| I am a 36-year-old man and I have been fascinated by so-called " hauntings " all my life. I have seen, heard, and felt some strange things before, but most of them were eventually explainable. Those that weren't explained were not particularly dangerous. I now know that I have been living foolishly by doubting the supernatural. My whole belief system crashed two days ago. Please appreciate what that means to a person before reading on. I’m still shaking. On October 6, 2001 (this past Saturday), I visited Spider Gates cemetery in Leicester, MA. A female associate accompanied me. I will call her Ann. We are both highly educated and skeptical people, but we remain open-minded and are very curious about all things paranormal. We also thought that we were prepared for any spooky surprises, but we were wrong. We have both been shaken badly by the events of October 6. It has been two days. Ann is still bed-ridden from some malady that has attacked her. She is staying with her elderly parents, but she has not told them anything because she thinks they wouldn’t understand. They are devout Catholics and she does not want to frighten them. I am hiding in my apartment with all the lights on. I have not slept. I went online to locate any others who might have visited that horrible place. I found your Web site. I thought it might help me to sort things out if I corresponded with someone who is open to strange things. I hope you don’t mind being my first audience. Maybe you will have some valuable feedback for me. Perhaps you will see fit to warn other curious ghost hunters not to disturb Spider Gates. Here's what happened Saturday… At dusk, with the wind blowing rather briskly and a chill setting in, we walked the wooded paths near the reservoir in Leicester. Since you have been to the burial ground, you know the area, I'm sure. Actually, we were rather uncertain as to the exact location of the cemetery, so we walked through the surrounding woods for a couple of hours, enjoying the sunshine and scenery. There are some interesting ruins strewn throughout the area, but they are hard to see. Most of them are overgrown with weeds and brush. We found a cool old building, or at least its broken foundation, beside what looked like some kind of dried-up streambed. It was made up of flat native stones piled on top of each other carefully, much like the old stone walls that run throughout those woods. There were old, rusted nails and rotted timbers lying in the dirt all around. There were also some broken stoneware shards half-buried in the soft ground. We speculated over what the building was for and decided that it was probably a residence for a small Pilgrim family who moved on when the stream stopped running. We continued on our way, eventually emerging from a path onto a side street, facing a modern tube-steel gate, painted pale tan, with no markings on it. We got the feeling this was the way into the cemetery, since it was the only path in the area that we hadn’t yet walked down. It was just getting dark, so we got out our flashlights and crept under the gate onto another wide path. We started walking into some pretty woods. We were talking about cars and real estate, using the cemetery as an amusing diversion to get us outdoors for a while. We even joked about spooks. I get a cold chill down my back just remembering how casually we strolled into that place. When Ann suddenly stopped and pointed to the right, I looked up and saw the wrought-iron gates that mark the entrance to the cemetery. The design on the gates was quite attractive, resembling a spider’s web. I was surprised at how easily the gate opened, not even creaking or squeaking. It was like the place wanted you to enter. We looked around in the gloomy light and saw rows of gravestones. Except for maybe three larger memorials, the stones were identical, even though the burial years ranged from 1759 to 2000. It was kind of creepy. We laughed nervously and started to walk around the small graveyard. The stones were mostly marked “Southwick”, “Earle”, and maybe two other surnames. After a few minutes, it got so dark that we couldn’t read the stones without the flashlights. It was while I was reading the creepy epitaph on one of the larger memorial stones that the place seemed to notice us. There was a message at the bottom of one stone, something about not being able to discover the nature of the path to the afterlife until we walk it ourselves. As I read it, I called to Ann to come and see it. She said, “Hold on.” I kept my light on the stone and waited. I heard her walk up behind me and I turned to jokingly shine the light upwards at my chin to say something scary, but I never got the sentence out. Ann was not there. Instead, a young man stood smiling at me. I had not noticed anyone else in the area on the way in. He was maybe 25, tall, thin, pale, and nervous-looking. He had really long hair, light brown, in a ponytail. He was wearing a black jacket, but it was too dark to see more of his clothes. He held a walking stick and apparently had a backpack on. I was rather startled, to say the least. I just said, “Hi.” He stared and waited about five seconds before he spoke. He had a lisp and a soft, high voice. “Are you a student?” I said that I was not. I mumbled something about being a curious type. I didn’t want to be rude, so I kept my light off his face. I called to Ann again, casually, but hoping she would hurry over. From about 50 feet away in the dark, she just repeated, “Hold on.” The young man spoke again. “This is a Quaker resting place.” I weirded out. This guy was as creepy a stranger as one would want to meet on a busy street, let alone a graveyard at night. But what he said was interesting, so I responded by asking him if he studied Quaker history. He didn’t respond. I wondered if he might have been deaf or something, because he stared at my mouth and didn’t seem to hear my question. So I asked him if he lived in the area. He waited about ten seconds before saying anything, but then he whispered, “Very close.” He then cocked his head in the direction of the woods opposite the gate. I needed to get this guy out of my face. I excused myself and walked towards the spot where Ann’s voice had come from, leaving him standing there in the dark. I shined my light around, but she was not there. I started to sweat. I felt suddenly claustrophobic. I shined the flashlight beam in all directions, shouting to Ann loudly. I didn’t care what the man was thinking, I just had to find Ann and get out of there. I looked towards the gate and saw that it was closed. We had purposefully left it open. I decided I had to ask the guy if he had seen the lady who had been with me minutes before. When I directed the beam towards him, he was gone. I would have heard his footfalls in the