then. There was a handsome old movie house, Weis’s, but it was shut. Downtown movie houses are pretty much a thing of the past in America, alas, alas. You are always reading how buoyant the movie industry is in America, but all the theaters now are at shopping malls in the suburbs. You go to the movies there and you get a choice of a dozen pictures, but each theater is about the size of a large fridge-freezer and only marginally more comfortable. There are no balconies. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine movie theaters without balconies? To me going to the movies means sitting in the front row of the balcony with your feet up, dropping empty candy boxes onto the people below (or, during the more boring love scenes, dribbling Coke) and throwing Nibs at the screen. Nibs were a licorice-flavored candy, thought to be made from rubber left over from the Korean War, which had a strange popularity in the 1950s. They were practically inedible, but if you sucked on one of them for a minute and then threw it at the screen, it would stick with an interesting pock sound. It was a tradition on Saturdays for everybody to take the bus downtown to the Orpheum, buy a box of Nibs and spend the afternoon bombarding the screen.
You had to be careful when you did this because the theater manager employed vicious usherettes, dropouts from Tech High School whose one regret in life was that they hadn’t been born into Hitler’s Germany, who patrolled the aisles with highpowered flashlights looking for children who were misbehaving. Two or three times during the film their darting lights would fix on some hapless youngster, half out of his seat, poised in throwing position with a moistened Nib in his hand, and they would rush to subdue him. He would be carried off squealing. This never happened to my friends or me, thank God, but we always assumed that the victims were taken away and tortured with electrical instruments before being turned over to the police for a long period of mental readjustment in a reform school. Those were the days! You cannot tell me that some suburban multiplex with shoebox theaters and screens the size of bath towels can offer anything like the enchantment and community spirit of a cavernous downtown movie house. Nobody seems to have noticed it yet, but ours could well be the last generation for which movie-going has anything like a sense of magic.
On this sobering thought I strolled down to Water Street, on the Savannah River, where there was a new riverside walk. The river itself was dark and smelly and on the South Carolina side opposite there was nothing to look at but down-at-heel warehouses and, further downriver, factories dispensing billows of smoke. But the old cotton warehouses overlooking the river on the Savannah side were splendid. They had been restored without being over-gentrified. They contained boutiques and oyster bars on the ground floor, but the upper floors were left a tad shabby, giving them that requisite raffish air I had been looking for since Hannibal. Some of the shops were just a bit chichi, I must admit. One of them was called The Cutest Little Shop in Town, which made me want to have the quickest little dry heave in the county. A sign on the door said:
ABSOTIVELY, POSILUTELY NO FOOD OR DRINK IN SHOP
I sank to my knees and thanked God that I had never had to meet the proprietor. The shop was closed so I wasn’t able to go inside and see what was so cute about it.
Towards the end of the street stood a big new Hyatt Regency hotel, an instantly depressing sight. Massive and made of shaped concrete, it was from the Fuck You school of architecture so favored by the big American hotel chains. There was nothing about it in scale or appearance even remotely sympathetic to the old buildings around it. It just said, ‘Fuck you, Savannah.’ The city is particularly ill favored in this respect. Every few blocks you come up against some discordant slab—the De Soto Hilton, the Ramada Inn, the Best Western Riverfront, all about as appealing as spittle on a johnnycake, as they say in Georgia. Actually, they don’t say anything of the sort in Georgia. I just made it up. But it has a nice Southern ring to it, don’t you think? I was just about at the point where I was starting to get personally offended by the hotels, and in serious danger of becoming tiresome here, when my attention was distracted by a workman in front of the city courthouse, a large building with a gold dome. He had a leaf blower, a noisy contraption with miles of flex snaking back into the building behind him. I had never seen such a thing before. It looked something like a vacuum cleaner—actually, it looked like one of the Martians in It Came from Outer Space—and it was very noisy. The idea, I gathered, was that you would blow all the leaves into a pile and then gather them up by hand. But every time the man assembled a little pile of leaves, a breeze would come along and unassemble it. Sometimes he would chase one leaf half a block or more with his blower, whereupon all the leaves back at base would seize the opportunity to scuttle off in all directions. It was clearly an appliance that must have looked nifty in the catalog but would never work in the real world, and I vaguely wondered, as I strolled past, whether the people at the Zwingle Company were behind it in some way.
