Eerie Wail In The Graveyard

From my late childhood years to my early young adult years I used to spend most mid-to-late summers in the weekend house for rest that my maternal grandparents used to own. Their house was in Fužine, a village in Gorski kotar, a mountainous region some half hour distance from Rijeka (by car or a similar motor vehicle), a seaside town I live in. The following story happened 20 years ago, when I was a 16-year old, and yet I still remember as it all happened yesterday.

My cousin (oldest of the two sons of my maternal uncle's ex-wife), his late grandma (mother of my uncle's ex) and I went for a walk one day... Fužine is a small village, and it takes someone who travels by foot no longer than 20 minutes to reach the center, if someone wants to drink a cup of coffee or buy a newspaper or something... Halfway between my grandparents' house (sold to another owner in the meantime) and the center of the village is a graveyard, located next to a pine forest, and that day my cousin's grandma decided that we should visit the graveyard for a short time. The three of us walked around for a few minutes, reading the family names of the people buried when all of a sudden a horrible wail was heard from the forest (even now, after 20 years, I still feel shivers down my back as I write this).

The wail was so close, from behind the first few trees at the beginning of the forest. - It sounds like a crying woman - my cousin's grandma said, sounding rather calm, as I recall, and I have no idea how she felt, nor how my cousin felt (he was 4 years old at the time) but I was shaken to my core...

The three of us left quickly, a minute or two after, and as we got closer to the wrought iron gates that served as an entrance to the cemetery, we heard the loud banging of a hammer, but it turned out to be a man repairing something at the cemetery entrance or near it.

That night I slept with my maternal grandfather in his bedroom on the first floor of the summer house, located on the left side of the hallway (my late grandmother's room was on the right side, near the built-in wardrobe closet), and my grandpa said to my folks the next day that I was muttering something in my sleep sometimes during the night...