dead leaves, but there was nothing but wind in the trees and silence. I was alone. For the first time in my adult life, I was in a true state of panic. I ran for the exit, stumbling once over the stones. I threw the gate open and bolted back up the path. That’s when I found Ann. She was kneeling by the path, looking into the woods to the left. Her flashlight was pointed between the trees. She was hyperventilating badly. I noticed immediately that she had vomited on her jacket. She was too disoriented to speak. I lifted her to her feet as gently as I could, but she couldn’t walk without my help. I shouted, “What’s wrong?!?” directly into her ear. She just shook her head and grabbed my arm for support. Dropping my flashlight, I ushered her towards the street. The car was a good distance up the road from the end of the path. That’s when I noticed that the path seemed to get longer. I distinctly remembered it being only a couple of hundred feet long and about eight feet wide, but the further we went, the darker and narrower the path became. And it began to wind left and right, when I seemed to remember it being rather straight. After ten minutes, I told Ann we were reversing direction, saying that maybe we had gone the wrong way in our rush to leave. She wanted to rest for a minute and sit down. I took her flashlight and set it on the ground pointing up the path. I finally had a chance to ask her what had happened to her. She started crying. She said that what sounded like a young girl had called out from the trees off the path, just moments after we had read the names on the stones nearest to the entrance. She said that the girl was mumbling about looking for a dog or something. Ann had called to her, offering to let her use her flashlight, but the little girl had ignored her and kept mumbling, staying just out of sight. Ann said she thought the girl was speaking more to the open air than to her, but that the brush was definitely moving where the voice was coming from, so there must have been someone right there. She said that when she tried to walk into the woods to help the person, there was a short scream and the yelp of an animal. In a panic, Ann had stumbled into the brush and landed on a dead, rotten log. She said that when she tried to stand up, the log broke under her weight and split in two halves down the middle. She then said that when she stepped back from the log that it had actually seemed to shut itself on her boot and wouldn’t let her go. My blood was freezing by this point. Ann then said that she was able to break her foot out of the rotten wood and try to find the girl in the brush, expecting to find a serious situation. She then heard the girl’s voice from the path behind her. According to Ann, she then tried to get my attention for help. She said she called my name several times, but I had heard nothing. Ann stumbled back out to the path, shining her light everywhere looking for the source of the voice. She said she thought she had seen a person run into the cemetery, so she started back towards the gate. That’s when the worst of the story happened. Ann said that when she started for the cemetery entrance she was immediately hit with a horrible odor, like death, as she put it. She had covered her mouth and nose with her sleeve. Her natural instinct was to turn away from the smell, so she spun around. When she did, she saw movement in the brush where she had just been entangled. She pointed her light that way and according to her she saw a small dog peeking out. It was mutilated terribly. Ann said its skull was visible through a wound in its face and it had lost an eye. It looked as if it had been shot in the forehead. Ann had lost it at that point and had thrown up at the sight. She said she tried to remain as calm as possible, trying to think of how she could help the animal, but when she looked for it again, it had disappeared. She had lost her breath and was feeling very sick at that point. That’s when I had run down the path and found her. By this point, it was freezing and I was desperate to get out of the woods. I decided not to tell her my story until we had found the car. We gathered our strength and went back down the path the way we had come. About ten minutes later, to our absolute horror, we passed the cemetery gates again, on our right, just like it was when we first found it. It was as if we had been redirected back into the graveyard. I swore terribly, scooped up Ann in my arms, and ran away from the gate once again. I simply turned 180 degrees and bolted, dropping the last flashlight. To my amazement, the road was right where it was supposed to be this time. I set Ann down and together we rushed towards the car. But the place was not done with us. As we were running, a young man’s voice rang out from behind us, seemingly from the path. For some reason, he seemed to be repeating the word “animal” or the name “Abigail” or something. I froze and asked Ann what she thought that voice was saying. She also stood still for a second, then asked, “A voice?” I told her to never mind and hurriedly unlocked the doors. Then, as she was tossing her soiled jacket into the trunk, she suddenly jerked her head up and yelled, “Do you smell it?” I was puzzled. I asked her, “Smell what, your jacket?” (which did smell pretty bad). She just said, “No, THAT…” and sniffed the air, staring at me with a sickened expression. I smelled nothing, even after inhaling deeply and deliberately. She later said she had smelled something old and musty, like an ancient cellar. About halfway back to Milford, I decided to tell her what had happened to me at Spider Gates. We both agreed that it seemed to be some kind of diversion to get me to leave her alone. She also said that she had never said the words “hold on” when I had called her because she had not stayed in the cemetery at all. She had not even known that I had called to her. That night, she was still complaining about feeling sick. I told her that it was simply stress from the day’s events. She insisted that she didn’t want to be alone that night, so I dropped her at her parents’ house. She wanted to sleep under the big rosary in their living room. I have no such holy remedies and I can only sit here and jump at every little sound the house makes. I am alone in my bedroom, typing this memo to you in hopes that you can at least assure me that I am not going crazy. I hope you can offer some kind of commiseration or explanation that I have not thought of yet. But mostly, advise your readers not to go to Spider Gates. That place is unholy and spiteful. |
| This Experience was sent to me late last year. Please read it and see what conclusions you come up with. If you like please email me on what you think @ MGHSLOWELL@YAHOO.COM |
| SpiderGates Experience 10-6-01 |