I left Savannah on the Herman Talmadge Memorial Bridge, a tall, iron-strutted structure that rises up and up and up and flings you, wide-eyed and quietly gasping, over the Savannah River and into South Carolina. I drove along what appeared on my map to be a meandering coast road, but was in fact a meandering inland road. This stretch of coast is littered with islands, inlets, bays and beaches of rolling sand dunes, but I saw precious little of it. The road was narrow and slow. It must be hell in the summer when millions of vacationers from all over the eastern seaboard head for the beaches and resorts—Tybee Island, Hilton Head, Laurel Bay, Fripp Island.

"Today I woke feeling emboldened to continue on this journey of understanding why and how all of this transpired. I have been patiently waiting on my hands for weeks now for any type of information to understand what happened to my mother. My family and I have been forced to navigate moments we could have never expected. To say it’s been surreal is an understatement.
While feeling emboldened to help protect my mother and my family’s safety, I made the poor decision today to reach out to Habersham County Law Enforcement. After several attempts and requests to be up to date on any information shared regarding my mother’s case Debbie Collier, I finally found myself on the phone with the Habersham County Sheriff to express my concerns. My goal in the conversation was to request to be updated on any press briefings, releases, and any other pertinent information since my other attempts were not panning out as promised. I was met with a Sheriff who did not empathize with my situation, my concerns for my personal and family’s safety after being doxxed online, or potential leaks coming out of his office despite several media outlets claiming sources in his own department. He instead used his time to snicker at my attempts to discuss my concerns and to tell me directly that he wasn’t trying to hang up on me when pressing him on his office’s actions. Additionally, he claimed that some of their errors regarding poor communication came from short staffing.
But he did remind me that the press has the right to free speech; well, so do I. So I feel compelled to share my experience with the Sheriff because I hung up on him abruptly after he continued to snicker despite my request for him not to laugh at my situation. Unfortunately, the elected Sheriff’s attitude and lack of understanding does not give me faith or confidence in their ability to handle her “deliberate and personal” death, nor does his inability to understand my concerns regarding leaks of information that I assume is only known by those directly working the investigation. I’m no longer feeling emboldened; now I’m feeling really stuck in a hard place and I’m asking for the internet’s help in this situation to remind me how much people actually care and love for my mother, Debbie Collier."
He rightfully absolutely throttles HCSO. If they were really snickering on the phone, that is disgusting. I hope he lawyers up.

FAMILY NO LONGER THE FOCUS? HCSO: "That would be a good assumption"
by Nora Almazan and Jeff Batten
Law enforcement was expected to make an update to the Deborrah Collier case yesterday but any news will likely wait until after a ‘celebration of life’ service for Collier is held tomorrow in Athens. It will be a private service by invitation only.
So, a question now before law enforcement: if the family will be in attendance tomorrow, does that imply that family members are no longer the focus of the murder investigation? When asked that question, one ranking member of the Habersham Sheriff's office told WCHM News Director Nora Almazan, “that would be a good assumption.”
The 59 year old Collier’s remains were found September 11th - her death has been under investigation and highly publicized. Sources close to the family say they have requested the information regarding her death and who is responsible not be released until after the Celebration of Life. More news is expected at the first of next week. WCHM will continue to keep you updated as the investigation comes to an end.

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I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old high school, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their high school days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.

​
I had never met the guy before that night, and what my friends and I did was extremely foolish.
Given the crowd we rolled with, it was fortunate that we didn't end up as ghosts ourselves.
I was a part of the Goth scene at her High School. These were the prime years of Hot Topic fashion when every town had a garage band that played scene music, and every school had a little collection of black-clad figures who smoked behind the gym. I was a poster child for the Goth culture. Eyeliner, hair like an over-sprayed raven's wing, fishnets, combat boots, the whole nine yards. The school hated our little click, mostly due to truancy and the little pile of butts we often left behind the gym, but we didn't care.
It was all part of the aesthetic, right?
