As an exciting thing to do on a summer night, visiting an Indian burial ground ranks right up with getting tear-gassed. Thankfully, it was much less painful, but it still made me cry.
The night started out innocently enough. It was just four of us driving around, trying to find something to do.
After hours of indecisiveness, my friend Blake suggested we go to the bridge. However, this is not just any old bridge. It is a bridge built over an Indian burial ground.
You are supposed to drive out to the middle of the bridge, turn off your car, turn off your lights and something is supposed to push you the rest of the way across.
That is all Blake had to say. It doesn?t take much to scare me. I did not want to go. But no one else was as wussy as me so we went.
On the drive over, we heard the rest of the story. Fifty years ago, a bus full of kids crashed on the bridge, and the kids were all scalped by the Indian spirits.
At night ? but not during the day, of course ? you can see the scalps hanging from the creepiest looking tree ever. Picture that tree from the Sleepy Hollow movie and multiply it by 1,000.
When you turn your car off on the bridge, it is the children who push you to safety. If you dust your bumper with baking soda when you get to the other side of the bridge, you can see fingerprints. You can also see scratch marks where the Indians were trying to pull you back.
I was completely terrified, but Blake was just getting started.
He had gone to the bridge a few weeks before, but had not turned off the car. However, he and the four people with him all had different cell phone services. Each of them had full service until the front tires hit the bridge, then all service was lost. As soon as their back wheels left the bridge, full service came back.
The bridge is about 30 miles outside of town, and by the time we reached it, I was practically screaming. It was 2 a.m. and the moon had already set ? everything was pitch black.
We lost all cell phone service, and as soon as Brian put the car in park and turned off the headlights, I curled up into the fetal position in the back seat.
After five minutes of my constant screaming and nothing happening, everyone became eerily silent. I uncurled to find the three of them looking dead ahead.
A light, 20 yards ahead, had appeared out of nowhere about three feet off the ground and was moving towards us. There was nothing and no one out there. There were not even reflectors on the side of the road.
As we stared in shock, Blake let out a scream. Twenty yards behind us, another light appeared doing the same thing ? converging on us.
I curled back up and started screaming along with Lindsey. Brian went to start the car ?and it would not start.
I almost wet myself.
Finally, the car started. And the second it did, both lights disappeared. We drove off the bridge at lightning speed and went to where we saw the light. There was nothing but wide-open prairie. At least we had our cell phone service, though.
Unfortunately, we had to drive back over the bridge to go home. Blake convinced Brian to stop in the middle again. We did, and nothing happened. Finally Brian turned around and looked at us ? ?You guys?? ?Yes?? ?We?re in neutral.? We nodded. ?My foot?s off the break.? We nodded. ?We?re on an incline.? We nodded. ?We?re not rolling backwards.? We screamed.
Brian slammed the car in drive, and we flew like a bat out of hell off the bridge.
By the time we made it back into town, we had calmed down a little. Back at Lindsey?s house, we decided it would be all right to check the bumper. That was a bad idea.
If I did not believe in ghosts before then, I certainly believe in them now. A little to the left of center on the back bumper was a small handprint, and right next to the handprint was a large scratch.
Haber can be reached at bhaber@campustimes.org.
