Back To The Cemetery, Please

Near my home is a huge, old, lovely Cemetery. Big trees provide shade over beautifully carved headstones. Many of them have military and Masonic symbols, and the oldest dates of decease are from the 1910's. It is a nice, quiet place to be. During the day it is open for the public. I used to take my two boxer dogs there, and go (respectfully) all around. I really like to read the names and dates, and imagine who lies under the stones. I did not grow up in this area, but some of the names are the same as those of local streets and such, so I imagine those were the "best" families, in their day. I am not frightened of cemeteries at all. What happened there does not make for a "scary" story, but it scared me, nonetheless.

I found a marker which read "died in France" and listed the WW1 unit of the deceased. Call me a sentimental fool, but right there I said out loud "my uncle fought in (same unit) WW2 and died in Belgium, and now he watches over me. I wonder is your soul in France, where you fell, or did you return to whoever put this gravestone here to honour you?" Then the dogs and I meandered through the rest of the cemetery. We walked home through the humdrum summer sunset.

The weirdness started after dinner, at home. When put outside to do her business, my older dog, Felix, kept barking at the house wall, below my bedroom window. Then she kept barking, inside at the same place, fussing and whining below the bedroom window. Each time I checked, no one was outside. This kept up for several days. The other dog, Leila, carried on totally normal, no barking, no staring or whining.

Then Felix actually started digging a hole, outside there, below the window. She is not a digger dog. So I figured there was a varmit in or under the wall, since she kept fixating on that spot. I examined the whole wall, inside and out, and found nothing to show where mice or bugs were invading. I couldn't hear anything either, and you may know that vermin nesting in the walls eventually make noise when they think the coast is clear. (Yuck.)

After almost a week of Felix barking at the wall, and trying to dig below it, I yelled at her to stop, in frustration. She looked at me with that reprimanding way dogs do when they are right and you are wrong. I was sick of her nonsense and told her so. (Yes, I talk to my dogs like people.) I pushed all the dirt back with my foot again, as if that would stop her from digging.

When we got back inside, Felix headed right back to the bedroom and went to staring and whining at the wall. I was going to holler, she was making me crazy.

Then I noticed a penny on the floor, placed exactly beside where she had been digging at outside. I picked it up and dropped it in my front flower bed.

I was more than a little freaked out by this. I am not someone who wants any sign or needs confirmation of spirits. I use sage and salt, with proper offerings and blessings, to protect my home. Who left that penny there? Until this point in my life I thought of "ghosties leaving dimes" as utter nonsense, especially since I have only heard of it from daytime teevee.

All week outside, Felix kept barking at and digging below the same spot of wall, or staring at it from inside. Twice more, I found pennies in the exact same place inside, beneath the wall heater, up against the wall. I removed them from the house.

It seemed clear that someone was there. I was afraid to acknowledge how bad the pennies scared me. We're "they" inside or outside. Or both!? I lived alone, and it was also nerve-wracking to have one dog keep alerting like someone was lurking outside my bedroom window. The other dog showed no interest in Felix's obsession.

At the suggestion of a friend, early one evening, I stood by where Felix was trying to dig and spoke out loud my intentions to "head up to that gorgeous cemetery on the hill." I made sure to say that EVERYONE THERE was heading back with me and how nice it is. I brought the dogs and went along the same route we had taken coming home the last time. When we got to the grounds, I wandered around saying something along the lines of "the light of the Goddess is stronger than my light, so if you must follow someone, find God's light" and made it clear that my dogs and I were leaving the cemetery alone.

We did, as far as I could tell. Who knows for sure?

I welcome any thoughts or comments on this whole strange episode. I will answer all the questions I can-

The dog never fixated on that wall, inside or out, or tried to dig under the house ever again.

I never again found pennies on the floor.

I have been back to that cemetary numerous times, although now I keep my thoughts to myself.

Please note: I have lived off cash tips my whole adult life, and the change adds up fast. I cannot abide wadded up or disorganized money. I won't even carry pennies. More than a couple pennies gets heavy, so I make change by rounding up a nickel. I carry two dollars in "silver" coins, as part of my "bank", but every single other cent goes straight in the piggy bank after each shift. To be very clear, I think of money as absolutely filthy, and would NEVER leave coins around. I would not want money touching my things, I keep all my coins in my wallet, never jingling in pockets or dumped on the dresser. That is just like having a stinking pile of dirt sitting around.

My piggy bank is kept in the living room. It is an enormous, heavy, old glass water cooler jug, and I only take money out of it for Christmas (ok, and once to pay the water bill). There is NO WAY there were loose pennies to roll all the way into the bedroom.

Living with two dogs who eat anything they find on the floor is another reason there would never be coins loose on the floor. The whole piggy bank couldn't cover the veterinary operation to fish a nickel out of a dog.

I am one hundred percent for sure certain that no coin could just fall beneath the heater, and damn sure that two more pennies would not fall and land in the EXACT SPOT as the first, two more times. If not for the pennies, this story would be about my dog's overactive imagination and my own tendency to romanticise death in combat, and I would not venture to share it on YGS...