The Cemetery behind the old orphanage out on Hill Road is haunted. Everybody knows it, everybody has heard the grisly stories of kids who stay there at night and were never the same or the ones who never returned, and tonight we will hear the tale of Beatrice and Lizzie, two best friends who have decided to “put the rumors to rest”.

You see Beatrice believes in the supernatural, but only in the way, that science creates unexplainable phenomena all around the world. She believes the supernatural is just a predisposed belief from when we were still new to this world and the things around us made no logical sense; so we created these ideas of spectral beings, lost loved ones still being around once they are gone, and they stuck within us. Science is the only truth of anything “supernatural” in the world. Beatrice came to these conclusions when she was just eight years old after telling her father that Santa Claus did not exist, you see she has always been a logical child and refused to accept anything illogical, such as a magical man sliding down a chimney with a bag of presents.

Lizzie on the other hand is just one of those people who only believes in what she can see, what can be proven with cold hard facts and evidence. If she were to believe in something as silly as a ghost story about an old cemetery when there is no definitive proof of such things as these entities, then that would be almost as bad as someone believing in a Unicorn just because there are an exuberant amount of books and movies about them. Everyone swears they must be real because their father, their brother, their mother, their aunt, or their great great grandmother Sylvia said so, which without any proof is just too illogical and highly improbable.

To enter the cemetery you have to climb over the gate to the compound as it was locked a few years back when a boy was found overdosed on the lawn of the orphanage. Once you climb over the gate you will see what’s left of the Orphanage. Silver Orphanage was built in 1853, to a Mr. and Mrs. Whitelock. The Whitelocks ran the orphanage until 1889 when they handed it over to their twenty-two-year-old daughter Diedra. Diedra was born in 1867 and had been raised in the orphanage around the other Children at the time. Diedra was never a very nice girl, when she was twelve there were stories of neighborhood animals going missing and turning back up the next day with their throats cut and eyes gouged out. No one could ever prove Diedra had done this, but everyone knew it was her… just by the look in her eyes they could tell there was something wrong with “that girl”.

Diedra took over the orphanage from her parents and within five years 13 of the original 47 children kept in this once loved home for the lost had disappeared. Diedra claimed they had all been adopted out, but the children had much more chilling tales to tell. The children told of a monster that came in the night and snatched away the others one at a time when they had been bad and angered Mistress Diedra; it was a monster that took them and put them in the cemetery out back. A cemetery hidden from the public as a personal place for these lost children to rest after the monster had gouged out their eyeballs and slit their throats to drink the blood; there was even a rumor she would bring these bodies back into the rooms of the other orphans and show them what this “monster” did to children who didn’t listen. Due to the scarring stories the orphans shared, the local sheriff began an investigation in the summer of 1894, but could never figure out where this secret cemetery was hidden. After that summer Diedra stopped allowing the children to go out of the Orphanage, and more children continued to disappear. New children continued to replace the ones lost, and it wasn’t until Howie, one of the youngest orphans under Diedra’s care, in the year 1991 came to Sheriff Connor that Diedra was caught. Howie had walked down the streets of the town screaming and crying for help until one of the neighbors had finally woken and heard him. Howie was a mess he was covered in blood and missing his eyeballs, he told Mr. Jones (the man who found him) that the monster had taken them away for his disobeying orders, but then it took him into the woods towards the “secret” cemetery and he heard weird noises coming from where it sat so he ran. Howie was only ten years old. Once Diedra was arrested the children showed the police where the cemetery was hidden, and to remind them of the horrors that had happened within their town they burned down the forest surrounding Diedras secrets and left it.

And so we start our tale on Halloween night, with two girls who are ready to discredit the story everyone in the town so loves to tell. Beatrice brought along many of her favorite instruments, in a backpack so heavy she has to almost drag her body to keep it moving, to help prove how scientific phenomena are the only answer to these stories of ghosts within the cemetery of Silver Orphanage. Lizzie brought a much simpler bag of supplies: a camera for photo/video evidence, a file on the true history of the Orphanage which is what she felt inspired these stories to begin with, a flashlight, and most importantly to her a pen and notebook to take detailed notes of everything that happens on their stay in the graveyard.

What neither of these girls seems to have thought of were sleeping bags, blankets, or anything really for sleep as if they subconsciously knew they wouldn’t be sleeping.

The girls carefully climbed over the fence and down the other side, both slipping their bags underneath before climbing, and looked at the crumbling remains of the town’s oldest building. Silver Orphanage somehow still stands with its brick and stone facade. No one has entered that building in years, it’s as if Diedra’s mark on it will never go away. Both girls shivered slightly looking at it. Walking behind the large building they can see the beginning of the charred remains of the once large forest that claimed the back half of the property. Walking about a mile or two into this is where the girls found the cemetery. The cemetery was more of a cleared area with only a few of the wooden crosses remaining intact. The people had at one point petitioned to have real headstones put in in remembrance of the children, but the Mayor said it wasn’t in the budget.

It was only a little past two hours since the girls had left their houses and set out for the cemetery. The sun hadn’t fully set in the west yet when they climbed the fence, and they still had about fifteen minutes before it was completely dark out. Pulling out her gadgets and things Beatrice set up all of it in the middle of the cemetery. Lizzie began taking her notes and a few photographs of the cemetery before the sun had fully set.

The girls sat, stood, whispered, and waited in that cemetery for hours before something finally happened. At exactly 2 a.m. on that Halloween night, Lizzie and Beatrice found out just how real ghosts could be. You see they met Tyson, someone who was only mentioned loosely in the history of the Orphanage. At 2:15 a.m. two girls came running from the direction of the old cemetery. Beatrice was missing her eyeballs and Lizzie was covered in her blood. When the police asked the girls what had happened they told them the monster came for them while they were at the cemetery on Hill Road.

Tyson was Diedra’s older brother and had never been seen outside of the Orphanage walls. Tyson had a congenital malformation; parents and children in the town were scared of Tyson, even calling him a monster for something that he couldn’t control. The way the town treated Tyson had resulted in anger, and he took it out on their animals. His parent’s got much more strict with him after that and he was kept locked in his room most of the time. Once Diedra took over she tried to give him more freedom until her children began to turn up missing, but by then it was too late; Tyson was constantly figuring out new ways to slip out.

It turns out Tyson was the monster the children feared, and Diedra, just as her parents had before her, had spent her life trying to protect him. When Tyson took Howie I suppose it was the final straw for Diedra, and she killed Tyson and buried him in a shallow grave next to the cemetery before the police came back with the boy.