This wasn’t the story I was going to write tonight, but the night got away from me

“Sam, where are we going anyway?” Melissa asked as the blonde ghost led her towards the cemetery gates.

“I’m going to level with you, Mel,” Sam said without slowing, “I have no idea. But I’m taking you out of this place. We’ll figure it out once we’re beyond the gates.”

“Uh… okay,” Melissa said with trepidation. “Oh, look!” She tugged on Sam’s sleeve. “That’s the old guy who comes and sits by his wife’s grave,” she pointed to an elderly man in a threadbare brown tweed jacket sitting on a folding chair next to a marble headstone.

“That guy?” Sam stopped, pointing.

“Yeah,” Melissa confirmed. “Isn’t it sweet?” she swooned.

Sam gave her a look, shook her head, and started walking towards the gates again. “Mel, you’ve got a lot to learn…”

The man in the tweed jacket watched the two ghosts go and then spoke to the grave. “Did you hear that? That new ghost thinks you’re my wife!” He chuckled as a low groan rose up from the grave. Then a translucent gnarled hand reached out from the ground and the groaning rose in pitch. A second hand emerged from the grave, its long bony fingers flexing experimentally.

Before either arm rose beyond mid forearm, the old man casually reached into the paper bag next to him and tossed a handful of salt onto the grave. The salt crystals hissed as they contacted the grave while the crystals that touched the translucent hands sparked into tiny flares and the low groan turned into a shriek of pain as the two hands were pulled quickly back into the earth.

“When in fact you’re an unspeakable evil, aren’t you? As long as I’m around I’ll make sure you never escape the confines of that grave to steal any more souls, you foul revenant.”

He smiled as a little boy and his mom walked by. “Come on, Kyle,” she said to the boy. “Grandma is just over here.” The woman met the man’s eyes and smiled. “Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning,” the old man smiled back and threw another handful of salt onto the grave after they passed. A muffled shriek came from deep within the earth and he smiled more broadly.

This story was inspired by the headstone in the cemetery in Logan next to the Utah State Family Student Housing that we walked though so many days. On the back of this particular headstone was “Kay’s Fudge” recipe. So, why not a Snickerdoodle recipe?

Emma Ray had been wandering the cemetery with a scowl on her face since shortly after they lowered her casket into the earth. Specifically, since they installed her headstone.

The front of the black marble read simply:

Emma Ray Davies
April 4, 1917 – January 27, 2000
Mother, Wife, Sister, Friend

Emma Ray had no issues with this side of the headstone. It was the back that she took issue with. On the back in carefully etched letters read “Emma Ray’s Secret Snickerdoodles”. And what followed made Emma Ray’s spirit to wander the manicured lawns and carefully pruned trees of South Hill Cemetery for more than twenty years:

1 c butter
¾ c sugar
½ c light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tbs vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tartar
½ tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
2¾ c flour

Cinnamon Sugar Mixture
¼ c sugar
1 tbs cinnamon

Preheat to 325°F
Mix the butter, sugar, and brown sugar on medium until light and fluffy, 2-3 minutes.
Add egg, the yolk, vanilla, baking soda, cream of tartar, salt, and cinnamon and mix for 1 minute.
Add flour on low until just combined.
Roll 2 tbs balls in cinnamon sugar.

Bake for 12-15 minutes.

For a time she tried to ignore it. She would only look at the front of the headstone and try to focus on the “Mother, Wife, Sister, Friend” and think of those she loved and she knew loved her. But she kept coming back to “Sister” and then furor would rise and she would have to terrify a groundskeeper or petrify teenagers smoking pot in a corner of the cemetery. And when she was angry, she didn’t care that she was often visible. “Let them see me, let them know my anger!” she thought. “I will have my reckoning!”

Twenty-two long years she haunted the cemetery and terrorized visitors and employees alike. Every funeral gathering would feel a cold wind blow as her spirit swept through checking to see who was being interred. Finally, the moment she had waited for arrived: her sister, Mary, died peacefully in her sleep. The following Saturday a beautiful funeral took place at the Methodist church before the Cadillac hearse from Abbott and Abbott mortuary bore her oak and brass coffin through the wrought iron gates and into South Hill Cemetery.

Emma Ray knew immediately.

As the graveside ceremony drew to a close and the mourners dropped fistfuls of dirt on the lowered casket, Emma Ray stood patiently among the copse of birch trees. She watched as her niece, Rebecca, smiled sadly at the gravesite, climbed in the passenger seat of her car as her husband drove them away. Emma Ray looked on as the maintenance workers filled in the grave and replaced the sod on top. Finally they, too, left and in the waning afternoon light Mary Lifson’s grave sat quietly as the wind whispered the birch leaves.

Mary walked up to her grave and looked at the temporary grave marker and sighed, a million bittersweet thoughts racing through her incorporeal mind. So consumed with her melancholy that she leapt when she heard the words spoke behind her.

“Mary Elizabeth Taylor, you witch!”

Mary spun and saw Emma Ray’s ghost coming at her hands out reaching for her throat. Out of instinct she put up her hands to fend off the attacker. “Emma Ray? What are you doing?!”

“I’m going to carry you to hell myself!”

Emma Ray clawed at Mary who swatted her sister’s arms and hands away. “Why are you doing this?”

“You know, witch!”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Mary yelled as she fought off Emma Ray. She managed to put a few feet between them and they both stood panting in the growing twilight. “What has gotten into you?!”

