I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be buried alive. Stuck alone in a coffin underground, where no one could hear your screams as you slowly suffocated to death. In the dark.
It’s morbid as hell, but then again I’m a morbid person. Sometimes I look up medieval torture methods, and I loved to watch horror movies where people died in terribly unimaginable ways.
I’m not a future serial killer or anything like that. It wasn’t like I was the creepy kid at school, either. These are just things I think about sometimes. Other than that I’m just your average 12-year old boy.
Being buried alive sounds like something that would only happen in a book, or in a bad B-rated movie, but it’s happened before. I read stories about people that were really sick, though they weren’t dead yet, but their relatives thought they were. So they buried them underground. In some cases, years later when they dug the person back up for whatever reason, they found claw marks on the coffin which proved that the person had woken up inside and tried to get back out.
But the story that’s the most interesting to me is the story of Rebecca Jones. It’s more of a legend around the area, actually, since this apparently happened in our town in the 1890s. Rebecca had this disease called catatonia, which meant sometimes she had episodes where she couldn’t move or speak, and it appeared that she was dead.
Back then, even though they knew about the condition I guess they didn’t really have the ability to tell whether someone was dead or whether they were just having a catatonic episode.
Where it got interesting, though, was that her dad was abusive. He knew about Rebecca’s condition because of an episode she had when she was a lot younger.
But when Rebecca turned 11 and her catatonia hit her with another episode, her dad didn’t say anything about it. Instead, he allowed her to be buried alive. Why he did that, I can’t really be sure. He was probably just psycho.
The townspeople back then found out she’d been alive because someone Rebecca had known she was little knew about her catatonia and got suspicious. Why that person didn’t speak up earlier, I didn’t really know either.
When they dug her up again to investigate, they found the scratch marks, and an abnormal dent in her skull, which I guess proved that she was also banging her head against the coffin or something so she could escape it.
Rumor is that her spirit’s still alive and is out there, waiting to seek revenge.
Some of these details may have been made up. The story’s been passed down a lot and there’s nothing on the internet about it, so I wasn’t even sure if it was true.
The only thing that really made it more concrete was that there was a gravestone in the town cemetery that had actually “Rebecca Jones” written on it. Maybe someone had just seen that name and made some crap up. I don’t know.
The reason I’ve been thinking about Rebecca Jones, though, is because of what happened a few nights ago.
Alex, my older brother, was the one who told me the story in the first place, a couple years ago. It wasn’t just him, though. I asked dad about it and he said he’d heard that story about it when he was a kid, too. But he told me that the whole “spirit” thing was just BS.
I was hanging out with Alex and his friend Derrick skateboarding at the park late at night. To be honest I should’ve known they had a reason for letting me hang out with them. Alex was fifteen. No fifteen-year old’s gonna let their little brother hang out with them for fun. At least, not him.
“Shay,” Alex said to me as we were leaving the park, one arm around my shoulder. “Me and Derrick got a bet for you.”
“I’m not gonna try to spy on Lindsay again so I can take pictures of her in her underwear for you. You guys are nasty,” I said.
Derrick snickered.
“No!” Alex insisted. “Not that.” We walked down the road over to the graveyard, which was near the skate park. It was locked at night, but you could still see the gravestones arranged in neat rows, with the paths winding through them and the little benches in the back.
He let go of my shoulder as he pointed at one gravestone in particular, even though it was a little hard to see it. “You remember that story I told you about Rebecca Jones?”
“The girl who got buried alive? Uh, yeah? What about her?”
“We want you to steal her gravestone.”
I reeled in shock. “Wait, what the hell? Why?”
“Because it’ll be cool,” Derrick said. “Keep it in your room or something, and you can tell people that you took it.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. “Isn’t that illegal anyway?”
“It’s not illegal if they’ve been dead for at least a hundred years,” Alex informed me. He had that look on his face where I knew he was probably lying, but I also knew I wasn’t going to get him to admit that, so I didn’t push it.
“Besides,” he continued. “We got fifty bucks in it for you if you do it. It’s simple. We come back later at night when there’s no one here, and you dig it up. There’s a hole under the fence, so you climb under with the shovel and then when you’re gone come back out and take the shovel and gravestone with you. The stone’s really small, you’ve seen it. There’s the hole.” He pointed at a hole that I could just barely see in the dark. It’d always been there, of course, but it was the first time I was really noticing it.