October may have meant costumes and candy when I was younger, but now that I was older, October was thirty days of celebration. On any given afternoon, my friends and I could wander downtown and hear someone telling spooky stories on the corner, take part in a ghost tour, or listen to someone playing a saw or something spooky with scavenged instruments. Downtown had a sizable artist scene, and October was also their month to cash in on the semi-spooky history of the town. Pinkerton Dock, the park where some witch burnings had taken place, the old gallows by the courthouse, and Reicher's Hotel, they all had a history of ghosts and spooky occurrences. Sometimes, we would just walk around in our dark clothes and heavy makeup, adding to the ambiance.
So, when the posters appeared at our favorite coffee shop, Dark Brew, announcing a Halloween concert for a local band called Burning Ramsey, we all planned to be there.
We were sitting towards the back, the air heavy with the smell of clove cigarettes and the fruity smell of smuggled vodka when the man in the vest suddenly approached our table.
I was sitting with Catherine and Margo, Tobias and Clyde sitting on the other side, and we had just started discussing what we would do after the concert. Clyde thought we should go to the old Leebache place, the most haunted spot in town, and see if we could spot some ghosts. Margo wanted to go drinking at the Pinehurst Cemetery, something that was a shock to no one. Margo was already three sheets to the wind and seemed destined for a life of barely functional alcoholism. Tobias was just suggesting that maybe we could check out the trail the next town over where those kids got murdered back in the eighties when the guy seemed to appear between Tobias and Catherine before speaking up.
It wouldn't have been strange, the place was packed, but Cat and Tobias were sitting against the back wall.
"If you guys are looking for something spooky to do, you should come out to Habersham Cemetery with me."
We all jumped and looked at him, clearly startled by the sudden appearance. He was older than we were, somewhere between twenty and thirty, wearing dark jeans and a leather vest covered in patches from other shows. I didn't recognize any of the patches, but I thought I recognized the man. I had seen him at shows before, one of those guys who liked to hover around the back, and the left side of his head had a weird burn on it like someone had pressed his face against a radiator. That side was hairless, and he swooped the rest of his cornsilk hair over it to hide the spot. It drew more attention to it, ruining the attempt to hide it, and the longer I looked at him, the more he looked like a skeleton someone had squeezed into scene-kid clothes.
Hearing him talk now was a little odd; I had expected his voice to be something like a hiss or carry a stutter.
We would all be surprised later that we hadn't just told him to leave, which would stick with me.
We had been enchanted by him, held by some sort of glamor, and when Tobias asked what he meant, it seemed like he had only been waiting for someone to ask.
"Habersham Cemetery is supposed to be as old as the town itself. It's lost in the woods near Terry Mill, and I watched a corpse dance there last year."
I leaned in to hear, wanting him to go on, but he stood up and pointed at the door with his thumb.
"I could tell you all about it, but why tell when you can show? It happens at midnight on Halloween night, and if I want to see it, I need to get movin. You can come with me if you want. It's definitely something to see."
He pushed past Catherine and headed for the door, clearly not caring if we followed or not, and the five of us looked at each other in silent conference. It sounded fun, but none of us knew this guy. Clyde thought his name might be Steve, but he had never talked to him. Clyde was interested in seeing what was at the cemetery, and Tobias thought he had heard of this place before.
"It's supposed to be wild like it feels like there's real magic there, I heard."
After a short discussion, it was unanimously decided that we would follow him out there. Catherine added that there were five of us, even if he was a creep, and he didn't look that intimidating. The man was a scarecrow, and five older teens could easily jump him if he decided to get weird. So, after we roused Margo and got her shakily to her feet, we all set out after the weird guy before he could get too far ahead.
He looked up when we walked out, enjoying a cigarette on the sidewalk, and his smile was broad and genuine.
"Glad you guys decided to join me. Looks like I might need a ride."
He pointed to an empty parking spot nearby and explained how his van had been towed while he was inside.
"Guess my tag was a little more expired than I thought. Think I could catch a ride with you guys? I don't mind hitchhiking back in if you don't want to bring me back to the."
This elicited a new huddle. I had a Ford Focus that would be lucky to hold four people, and Cat and Margo had ridden with me. Luckily, Clyde had a jeep and figured he could easily put all six of us in the vehicle. We decided that Tobias and Catherine could sit on either side of him in the back just to make sure he didn't try anything weird. Tobias was a softy, but he was nearly six and a half feet tall and was muscled through the shoulders from working on his dad's farm all his life. Catherine was a waif by comparison, but the whole group had seen her put people twice her size on their asses more than once, and we felt confident that the two of them could keep him from getting crazy.
