Haunted Funerals

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)><em>The living aren't the only ones listening.</em></strong></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>People think cemeteries are quiet. They aren't. Not the old ones. Not the kind with crooked stones and names worn thin by weather and grief. They hum they breathe they watch. After a decade tending the dead the sounds have stitched themselves into me-roots rubbing bones frost shifting in the dirt whispers caught in the cedars.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>It was supposed to be just another burial. Another evening alone with a backhoe and the wind. But this time the dark spoke back.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>At first it was only light-small pulsing wounds in the night air circling the open grave like curious birds. Then the air went marrow-cold the ground shifted and I felt a hand-cold as river stone-close around my ankle.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)>Now I know the stories aren't stories. The dead aren't quiet. And the thing in the graveyard isn't finished with me yet...</span></p><p></p><p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(15 17 17 1)><em>Read this story and numerous others included in Haunted Funerals.</em></strong></p><p></p>