Many a graveyard have graced my sleep. Call me wicked, call me daft. Call me disrespectful. But I have found the graveyard to be the most comfortable of places. It’s a place where I can have a casual smoke or howl wholeheartedly at the moon while the dead stones look on. The graveyard is the best rest stop for the traveler; no crowds, no charge, no hawkers and hustlers, no rules, no nothing. Everything is dead. Full stop.

And then I look around and see a flower growing from a crack in a tombstone, or some funny shadows dancing on the mausoleum, themselves reflections of something bouncing off my candlelight. And I laugh aloud and thank my Lord for making me the man I am, blessing my journey and giving me a free night’s stay while everyone is spending their bucks shacked up at the Sheraton with room service and this and that. Yes, I admit, a good bit of roast chicken and some cable tv and a free paper in the morning is pretty good, too. But, really, nothing beats a good fire in a graveyard on a night with fine weather.

Paranormal? In a graveyard? There is no such thing as paranormal! Cue all the incredulous out there currently thinking to themselves – but I saw the chandelier shake, and the tv blew up… It is all quite normal. You guys, telling tales of this and that – creations and variations and manifestations of the one mind that we are all but the most infinitesimal part of. Normal. People thinking far too much are responsible for their own ghosts. Your own fears are the generators of these very phantasms you call paranormal. All quite normal and to be expected when you’ve convinced yourself that the images you’ve seen in movies or learned through religion or myth or faerie tale are real and something apart from your very own Self.

Anyway, no. I’ve not experienced the paranormal. Not in the graveyard anyway. On the other hand, I did live near a graveyard once with a woman who could seemingly call centipedes to herself at will. Does that count?