Nodding, we broke and told him he could ride in the back as long as he could give us directions.
He introduced himself as Steve and took his seat graciously before telling Clyde to hop on the main road and head out of town.
We rode in silence past the town sign, the silence getting awkward until Tobias couldn't take it anymore.
"So I don't think I've ever been to Habersham Cemetery. What's the deal with it?"
"Habersham Cemetery is beautiful, but it's been kind of lost to time," Steve explained, "It was owned by the old Habersham family. They were dancers, did you know that? Their whole family was involved in the theater in one way or another, until one day their blood line just sort of dried up. When I was in high school, my friends and I would go there to hang out a lot. My friend Trevor had discovered it as a kid, and we used to get drunk and smoke there whenever we could all get together. It sounds weird, but that's where I got my first kiss, took my first drink, and the place I have the happiest memories of."
"Why aren't these friends going with you, then?" Asked Cat, her tone not really accusing but more curious than anything.
"Oh, they just don't really hang out with me anymore. People get older, and they kind of drift apart. Life happens, and people grow separate. You guys will figure that out someday."
At the time, I remembered thinking this wouldn't happen to us, but everyone knows how that usually works out.
For the moment, we were on an adventure, and that was what was important.
Steve bumped Clyde's headrest softly, pointing towards an access road as it swam into his headlights and told him to take it.
"It's at the end of the access road. It should only take about ten minutes to get there from here."
I checked my watch and saw that it was pushing eleven. We should make it in plenty of time, but I hoped this wasn't just a creative means to lure us into the woods. The guy seemed at ease as he sat between Catherine and Tobias, but some people could turn on a dime like that. He could be a quiet little mouse until he transformed into a lion and stabbed us all to death.
The trees slid by in the soupy glass of Clyde's windshield, and as we came to a cul-de-sac at the end of the access road, Clyde slowed down and stopped in the middle. The area was open, carved out, and rolled smooth as they prepared to raise new houses here. At the moment, the pristine land just looked barren and lonely, and Clyde looked back at Steve to make sure this was the place.
"It's in the woods behind this. Come on," he said, looking at his bookends to see who would get out first.
Tobias climbed out first, and Steve followed him as Clyde turned off the jeep and killed the headlights.
It was dark, the moon little more than a sliver tonight, but luckily, Clyde had some flashlights in the back. Steve had his own headlamp in his back pocket, and as we dug out the lights, he slid it on and waited for us to get ready. Margo had sobered up a little and was complaining how she didn't want to go tromping out into the woods at night. We debated just leaving her there, but as Clyde slid an arm around her, she perked up and prepared to head into the trees with him.
Margo had a pretty obvious crush on Clyde, but she seemed the only one who hadn't guessed that Tobias would have been more Clyde's speed.
The only one who might have been more surprised to learn it was Clyde himself.
Steve headed off into the woods as we checked out lights, his headlamp bobbing between the scrubby trees surrounding the flat and unnatural landscape. He called back to us, telling us to get the lead out if we wanted to see it, and we came along with our flashlights bobbing and Margo swaying as Clyde tried manfully to keep her upright.
The night sounds around us seemed way louder than they ever had in the city. The crickets chirped and reeee'd happily, the bats tittered and flapped overhead, the frogs sounded off in the depths of the wood, and as the wind rustled, it sounded like the trees themselves were welcoming us. The leaves of last year rattled skeletally on the branches as they chimed in the winter, and the deeper in we went, the lonelier this place seemed.
It felt like we had entered a graveyard long before I saw the crumbly stone and iron wall surrounding it.
"Welcome to Habersham Cemetery." Steve said grandly, "Here lies the entirety of the Habersham line, save for the last two generations who are buried in Mount Christos. I've spent some of the best times of my life here, times I'll never recapture again."