“That!” she pointed towards her headstone.

“What?” Mary asked confused.

Emma Ray stalked over and roughly took Mary’s arm and they both appeared directly in front of Emma Ray’s headstone. “This… this… travesty!”

“Don’t you think it’s lovely?” she asked confused. “Trevor liked the black marble – said you’d picked it out yourself. And the inscription is simple, too. What’s got you upset?”

Emma Ray touched Mary’s arm again and now they stood behind the headstone staring at the recipe. “How dare you put my secret Snickerdoodle recipe on here!”

“Oh!” Mary let out a little laugh. “That? That’s what you’re upset about?”

Emma Ray fumed. Her eyes turned dark and she literally hovered off the ground.

“Okay, okay,” Mary held out her hands palms out. “Yes, I see this is what you’re upset about.”

“I’ve waited twenty-two years until you died so I could get even with you for this!”

“For putting the recipe on there?”

“First,” Emma Ray said, “This carving must have cost a fortune – probably more than the grave itself!”

“It wasn’t cheap,” Mary admitted. “But your girls thought it was a great idea.”

“Don’t you bring them into this!”

“Emma Ray,” Mary chided, “They were as much a part of the decision making here as I was.”

“Fine!” she spat. “Worst of all, you got the recipe wrong!”

“Ah,” Mary smiled.

“You left out the extra egg yolk! And ‘12-15 minutes?’ They’ll be raw or hard as a rock! 11 minutes exactly! EXACTLY! And without that extra yolk…”

“Without that extra yolk they’re not exactly your cookies,” Mary finished.

“Exactly!” Emma Ray exclaimed, then said, “Wait, what?”

Mary smiled at her sister, “Oh Emma Ray, do you think I would really get your secret Snickerdoodle recipe wrong?”

“But it’s wrong right there!”

“Yes, it is. And now when anyone takes this recipe and tries to replicate your famous secret Snickerdoodles they’re going to be close… but not exactly your Snickerdoodles!”

“I…I…” Emma Ray stammered.

“I’ve seen it, Emma Ray,” Mary said moving close to her sister and putting an arm around her. “’These are good,’ they’d say, ‘But they’re not quite Emma Ray’s. No one makes ‘em like Emma Ray made ‘em.”

Tears welled up in Emma Ray’s eyes.

Mary pulled her sister close. “And, Emma Ray, no one will. And they won’t forget it. Or you.”

About a week ago I was in the kitchen making dinner. I heard Andy’s key rattling in the front door lock, then the signature squeak of the front door opening followed by Andy calling, “Hey babe!”

“Hey Sweetie,” I called back. “I’m in the kitchen,” I said but got no response. I thought it was odd he wouldn’t have come into the kitchen – he normally does and gives me a quick kiss, it’s just our pattern. But I was busy sautéing some vegetables and figured he’d come into the kitchen when he was ready. But he didn’t. Ten minutes later I heard the front door lock rattling and the signature squeak of the front door followed by Andy calling, “Hey babe!”

“I’m still in the kitchen,” I said with possibly a little irritation in my voice.

Andy came in and gave me a quick kiss. “What do you mean ‘still’ in the kitchen?” he asked.

“I told you I was here when you got home ten minutes ago. Did you go back out?”

Andy looked at me quizzically. “I just got home,” he said.

“Right, but you came in ten minutes ago, too.”

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I literally just came in a moment ago.”

I chalked it up to my mind playing tricks on me until the next day. We were going out to dinner and I was doing my makeup ahead of Andy getting home. I heard the lock rattle followed by the door squeak and “Hey babe!”

“I’m doing my makeup,” I called back. But when I didn’t hear anything else from him I wondered if this was the same thing I experienced the day before. I waited, and ten minutes later the lock rattled again, door squeak, “Hey Babe,” and Andy came in the room and kissed me.

“It happened again,” I said.

“What happened again?”

“I heard you come in ten minutes ago.”

“But I just came in now…”

“I know,” I said, “but it’s like I told you yesterday – I heard you come in earlier and you weren’t here.”

Realization finally dawned on his face. “Oh! This is a case of Vardøger.”

“Var what?”

“It’s a phenomenon where you hear someone or something before it actually happens. It’s like a physical manifestation of Déjà vu.”

That made sense. And it was good to have a name for it, too, because it was a regular occurrence. Every day for a month I’d hear Andy come home and shout “Hey babe” ten minutes before he actually came home and actually called “Hey babe!” It got to the point where I stopped replying to the initial “Hey babe!” knowing it wasn’t actually him.

Until the time it didn’t happen.

I heard the lock rattle, heard the door creak, heard “Hey babe!” and didn’t respond. A moment later Andy walked in, gave me a quick kiss, and asked, “Are you okay?” as I stared at him confused.

“You’re here.”

“Vardøger?”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “Today was the first time in like a month where there wasn’t Vardøger.”

“Huh,” Andy shrugged. “Maybe it’s run its course,” he said and didn’t think anything more of it. But I couldn’t let it go.

Andy was a pretty regular person in terms of when he got home, so the next day just before I had been hearing the Vardøger, I set down the bowl and whisk I had been using and went into the front room and stared at the door.

Nothing. I texted Andy, “Where are you?”

“Just getting off the subway. About ten minutes,” he wrote back almost immediately. Maybe Andy was right, I thought as I turned back to the kitchen, the phenomena had just run its course. Then I entered the kitchen and saw myself standing there whisk in hand staring back at me.