The hike was instantly, lung-breakingly uphill. I huffed and puffed and had to remove my jacket because I was starting to sweat profusely. Yet somehow the geriatric, cancer victim who ascended the peak with me didn’t seem to be phased until he accidently dropped his Copenhagen over a ledge.
“You ever hear of Ezra’s ghost stories?” Ezra broke up the soundtrack of me wheezing and him spitting that scored the first couple hours of our hike.
“Uh, yeah.”
I had heard about Ezra’s ghost stories, but I regretably never went to one. They were always after hours at the museum and I wasn’t about staying late at work. From my understanding, they were a series at the museum where Ezra told the historical ghost stories of the era and the mines and they were actually really good.
“These hills are full of those old scary stories, you know? Some of them are downright nasty. A couple of them I even seen.”
“Really?”
“Well, the biggest of them all is where we are going?”
“The Old McCord Cemetery, I had heard a tiny bit about it before. I always heard it didn’t really exist.”
“Like hell it doesn’t exist.”
Ezra whipped a photo out of his pocket. Glossy, wrinkled and faded, I guessed the photo was probably from some time in the 70s. The photo showed a picture of a handle-bar-mustached man who bore a distinct resemblance to Ezra. The man stood in the ruins of a graveyard. Tall dead grass dotted with crumbling stones and rotten wood, the little area couldn’t have been much more than ten yards in each direction before it went right back into thick woods. It was hard to make exactly everything out the photo was so faded, except for the man’s eyes. They almost seemed to glow off the page.
