There Is No Death
by Howie Doyle

I have always been fascinated by cemeteries, but not in a ghoulish sense. When I visit a cemetery, I experience a sense of the history and pathos of the lives of those who lie at rest there. I was raised to believe that a cemetery was a place of respect: respect for the lives of those buried there, and for the families of the deceased. In reading the names, dates, and epitaphs on headstones, cemeteries echo with grief, but also with the struggle and even the joy of life. I usually leave with a sense of appreciation, as if I have shared part of a new friend's life story.
     There's a melancholy old traditional cowboy ballad, originating early in the 19th century, that begins, “O bury me not on the lone prairie.” I can imagine the author of this song as a nomadic cowboy longing to be laid to rest in a place of peace and comfort that in life he knew little about. The settlers of our area, largely German in origin, picked some of the most picturesque locations to lay their dead to rest. Family rests next to family, even in death reflecting the ties that in life carried them through adversity to establish what is now a thriving community. Yet how different the cemetery sites must have been back in the mid-19th century when they were established. How many of the sprawling oak trees were then only saplings? How many generations of hundred-foot pine trees have grown and fallen as the years rolled by?
     Even in my most rebellious days of high school I was always appalled at stories of kids partying in cemeteries, tipping over grave markers and otherwise vandalizing the grounds. I get that same sick feeling today when I see a cluster of beer cans on the ground in a cemetery.
     I believe a cemetery is a place to be visited, and visited often if that is what one pleases. I know some view the cemetery like an overprotective librarian might view her books, protecting the most valuable ones from being checked out whenever possible. Yet like these books, the graves of the dead impart information – even wisdom – to those who visit.
     As to whether ghosts of the dead inhabit cemeteries, I have yet to decide what I believe about this, or what I feel. There have been times when, after the death of a dearly loved one, I have prayed for some sign, some communication from the other side of life. Perhaps that prayer was answered in the winds of emotion that buffeted my soul, but never in the form of a spoken word, or a moved object, or a visible form of ectoplasm in my presence.
In pursuing this story for the magazine, I set out with three divergent goals. To the reader I would say that I wanted to share something very real and totally different than anything that I, at least, have seen before: a human interest story on the local deceased; a pictorial extolling the beauty of local rural cemeteries; and an investigative piece on the existence of ghosts.
     In my world these three goals live comfortably in the same realm. The Bible speaks of earthly life after death, of angels, of supernatural things. As a Christian my skeptical side is tempered with the knowledge that things do exist outside my tiny bubble of knowledge. In investigating this subject, if I visited the cemetery and experienced nothing out of the ordinary, that is what I would report. Beyond that, I would still report what I experienced – even if it meant portraying myself as being delusional, addled, or at least prone to the power of suggestion.
     In my quest to find the perfect place to do my research I crossed paths with Cathi Bunn. She and I shared several telephone and email conversations and I found her to be very pleasant, rational, and of sound intellect. I tell you that first because Cathi is different from you and I in one area: she sees dead people.
     Cathi is a fairly well known ghost hunter, and in my conversations with her I found a certain level of comfort in the fact that, like me, she respects the dead... she just doesn't happen to agree that they are “dead” in the traditional sense. Born of parents from the Old World, Cathi says that communication with the deceased is something she was raised to be comfortable with, to seek out even, and that she has been doing it since childhood. She believes she has an aura of energy that is attractive to spirits of the dead, and that that is why others frequently witness ghostly phenomena in her presence.
     Another thing that made me comfortable with Cathi – she is protective of the cemeteries she visits. She has no wish to see damage done to any cemetery, or disrespect paid to either the living or the dead.
     I discovered Mueschke Cemetery on her website. She describes the cemetery as being one of the most haunted places she has ever visited, and she regularly encounters an apparition there that she has nicknamed, “Ectoman.” Ectoman, according to Cathi, is neither a content nor benevolent soul.
     Cathi was kind enough to arrange to visit Mueschke cemetery with me. We even got as far as setting a date, timed to coincide with the full moon, which is supposed to increase the likelihood of contact. Unfortunately, Cathi encountered some health problems which prevented her from joining me in my quest, so my first visit to Mueschke Cemetery was during a full moon. Shortly past midnight. Alone.
     Although I believed that Cathi was being honest with me in relating what she had seen, or what she believed existed, I am definitely a “seeing is believing” kind of guy. I don't jump when things go bump in the night, and I believed (and still do) that there is more to fear from the living than from the dead. So as I approached the cemetery under the silvery glow of a full moon, I expected to get out, walk around for a while, and leave without having seen any unusual phenomena.
     I pulled up just outside the chain-link gates, rolled down my window, and turned off the radio. The only sound was the quiet hum of my idling engine. Long shadows emerged from the base of every tree, fence post, and headstone. Squinting into the distance, I could not see the back fence of the cemetery; the forms gradually being lost in a dark wash of half-light.
     Even as I experienced that familiar rush of appreciation for the beauty of the cemetery, I experienced something less familar. It started as a dull discomfort inside me, and grew into a gnawing sense of anxiety. Pretty quickly I decided I wasn't getting out of the car.
     I could hear the drone of traffic from nearby FM 1960, and see the lights of a commercial building through the woods behind the cemetery. I was not isolated, nor threatened in any discernible way. Why then, this blooming sense of fight-or-flight?