“Why can’t you guys do it?” I asked.
“Cuz,” Derrick said. “We’re too big to fit in that hole. The fence has barbed wire so we can’t really climb over it either.”
I was a pretty small kid, so I knew that meant a lifetime of people getting me to crawl into small spaces. At least til I hit puberty.
Maybe I was just trying to impress Alex. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal, cuz Rebecca was dead. Who really cares what happens to her gravestone? It’s just some granite.
Okay, it was stupid, I know. But I did it. Fifty bucks is nothing to sneeze at.
In the middle of the night, when no one was around, I went to the graveyard and snuck under the fence. Alex and Derrick at least came to make sure nothing happened to me, even though they stayed on the other side of the fence.
I dug around the gravestone, and it actually wasn’t too hard to get to the point where I could loosen the dirt enough to free the stone from the ground. Alex was right. It was small enough to fit in one hand. About the size of my math notebook, even though it weighed a lot more. I snuck it back under the fence to the other side and we took it home.
As it turned out, I felt really creeped out and didn’t want to keep that thing in my room, so it was agreed that Alex would keep it in a box under his bed while I would get bragging rights for stealing it.
I started to feel okay about it after a while, but a couple nights ago that changed.
It was around 3 am and I had to go to the bathroom. So I went ahead and did my thing, but as I was washing my hands, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Our bathroom gets a lot of of those little house spiders, so I figured it was just one of those.
I opened the closet to get a towel and wipe my hands, but there was somebody inside.
A girl.
At least, I think it was a girl. Whatever it was, I don’t really know.
There were dark, gaping sockets in her face instead of eyes, and layers of what looked like rotting flesh piled on top of each other. Her scraggly brown hair had fallen in clumps on the floor and she wasn’t wearing anything.
I screamed and fell back on the ground, scrambling to get away from her.
“It wasn’t nice to take my gravestone,” she said. Her voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard to me, and made me want to put my hands over my ears.
“Rebecca?” I gasped. She didn’t say anything.
I don’t know how my muddled brain managed to put two and two together. But I was still on my back, gaping up at her.
“Hey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I said. “I’ll put it back, I promise!”
“It’s a little late for that,” Rebecca told me. “Maybe I should teach you a lesson. You can see what it feels like to be me.”
“No, wait! I’m sorry!” I cried. “Don’t hurt me, please!”
But she was gone as quickly as she’d appeared. My parents showed up soon after that, trying to figure out why I was yelling on the floor. I tried to explain what I’d seen to them, but they just told me it was a dream and there were no such thing at ghosts. Dad brought me back to my room, putting me back to sleep.
Maybe it was just a dream, but I don’t know.
What’d she mean when she said I’d see how she felt?
I didn’t tell Derrick what happened because I knew he’d just make fun of me and call me a baby. Tell me I was making stuff up.
But I’ve been feeling really weird lately. More tired than usual. There’s these weird bags under my eyes. And sometimes when I brush my hair in the bathroom, some of it comes out in my hands. Mom says I might just be getting sick, and maybe I need more rest.
I’ve also been falling asleep at random times, like right now…
I’m drifting in and out of consciousness. I can see my parents around me. Alex. But it’s like I’m in a dream. Every time I try to move or talk, I can’t do anything. My mom is crying. She’s leaning over me, her face streaked with tears. I don’t know why. I can’t even ask her.
Everything goes black for a while, and then I wake up again.
This time I can move my arms when I try to. I’m lying down on my back and my vision’s still kind of blurry. But when I begin to sit up, something gets in the way and I hit my head hard. Carefully I place my arms out in front of me and hit something solid. When my vision clears, I can see that it’s wood. It’s at my sides too, and underneath me. I try to push it out of the way, but it doesn’t give.
As it sets in what’s happening, I start to panic. Thrashing around, screaming, hitting my fists on every surface to no avail. Because I know what’s going on. And I know it’s not a dream.
I’ve been buried alive.
—
Sanika Phadnis is a 20 year old student at the University of South Florida currently studying to get a Bachelor’s in biology. In her spare time, she likes to play the piano and write, having recently started writing for one of her college’s newsletter, The Odyssey.
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Creepy fun. Nicely done.
Jr. Princess – Weird and creepy for sure !!! Good imagination & creativity.