The Gray Ghost
My dad has told this story to my sister and I when we were young, growing up in Charleston, South Carolina. Through the years he has repeated the story a few times and the details have never changed.
He and a friend were planning a “surfing” trip along the east coast during a school break. They were anxious to get the trip started and found they couldn’t sleep the night before they were to leave. This friends family owned a house in Charleston very close to a very old and well known cemetery. The graves in this cemetery date back to the civil war and probably beyond. The cemetery was very dark, protected by a high wrought iron gate that was locked every evening. The farther back you went into this cemetery the darker it got. It was a moon lit night that night and the bet was that my dad could go further back into the cemetery than his friend would. The friend took the bet and both of them jumped over the gate.
Both of them continued to go further and further back into the cemetery. They were both sitting against one of the graves when my dad heard what he thought was someone shoveling dirt in the back corner. They both stopped talking, dad looked around one corner of the marker and his friend looked around the other side. The moon was bright, allowing my dad to see the silhouette of a tall thin older man, wearing a gray long sleeve coat, standing over a grave, digging a hole. Dad sat back against the grave marker and asked his friend, “do you see what I see?” His friend described exactly what my dad was seeing.
They both saw the old man standing over the grave, they saw him push the shovel into the ground and remove dirt, throw the dirt to the side of the grave and continue to shovel the dirt away. Dad moved around the grave to get a better look and in doing so made noise. The old man digging stopped what he was doing and looked in their direction. Both my dad and his friend took off running for the front gate, never looking back.
The next morning, before they left on the surfing trip, they returned to the cemetery, walked back to the grave site were they spotted the old man digging, fully expecting to find the grave uncovered, vandalized and probably robbed. What they discovered to their disbelief was, the grave was intact, there was no sign that the area had been disturbed and no evidence that anyone was ever there. The ground was solid, no indication that anyone had been there for weeks, months maybe yet both of them saw the old man removing dirt and getting deeper into the grave.
Source:ghostsandstories.com
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