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.

Almost done with my crazy work schedule!

“Hey,” I started the conversation casually. “If you hang around cemeteries as much as you are people are going to start thinking you’re a ghost!” I gave a mock laugh at the end.

The woman stared at me as if I had a second head. Then she said slowly, as if I were a child, “Yes… that’s because I am a ghost…”

I sighed. “Yeah, I know. I am too… ghost to ghost…. Kinda obvious… that was the joke – get it? I know you’re a ghost and I’m joking about you being… you know, nevermind,” I gave a dismissive wave of my hand. “They say explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog – you can learn parts and label them but you still have a dead frog. Or two dead women…” The woman just gaped at me, so I just plowed on.  “Seriously, though, why are you hanging around here so much? It’s depressing…”

“I’m sorry,” she shook her head. “Who are you?”

“Sam. Well, Samantha, but everyone calls me Sam.”

“There’s others?”

“Ghosts? Oh yeah, but most of them don’t actually say anything. Mostly just,” I let my face go slack and held my arms out in front of me and took several stiff steps. “You know, they’re not all there.”

“I don’t know. You’re the first ghost I’ve talked to.”

“I can tell,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because – and this brings us back around to the beginning of our conversation – all you do is hang around a cemetery!”

“But…” she started, “This is where I’m buried.” She pointed to the headstone that read “Melissa Taylor” and listed her birth and death dates.

“Uh huh,” I nodded in agreement, then looked up at her and said, “So?”

“So… I should be here.”

“Why?”

“To… bear witness to my life? To see my loved ones come visit?” she said more in question than statement.

“Look, Mel – can I call you Mel?”

“No, no one calls me Mel….”

“Okay, Mel, first you’re dead. What’s the point of the dead bearing witness to life? And to your second point… honey, we need to get you out of here – you don’t want to hang around for the living to visit…”

“But my husband and family were all here just the other day. It was beautiful!”

I looked at the headstone again. Died October 5. “Mel, you just died. They’re going to come out here for your funeral and because, I don’t know, it’s new and all. But they’re going to realize that they’re visiting a piece of marble and manicured lawn and what’s the point of that?”

“I’m below that manicured grass!” She yelled.

“Uh huh,” I said. “Below. As in ‘not visible’. They put you in the ground, what? A week ago?”

“Ten days.”

“Yeah,” I said, “It’s still new – I’m sure they told themselves they’d come every day or every other day or once a week – whatever it is, I’m sure they said it with the best of intentions. But they’re going to stop coming regularly. They all do. And they should – they’re alive!”

“But…” she countered, “I see an old man visiting his wife’s grave every day. It’s really sweet!”

“No, it’s pathetic. What kind of life is he living now?”

“One where he remembers his wife!” She emphasized.

“And what of it? She’s still dead. He’s alive – he can go out and live!”

Melissa rolled her eyes exasperated. “What do you even want?!”

“I want to help you, Mel. I want to take you on a proper outing outside the cemetery gates!”

“Can… can we do that?”

“Nothing stopping us!” I said. “Want to see what’s in the big dead world out there?” I asked.

She seemed dubious, looking from me to her headstone, then to me again. “Okay,” she said with a nervous smile. “Let’s go.”

“That’s the spirit, Mel! Get it, spirit… we’re ghosts?”

“Yeah, I get it…” she said as we started walking to the cemetery gates.

“But you didn’t laugh.”

“That’s because it wasn’t funny.”

“I like you, Mel!”

“Stop calling me Mel,” she said.

“We’re going to have a great time, Mel!”