I live in a small town in New Hampshire. You can normally see graveyards wherever you go, but for some reason New Hampshire seems to have one of the highest numbers. There are seven I can count in my town alone, forget about the rest of the state.

About eight years ago, a couple of my friends, we'll call them Bree and Lancelot, and I left my house at around one in the morning to go to a 24 hour store that has a thing called "Free Coffee Friday." As soon as it hits midnight they honor the deal.

Once we got our coffee, we decided to go to Union Cemetary which was an old haunt of ours, no pun intended. You can actually go onto Google Maps and find it. The place is huge, it has two sections to it and a main road that runs between them. One section is dedicated to anyone from the 1800's up to 2000, and the other is the more recent one.

Bree, Lancelot and I sat right at the opening to the older section, and stupid me decided to lean against this coal black mausoleum that was directly behind us.

So there we were, coffee in hand, just talking about life and catching up with each other when I smelled something burning. It honestly smelled like someone was being burned alive, there was even the acrid smell of burning hair. I stood up and started looking around for a sign of a fire, afraid that I would have to call the fire department because some kid decided to set another plot on fire. I was just a kid myself at the time (15), and I knew if there was something on fire in the graveyard and nobody else was around, my friends and I would be the first people they looked at.

Eventually I realized that whatever it was wasn't visible and I calmed down, thinking that maybe someone was just having a fire and a rodent got caught in the flames. I resumed my place in front of the mausoleum and continued my conversation, which was apparently a bad idea.

I was in mid sentence when the doors to the mausoleum slammed outwards, hitting my back. It couldn't open all the way because there were chains around the handles, but it did snag my shirt on the way back to its original position and I started freaking out. I was so scared I actually started crying, and in the end Bree and Lancelot had to cut my shirt out of the door. I was left alone in that graveyard for about half an hour while they went back to the store to ask for scissors.

Once they got me free and Lancelot gave me the spare shirt he always kept in his backpack -- I used to pick on him for always carting around an extra shirt that he would never wear, he was too careful with his clothes to need it and I never picked on him again after that night -- we bolted all the way through both sections so we could head home. Here's where it gets even more weird.

We were only about a quarter way down the sidewalk when somebody called to us to get our attention, and we turned around to see a police officer. My heart jumped into my throat.

He asked what we were doing in the graveyard and we told him we were just hanging out after getting free coffee from Cumbie's. It never occurred to me until the next day that he would have had no way to know we were actually in the graveyard, we had been on the main road and on the opposite side of the street the graveyard was on. I also noticed that his uniform was a little off, and didn't even match those of the other police officers around town. I figured he might have been a sheriff, but one look at his car told me he was just an ordinary officer. The car looked weird too, and once again it did not match those of the other police officers. It was an old style, and the writing was the wrong color. His car still said he was a police officer of my town though, and I snagged a quick look at his nametag. I won't use his actual name, but we'll call him Officer Phantom. I brought all of this up to Bree and Lancelot later that night when we finally got back to my home. They'd noticed it too.

The officer just kind of stood there for a minute and eventually asked us our names, ages, where we lived, and where we were headed. Obviously I'm not going to ignore the direct questions of an officer, and so we all complied and gave him the answers he was looking for. He said since we were all underage, he was going to call our parents and let them know we were on our way home. He even said he was going to call all three numbers back later on to make sure we actually went where we said where we were going and to see if we made it home safe.

So that was that and we turned around to leave. I looked back two seconds later and the officer was gone, car and all. There was no engine turning on, no tires crunching gravel, and no headlights illuminated us...he was just gone in a matter of seconds. We freaked out and ran, and as soon as we got back to my house we asked my mom if an officer had called to let her know I would be on my way home. The answer had been no. Bree and Lancelot also checked with their parents, no calls had ever been made, not even to check if we made it home safe.

As the years went on, it was put out of my mind until I was in the library one day, looking up the history of my town for an enormous school project. It would be the last project of my senior year. In an old newspaper clipping from decades ago, I found a picture of Officer Phantom in an obituary....cause of death? Died in an accidental house fire and his grave was the mausoleum I had been leaning on. BOOM! There was all the proof I needed.

I have never gone back to Union Cemetary, I'm 22 now, I do my absolute best to stay away from it. Bree and Lancelot now live in different states, but whenever they come back, that graveyard is completely cut off of the visiting list. I guess some things really do stick with you for the rest of your life.