He checked his watch and beckoned us inside. Someone had set a couch under an overhang of trees, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew who it was. Margo flopped onto the old couch, sending up a cloud of dust and dead leaves, and Tobias sat gingerly beside her as he tested the old couch for bugs or rats. Clyde leaned against a gravestone, and Cat hopped up on a stone marker as big as a coffee table. Steve was looking out towards the middle, an area without markers that seemed marred by a few hasty little hillocks. I wondered again if this was the place he meant to kill us? Maybe bury us in this long-forgotten graveyard? I doubted it, but it was a thought that wouldn't quite leave.
I pushed it aside and went to stand near him, curious about why we were here at all?
"Your van didn't get towed, did it?" I asked.
I expected he would lie, but he surprised me with his candor.
"I wasn't very smooth with that one, was I? No, the truth is, I usually ask someone to take me out here. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes, it's a stranger, and sometimes I end up walking. Make no mistake, though, I end up in this cemetery before midnight every year."
"And how many Halloweens has that been?"
He seemed to consider, but I didn't think he had to think very hard about it, "About eleven, I think maybe this one will be number twelve."
"And why is this important enough to walk to every Halloween?"
I had gotten past the idea that he meant to kill us, but I was still curious about the locale and the reason for coming here.
Surely we weren't really going to see corpses dance out here.
"Well, I think I've got time for a story. You see, I used to come out here when I was in middle school with my friends. Davey had found the place, and when he showed Heather, Mark, and I, we thought it was about the coolest place ever. We brought Sandra out there when she and Mark met in high school; by that point, it was our regular hang-out spot. We used to come out here every Halloween, tell scary stories, eat candy, drink beer, and just relax. I had my first time on that grave marker your friend is sitting on," he said, pointing at Cat, "and afterward, I looked at Heather and knew that she was the only girl I ever wanted to be with."
He looked wistfully out at the little hillocks, and I realized that there were four of them out there.
The thought piqued my curiosity, but it also rekindled a little of my mistrust.
"Then, one night, I messed it all up."
An alarm went off on his watch, and he looked down as he wrung his hands, "Any minute now."
He watched the mounds in the middle of the boneyard, continuing his story as he waited for the show to begin.
"We were coming back from a show one night, all of us drunk or stoned or some combination of the two. A deer ran out in front of my van, and I swerved to miss it. The van skidded, and I went off into the ravine. It wasn't very deep, but I think I was the only one wearing a seatbelt. My friends bounced around in the van like popcorn. When we came to rest at the bottom, I slipped off for a while, and when I came to, three of them were already dead. I sometimes wish that Heather had been one of them, but it did mean that I got to say goodbye."
I heard something rustle out in the graveyard and looked at the four mounds that Steve was marking so attentively.
"I had a burn on the side of my face from something, I was never quite sure what, but it was bad enough that I’d never forget it. As bad as it was, though, Heather was worse. She was beaten all to hell, laying on what would have been the ceiling and pulling in breaths like she had broken ribs, and they were in her lung. She was looking at me, and when I saw her, I unclipped my seatbelt and fell to my knees beside her. Despite her protest, I pulled her on my lap, and as she lay dying in my arms, I could hear her whispering something again and again. I leaned in close, just as the blue and white lights reflected inside the van, and she whispered her quest one final time before passing on."
I hardly heard him as he laid it all out. The earth around the mounds had begun to shift, the earth running in rivulets off. A dark finger had wormed its way from the closest grave, and an arm was itching out to join it. The top of a head appeared from the ground, and the blonde hair was ragged, like old yarn. Steve grinned as he looked at the face below that hair, sniffing a little as she pulled herself free, revealing a corpse in a black dress. The other three wore formalwear, suits, or dresses that looked like they'd never seen more than a week above ground. I took a step away, feeling like someone stuck in a George Romero film as I watched them shuffle about like sleepwalkers.
"What the hell?" I asked, and Cat squeaked in uncharacteristic fear as she nearly tumbled off the marker stone.
Clyde had taken a step towards them, Margo clutching at his arm as she screamed like a fire alarm. Clyde was clutching at something as Margo clutched at him, and I could see that it was a jagged piece of gravestone. Steve stepped in front of him, waving his arms as he begged him not to hurt them.
"They won't hurt anyone. They never hurt anyone. Just watch."
