There was a small cemetery outside of Austin, past Oak Hill, that lay beside a small white dirt road off Circle Drive, it was very old.I believe it was named Oliver Cemetery. There was an old white ranch house with horses next to it.My friend and I had been riding around the back roads of Oak Hill, and were getting high and feeling very care free, when we found a road called " Oliver Cemetery Road", and decided to investigate. Or rather, i did she only went down it because i wanted to seethe tombstones and make "etchings" with a pencil and paper by holding the paper against the grave marker, and rubbing it with the pencil.We got out of the car, and i made a few etchings, but they didn't turn out very well, the tombstones were easily over a hundred years old and had been deteriorating, covered with green mold. So many were of children' s graves, life was hard on the prairie back then, and children often did not make it to 10 year sold.It was sad and October and weirdly creepy, and the horses peered over the fence to watch us, so we went to the car to finish smoking our joint...about half way thru it, the sun started to set and we went for a little walk to see the horses again and perhaps give them some of our picnic basket sandwich crusts. The horses were gone, the wind started to blow, and a dark cloud flew low over us.The sun had just set, and everything was in a grey-bluish light, the headstones almost glowing in the diffused unearthly twilight.We were finishing up the roach in the ashtray, when night fell all at once and we joked around, that's weird and stuff, woohaha and all that. As we made spooky noises and played, the thickest fog i had ever seen in my life just rolled in and made billowing swirls around the car, enveloping it completely. This fog wasn't like the kind you see normally in Central Texas or Houston or even Louisiana, it was like the kind i remember my grandfather describing in England in WWII as he fished dead bodies out of the Atlantic. The Cemetery was at the bottom of a bowel-shaped depression, and the fog hovered and swirled. We could see nothing beyond it, a deathly white. I fancied seeing shapes in it, skulls and faces and flitting around, when i looked to her ashen face, white as the impenetrable fog, and she was shaking.Quickly i recalled my Aunt and Mothers cemetery advice " If you become frightened in graveyard at night, never tell your companion how scared you are, for if they are also afraid your fear will double and you will both panic and then something could happen."I didn't want 'something to happen', so I just asked her simply and gently as possible, "Are you ready to go?" " Uh-hhh huh-hh-h-h..." and she turned the key to the ignition.
Thank God, it started!
I just knew the zombies were about to break the windows and pull us out screaming into that evil mist.
The sensation of Evil was palpable in the air, it was as thick as that cursed fog.
Thenext day, we were talking about how the horses seem to know something was going on, when we read in the paper about a horriblecase of satanic ritual abuse at preschool in Oak Hill. The children had been taken to that cemetery as part of the rituals they had performed, and it turns out there had been a coven holding black mass there for years.
-shivers-
ihave a link to the story in texas monthly about the criminal case of the daycare facility, but hesitate to place it here- if you arefamiliar with Operation Monarch, then you have my utmost sympathy. God bless you and remove your sorrows.
if you wish to have your nightmares, then i will send you the link. I don't recommend reading it.
postscript: We encountered this same fog lost as sin on hwy route 6 in east Texas. It was pea-soup thick, and we were so completely lost around Beaumont. As we panicked, the radio started playing this eerie church bell music, except it was without melody, and my friend began to scream turn it off. I had a premonition, and leaned forward to the radio. i tried change the station, punching each button so hard it hurt my finger. This was an old radio with mechanical preset buttons. It was on every channel. I tried the volume, but it stayed a constant atonal ringing of deadly chimes. at last, turning grim, i hit the am/fm button. we were on a lower frequency than those. finally i tried to turn the damn thing off, but it played on insolently mocking alien cathedral chamber "music". I knew what we were listening to, men describe hearing them on the battlefield before they die. It was The Bells Of Doom. Again remembering my Mother's sage advice, as my ex began screaming for me to turn it off, I pretended to be angry with her and growled, " Be quiet, Ilike it." She glared at me but i think she knew that i was just bluffing and scared shitless, so she didn't ask any more questions which was good, because i would have hated to tell her that i thought we were going to die .
Eventually we pulled over and the rain came and washed away the fog( as well as the bells), and we left in the pouring rain, so glad to leave the strange pocket dimension we had struggled with.
We found our way back to the hwy and were so glad to have made it home alive.