     I didn't panic, or freak out, but I don't mind telling you that I left not more than a minute or two after I got there, and that I almost backed into a 'dead-end' traffic barrier in doing so. Driving away from the cemetery my eyes constantly darted to the rear-view mirror. What did I expect to see? A glowing fog? Shapes of light dancing in the distance? I saw nothing.
     But I can't tell you that I didn't feel anything. In retrospect, I'm sure it is embellishment when I relate to people that I felt a “malignant presence,” but without a doubt I did feel threatened. Me, the rational guy. The one who's not afraid of Things That Go Bump In The Night.
     After that experience I was feeling pretty defeated. Did I really want to tell the whole world what a coward I was? A couple of weeks passed and nothing happened to further the story. I guess it took me that long to get up enough moxie to go back.
     But go back I did. This time it wasn't a full moon, and it was only around 10:30 pm. I pulled up, cut the engine to my car, and dialed up a friend on my cell phone, only to get a voice mail message.
     I just started talking after the beep – a 21st century form of whistling in the dark. With only a sliver of a moon in the sky, I got out of the car, and leaves crunched under my feet as I slowly approached the cemetery gate, describing what I saw and felt every few seconds to the digital recorder at the other end of the line.
     My breath hung in the frigid air like a fog as I stood at the gate, peering intently into the distance and talking to no one every once in a while through my cell phone. I was in the middle of a sentence when – abruptly – a jarring voice came onto the other end of the line: “Your message has been sent.” The line went dead, and I was alone.
     Days later my friend commented to me, “If I hadn't seen you already, I would have been worried about you after listening to your message. You didn't call back.”
     The reason I didn't call back was because I had my keys in my hand, my foot on the accelerator and my eyes on the rearview mirror. Mueschke Cemetery had again gotten the best of me.
     My next trip there was in the daylight. I marveled at the natural grace of the setting, and the rustic beauty of grave markers over a hundred years old – stately in their longevity, yet crumbling under the forces of nature. Dust to dust... all was as it is supposed to be. There was no sense of being threatened, nothing creepy or disturbing in my time there. But did I sense a “presence” there?
     Well, yes, but I frequently have that sense at cemeteries. Perhaps it is a faint signal, reflecting my limited ability to commune with the deceased, through cataract eyes and deaf ears. Or perhaps that presence was the accompaniment of familiar names in our local history: Baldwin Boettcher (1861-1912, a prominent German Settler to the Spring/Westfield area in the late 1800’s, whose family donated the land on Aldine Westfield upon which the Baldwin Boettcher Branch library now stands); Riley Fussell (whose namesake, Riley Fussell Road, runs from the Hardy Toll Road near Old Town Spring northeast into Montgomery County, ending 10 or 12 miles later near the west fork of the San Jacinto River), the Hildebrandt family, the Mittelstedts. Interestingly, there are only four Mueschkes known to be buried in Mueschke Cemetery: Paul (1856-1917), Olga (1861-1924), Emma (1886-1900), and Helen (date unknown).
     Quite a few of those laid to rest were born in the early- to mid-19th century. Elizabeth Roach, born in 1819, lived to be about 100 (1819-1919).
     What struck me most was the number of children buried in Mueschke Cemetery prior to 1950 who never made it to their second birthday; 15 out of approximately 130 people buried there. I wonder how many, given the advantage of modern medical prowess, would have made it to adulthood today?
     The next – and last – trip to Mueschke Cemetery was again made at night, but this time with a group of people. Emboldened by the presence of others, I strode without hesitation through the cemetery gate.
     The next hour was spent walking here and there, snapping pictures when the urge struck me (with the digital camera nothing is visible through the viewfinder at night, so these photos were all the proverbial ‘shot in the dark’). Some members of our party got “the creeps” and returned to the cars parked by the cemetery gates. I made a point of walking to the back of the cemetery alone, and sitting under a sprawling oak tree along the cemetery’s back fence.
     I seemed to remember reading, in a message from Cathi, that this was Ectoman’s tree. I called to him in the darkness. I sat silent, and was answered only by the occasional crack of a distant branch or crunch of a leaf. The sounds were unexplainable, but didn’t seem that far out of the norm.
     Again, it wouldn’t be true to say that I didn’t feel anything while I was there. When I was alone I again had that vague sensation of another presence.
     Other members of our party experienced similar sensations in varying degrees, but no one outright saw a ghost, spirit, or other manifestation.
     Well, with one exception. My daughter saw me walking along outside the cemetery fence, and called to me. When I didn’t answer, she turned away for a second, and when she turned back I wasn’t there.
     Of course you’ve probably guessed by now that it wasn’t me. I was nowhere near the area. What adds a layer to the story is that there is a strange set of shadows in a photo I took along that same section of fenceline. It looks like a man walking.
     More easily discernible, and equally unexplained, is (for lack of a better term) the “orb” that hovers amongst the branches of Ectoman’s tree.
     The photos I took at Mueschke Cemetery do capture the strange beauty of this isolated setting. Surrounded at distance by major traffic arteries and businesses, the piney woods filter out the here-and-now, leaving visitors to Mueschke with a sense that they have stepped out of this place in time and into a different plane.
     Is Mueschke Cemetery haunted? Who am I to say? My paean to this place is that it moved me, that I felt the weight of history in its trees, its soil, its air. If you visit Mueschke Cemetery, do so with respect, and with a mind open not to things that go bump in the night, but to the lives of men and women like us who laid the groundwork for this place we now live in. In every sense, there is no death. CS