This story is not mine; it was related to me by Mark, a friend, just after it happened.
Mark was the keyboard player in a local band... Still plays professionally, in fact, these days with his own group. This was nineteen seventy-five, when Mark, all of us, were still young men, energetic, looking for fun and adventure... Perhaps just not of this sort.
It was a wet, rainy summer afternoon, and Mark was driving down Ridge Street in Elyria, a town about ten miles south of Lorain. In the car with him were three other band members, one at shotgun, the other two in the back seat of the '62 Thunderbird. They were on their way to a friend's house, to pick up some equipment.
To their left, as they approached the intersection, was Ridgelawn Cemetery, its iron gates looming black against the gray backdrop of the sky. Back in the Fifties, so my mother had told me, Ridgelawn was the scene of weird occurrences, where a strange woman would signal taxicabs before the gates on rainy afternoons and evenings, only to vanish after going a few blocks.
The light was against them, and the guys found themselves stopped at the intersection. As the light cycled to yellow, Mark noticed a figure by the gates, a woman clad in black, staring at the car, her eyes burning even at that distance. As the light hit green, Mark hit the gas.
The woman was suddenly gone... And just as suddenly, INSIDE THE CAR! Sitting in the rear, between the bass player and guitar man, her face pale, and drawn, her green eyes blazing and hypnotic.
Mark said he didn't remember driving out of the city, nor did the other three men. Yet, that's where they found themselves about fifteen minutes later, about eight miles outside of town, sitting in the driveway of a dilapidated, vacant house, their eerie passenger nowhere in sight. They hurried back onto the road and headed home, their errand forgotten for the moment.
For a long time after that, you couldn't pay Mark to drive past Ridgelawn.
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