As if they had only been waiting for him to speak, all four took up poses and began to rotate in a slow circle. They moved to a tune that only they could hear, and they turned and moved like dancers caught in a familiar bit of choreography. They were helpless, moved by something unearthly, and their dance was turned into something grotesque as I noticed their injuries. Their clothes hid the bones that must be poking through their skin, but I could clearly see that one of the boys, a big blonde with football player shoulders, had a broken leg that he was dancing on headlessly. One of the girls had a head that looked mushy, and the one who had come out first had a head that seemed to bob on a neck that would no longer support her. The four moved with graceless precision, spinning as they moved in a circle, grasping hands as they came together in the center.
"What the hell is this?" Tobias asked, sounding angry as he got off the couch and walked towards Steve.
"Dancing corpses," Steve said, "just as I told you."
"Yeah," Clyde said, "but we didn't expect to actually see them. We thought…we thought,"
"Thought what? That I was putting you on? That I was just messing with a group of kids? That I meant to drag you out here so I could kill or rob you? Then why did you come out here? Why would you come out here with a complete stranger if you didn't believe in what he was saying?"
We couldn't really argue with him; he was right. We had gone into the woods with a perfect stranger, and for what? Had any of us really believed that we would see dancing corpses? We knew that such things didn't really happen, but here we were, watching four rotting corpses dance like tired ballet performers. Clyde went back to the couch, Margo clutching his arm, and we all sat in rapture as we watched their strange performance.
As they turned and moved, I could see that Steve had eyes only for the one with the broken neck. He followed her as she spun, smiling whenever her eyes happened upon his. It was hard not to imagine that her rotten lips twisted a little in pleasure, and I felt like I already knew who she was before I asked.
"Heather?" I asked, but he put a hand up to stop me.
"After. After the dance is over, I will finish the story. For now, just let me watch."
I nodded, turning back to see the corpses leaping like deer, their legs groaning in agony as their bones tried to hold them up. Suddenly, there were others in the old boneyard. Alabaster spirits, their bodies too decomposed to rise and dance, spun about the shambling dancers. Their movements were expert, their bright leotards and costumes from a thousand different performances, and they complimented the dancing bodies expertly. The dance was one they knew, a dance they had danced for generations, and as his watch beeped again, all the dancers suddenly stopped and turned to look at us. It was strange having the eyes of the living dead on you, and as they all bowed politely, the ghosts began dissipating in a shower of stars.
The four corpses, however, simply fell to the ground and moved no more.
"Shame it only lasts for fifteen minutes." Steve sighed.
"Okay, I waited till the end of the dance. Now, how about you fill me in on the rest," I said, my curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sure," Steve said, "but first, I need to put my old friends to bed."
He went into the woods and came back with four shovels.
"It'll go faster if you help me, but I understand if you'd rather not."
I took the offered shovel, and Clyde reached for one as well. Tobias took some coaxing, but he finally grabbed the other when Catherine sighed and went to take it. Margo just sat on the couch, her eyes closed and her breathing gentle. Clyde told us that it had all been a little too much for her, and he'd watched her faint just as the dead people started their dance. Cat came over to help us anyway, and as we worked, Steve finished his story, bringing the others up to speed before continuing.
"Heather said she wanted to be buried here, but it wasn't the first time she had asked it. We were in the graveyard on the last Halloween of her life, watching the ghosts dance and twirl when she asked me to bury her here when she died. I looked at her oddly, asking why she would want to be buried here, and she told me that she liked the idea of dancing with all the ghosts once a year. "Coming back once a year to dance with all my friends sounds like a wonderful way to spend my death." The others must have heard her because they decided they wanted to be buried here too. By the end of the night, all of us had made a pact. We would all make sure we were buried here, the last one alive making sure that the rest were buried here, one way or another."
He rubbed the sweat off his forehead, climbing out of the hole as he prepared to put his friend back into it.
"None of them thought they'd have to make good on that pact less than a year later. No teenager whose barely into their senior year thinks about their death as more than a distant idea. And suddenly, it fell to me to make sure their wishes were honored. Their parents wouldn't hear a word I had to say. They blamed me for their children's deaths, I was drunk when we crashed, and I was barred from their funerals. I didn't know how I was going to do it, but I knew that if I ever wanted to see Heather again, I would need to fulfill my promise to them."
"You didn't?" I said, kind of wishing I hadn't asked.
