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Abdulrahman Hamadi
English 113B
Professor Batty
April, 28th, 2015
The Cemetery: A Creepy Place
A cemetery is thought to be a place full of tombs, spirits, bodies of the dead people, and
absolute silence. A cemetery is one of the last places one would wish to walk. This is due to its
frightening nature. One of the reasons why cemetery is a cemetery is so frightening is because it
is scary and evokes anxiety in people. A cemetery also symbolizes death since everyone in it is
dead. Secondly, the disposal of the dead bodies is gruesome and causes people to imagine their
own deaths. Many people are generally afraid of death and experience fear whenever they face
cemeteries.
When human beings hear of a cemetery, the first thing that comes to mind is death. Human
beings have always been afraid of death, but whether we like it or not, all of us are going to die
one time. However, human beings have always tried to avoid death (Stephens 49). A cemetery is
associated with spirits, and the spirits of the dead are thought to be present in cemeteries. In
many cases, people have heard stories where the spirits of the dead come back to haunt the
living. This evokes anxiety in many people since people think that when other people die, these
people stay dead and do not come back and try to haunt living people. In fact, if a person woke
up to find him or herself in the middle of a cemetery at midnight, he or she might just collapse
out of fear.
A cemetery is a place where the bodies of the dead people are put to rest, making it a place

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that people want to avoid because no one wants to die. If someone happens to walk through a
cemetery, he or she will definitely experience some strange feeling because a cemetery is
different than any other place. A cemetery is not where live is. A cemetery, contrarily, is where
dead people are placed, causing a feeling of fear and uneasiness when people walk through a
cemetery. This feeling is clear when a family is attending a funeral or making a tour to a historic
graveyard. People do not want to be in cemeteries, and when they go it is because there is a big
reason to go or they want to be scared.
Like I said, when people go to a cemetery on purpose, it is because they want to be scared
or frightened. Some people enjoy experiencing fear since it is an emotion that many people do
not want to experience. These people see themselves as different. Fear is a unique feeling and
can make people think or act in ways that they would not do if they were not filled with fear.
After all, a cemetery symbolizes the final resting place for many of our dead. Consequently, a
cemetery is not a place where people go very often. When people go, maybe they bring some
flowers with them, or utter a few words and cry. A cemetery is not a comfortable place to visit.
Also, in horror movies, most of the horrors take place in cemeteries. In these scary movies,
cemeteries are depicted as the extremely scary. In horror movies, cemeteries are places where the
dead arise in the form of zombies and begin to eat people. In almost all places in the world,
cemeteries are silent and solemn settings. Even when the grounds are finely trimmed or allowed
to weed, graveyards happen to be a place where the living contemplate the mysteries, traumas
and heartbreaks associated with death.
We can imagine the thought of all those decaying bodies under dirt or, even worse, the
idea of a bony arm emerging from the soil to an extent that it can grab your ankle and jerk you

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into the underworld. Some of these strange events are shown in movies; lets say in places full
of dark secrets and hidden skeletons. Horror movies depict the dead as supernatural beings who
can hurt people. In horror movies, these scary beings that arise from the dead are just fictional
and designed to make a movie scarier. However, human beings fear death. One may wonder
why human beings fear death while they spend a lot of money and time preparing to bury a dead
person by buying luxury casket, building a graveyard with walls and painting them with good
colors. Humans fear death because they do not know what is going to happen once they are
dead. Some people believe in Heaven or Hell, but no one knows for sure if these places exist.
Another reason why cemeteries are considered to be frightening is because of the disposal
of bodies. In some societies, the dead are buried. One can imagine finding a dead body eaten by
vultures which happened a lot before people realized that they need to bury the dead at least 6
feet underground. This fact only instills more fear in human beings since they see that when they
are dead that animals can attack them. If dead people were just thrown away to be feasted by
vultures, cemeteries would not scare human beings. However, the fact that the cemetery is a
sacred place set aside for burying the death creates a distance between human beings and death,
thus instilling fear in human beings (Marlene 183).
A cemetery creates a sense of supernatural power in human beings, thus provoking anxiety.
One of the most popular settings used in describing a cemetery in scary stories is darkness and
most the scary things happen at night. Normally, darkness and night represents evil and thus
using a dark or night setting to write a story about cemetery only makes them scarier. Besides
this, cemeteries are associated with scary things such as frightening voices at night, lights. For
instance, the Silver Cliff Cemetery is famously associated with dancing blue lights. The

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witnesses of these lights describe them as small and round, and sometimes they appear in other
colors apart from blue. These things associated with cemeteries make them even scarier. Some
cemeteries are also associated with crying voices at night.
One can imagine walking past a cemetery and hearing a voice crying from the cemetery in
pain. Cemeteries are associated with spirits. It is said that the spirits of the dead are always
moving around. In most cemeteries, people often visit them and leave flowers on top of the
graves (Herring, Ann, Saunders, and Boyce, 6). Other people leave drinks and food and when
they return back to find out that the food is not there and the drinks have been taken; they believe
that the spirits of the dead ate the food and the drinks. In other cases, cemeteries are associated
with ghosts.
After staying for long periods without being taken care of, the cemeteries become full of
weeds and even scarier than they are at first. Therefore, they became a place for evil to lurk. In
some countries, vampires have been associated with cemeteries. For instance, in England, the
High Gate Cemetery is considered spooky due to lack of maintenance and, in the 1970s, the High
Gate Cemetery was associated with ghosts and vampires. Cemeteries are mostly depicted as evil.
This is evident in movies and stories. Most vampire and horror movies are shot at cemeteries,
which depicts cemeteries as scary places with frightening creatures. Ghosts and vampires are
associated with death since they are either dead, like ghosts, or drink human blood, which is
considered a terrible act.
Cemeteries are supposed to be respected and avoided because of their scary nature. In the
future, there will be more cemeteries since more people will die and the old cemeteries will fill
up. This means that cemeteries will never end, and that they will always be there and human

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beings should understand and get used to them. Even in the history, cemeteries were scared
places and used to be worshiped (Hassall, Guy Vol. 18). The history of cemeteries show that the
spirits of the dead used to help people during difficulties. Anyone who was found disrespecting
the cemeteries was punished. In history, there were rules and guidelines on how to bury people in
the cemeteries. In other cases, not everyone was allowed to enter into a cemetery. Only a special
number of people who were deemed sacred were supposed to enter into the cemetery. There were
consequences of violating the rules regulating the cemeteries. The spirits of the deed were said to
attack and punish wrong doors in the society.

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Works cited
Epp, Marlene. "Purple Clematis and Yellow Pine: On Cemeteries, Irony and Difference."
Mennonite Quarterly Review 74.1 (2000): 183.
Halsall, Guy. Cemeteries and society in Merovingian Gaul: selected studies in history and
archaeology, 1992-2009. Vol. 18. Brill, 2010.
Herring, Ann, Shelley Saunders, and Gerry Boyce. "Bones and burial registers: infant mortality
in a 19th-century cemetery from Upper Canada." Northeast Historical Archaeology 20.1
(2013): 6.
Parochetti, JoAnn Stephens. "SCARY STORIES FROM PURDUEi." Keystone Folklore
Quarterly 10 (1965): 49.
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M8qoqfo&sig=1QlKnyJBixOdwYYUI7v97nY4fPA&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=cemet
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