"Fortunately, they were buried in two different cemeteries. If I'd spent twelve hours in one cemetery, someone would have caught me for sure. Heather came first, then Mark, then I got Davey and Sandra from the Presbyterian church just as the sun came up. I had borrowed my dad's truck and parked right around where your friend had parked his jeep. I brought them out here, one at a time, and buried them in the place they loved so much. I put them to rest where I knew they could rest easy, and when it was all done, I washed the evidence out of dads truck and parked it right back where he'd left it. The police came to question me, of course, but I was careful not to let anyone see me enter or leave the cemetery or leave any evidence behind. In the end, they had to let me go, and I marked the days until Halloween."
He lifted Heather into his arms, looking at her rotting face with love.
"The first time I saw her dance, I was nearly scared shitless. I was out here drinking, keeping up the tradition that we had always held, but I don’t think I actually thought they would dance. They weren’t Habersham’s, and I would see nothing but the usual spooks as they capered. When they all drug themselves up, I spilled my beer and thought they had come to get me for disturbing their graves. When they began to dance, I was so happy. I felt that happiness falter, though, when I realized what it meant."
He laid her in the ground again, and as he began to cover her with soil, he looked back with the saddest smile I'd ever seen.
"It meant that there was no one to lay me to rest in the cemetery when my time came. I'll never dance with her, never be with her again unless I have the courage to bury myself alive when the time comes."
We were all gathered around the last grave, all of us beside Margo, and as he came out of the hole, he thanked us for helping him.
"Normally, I'd offer you a beer, but I'm afraid I forgot to buy any this time."
Clyde told him he thought it might be time for him to take Margo home, and Tobias said he needed to get home for chores the next day. Clyde had Margo over one shoulder, still snoring happily, and I saw Cat slide her hand into Tobias’s as they left. I asked Steve if he needed a ride, but he just shook his head as he leaned on his shovel.
"I think I'll stay for a little while longer. I prefer to spend Halloween with my friends, and I think we have some catching up to do."
We saw Steve a few more times over the years, and, unfortunately, his prediction had been true. Tobias and Catherine dated until college, when they both got accepted to separate schools. Clyde and Margo were an item for a while, mostly to get his strictly religious parents off his back, until he finally came out and moved to the midwest somewhere with his secret boyfriend. I got tired of being used as a shoulder to cry on by Margo and decided to go to college in the next state. I kept in touch with all of them, but we were never together again as we were in High School.
Ten years after I'd seen the dancing ghosts, I happened to be home for Halloween. I decided it might be nice to see it again. Maybe I wanted to prove that I'd actually seen it. Maybe I just wanted to make sure the old place was still there. Maybe I just wanted to see Steve again. Whatever the reason, I found myself pulling up into the cul-de-sac at about eleven o'clock that night, locking my car as I walked into the woods. The area had grown back up, the lots that had been cleared never being used. I had thought it might be hard to find the second time, but the trees looked exactly as I remembered them. When the gates loomed up, I saw they hadn't changed a bit, and I could already see the sagging old couch as it sat beside the fence. I expected that Steve would come wandering up at any minute, but as the time ticked closer to midnight, I figured this was one performance he would be missing.
As I sat watching from the couch, my watch chimed midnight, and the earth began to stir.
The original four corpses were still, but they were mostly skeletons now. Their bones were broken and cracked, but they still danced as they had on that night a decade ago. They groaned and creaked as they danced and spun, but the corpse who crawled out of Heather's grave looked a little fresher. He was wearing the same black vest I'd seen him in that night, and though dirty, I could still make out some of the band patches.
The ghosts joined them, and I marveled once again at the intricate dance they moved within.
I didn’t know how long he’d been there, but it appeared that Steve had found the courage he talked about to stay with the woman he loved.
When they flopped to the ground, I got up and found the shovel.
It appeared they would need someone else to lay them to rest this year.
I wondered who would put them to ground next year or whether they would simply bake in the sun the day after their performance?
I think that may have been the night I decided to move back to my hometown. I could do worse than teach English at my old highschool, drink coffee at the old coffee shop, and watch the corpses dance on Halloween. Who knows, maybe I’ll even find some teenagers to invite out here one night so they can have something to remember when their highschool days are behind them.
Maybe they too will come back to see one last performance by the Habersham Dancers plus five.