Ghost Story

I have never considered myself particularly gullible. I’m not the person who automatically believes every story about a haunted house, a ghost sighting or someone who swears their grandmother’s spirit still turns the porch light on.

But I have experienced a few things in my life that I simply can’t explain.

One of them happened in a cemetery in Southeast Alaska.

To understand the story, you have to understand the place. I grew up on an island in Southeast Alaska, tucked inside the Tongass National Forest. I moved to Oregon as a teenager and spent my high school and college years there, but I always found my way back to Alaska during the summers. Eventually, I moved home for good when my oldest son was a toddler.

There is something different about Southeast Alaska. It is difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it. The rainforest seems to swallow everything around it. The mountains rise straight out of the water. The weather can change in minutes. In the summer, darkness barely exists. It feels less like living in a state and more like living in its own little world.

One summer, sometime around 2011 or 2012, a friend of mine, Hanna, came to stay with me for a few weeks. She was a few years younger than I was and, at the time, wasn’t quite old enough to legally go to the bar.

I know this because I distinctly remember being very excited to sneak her into the only bar on the island one night.

We were in that stage of life when our definition of entertainment was considerably less sophisticated than it is now. There were no fancy restaurants, no concerts and certainly no Uber. So we did what any group of young people on an isolated Alaskan island in the middle of summer might do.

We partied.

Sometimes we partied at the homes of my older cousins. Sometimes we gathered along the rocky Pacific shoreline. Sometimes we went to the Lakeshore. And one night, for reasons that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, we partied at the cemetery.

The cemetery was only a short walk from the house where I lived with my grandparents, which was precisely why we didn’t party there. The cemetery was off the main road, down an unmarked road and nearly a mile into the muskeg and woods. Unless you knew it was there, you could drive right past it without ever realizing it.

It was actually a pretty convenient gathering place. There was a large gravel parking area, a covered shelter with picnic tables and benches, and plenty of privacy.

And despite our questionable choice of venue, we were respectful of the place. We cleaned up after ourselves and made sure we didn’t leave cans, bottles or other trash behind, being respectful to the venue’s permanent residents.

There were probably 10 to 15 people there that night.

By around 2 a.m., the party was winding down. I had to be at work at 6 a.m. to open The Store, where I worked as the front-end manager. It was the only store on the island and sold everything from groceries and fuel to mercantile goods and movie rentals.

Most of the group left, but Hanna, another friend and I stayed behind to clean everything up.

Once the last cup, can and bottle had been picked up, we headed home. I was planning to get a couple of hours of sleep before my alarm went off. A few hours later, at 5:30 a.m., I awoke to the blaring buzzer of the alarm clock on my nightstand. I showered, put on my work uniform, gathered my things and headed for the door.

And then I realized I didn’t have my cellphone.

If you know anything about a 22-year-old woman in the early 2010s, you know a cellphone was basically an additional body part. It was never far from me.

I searched everywhere. Nothing.

Eventually, I figured I must have left it at the cemetery. Maybe I’d set it on one of the picnic tables while we were cleaning up. So I got in my truck and drove back to the cemetery on my way to work.

When I pulled into the gravel parking area, I immediately saw something shiny and black lying in the grass beneath one of the picnic tables.

My phone.

I grabbed it and headed to work.

The phone was dead, so I plugged it in and went about my morning. A couple of hours into my shift, I took a break and checked my phone to see whether I’d missed anything.

I had.

Several messages. And several missed calls. All from a friend who lived on the opposite side of the island.

This wasn’t someone I talked to regularly. In fact, we hadn’t spoken in quite some time. We had gone to school together and had once been friends, but we no longer ran in the same circles.

I honestly didn’t even remember that I still had her number saved in my phone.

Her messages were simple.

“Is everything OK?”

“What’s going on?”

I immediately responded, asking what she was talking about.

Maybe I had accidentally received calls meant for someone else.

Her answer made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

She told me she’d received 14 missed calls from my phone while she was asleep.

Fourteen.

The calls had come between approximately 4:15 and 5 a.m.

The entire time, I had been asleep at my grandparents’ house.

And my phone had been lying in the grass at the cemetery.

It had been locked with a passcode. And when I found it that morning, the battery was completely dead.

I told her there was no way I had called her. I explained that I’d left my phone at the cemetery and that I was the last person there. I hadn’t made those calls.

There was a pause. Then she asked:

“Which cemetery were you at? By the ballpark or by the woods?”

I told her, “By the woods. Why?”

Her answer is something I still remember word for word.

“Because … my dad is buried in the cemetery by the woods.”

I checked my phone’s call log.

There they were.

Fourteen outgoing calls to her number, during the exact window of time she’d described.

I never found an explanation.

I suppose there are plenty of possibilities. Someone could have found the phone. Someone could have somehow accessed it. There could have been some bizarre technical malfunction. But none of those explanations make much sense.

The cemetery was nearly a mile down an unmarked road through the woods. It was around 4 in the morning. I had been the last person to leave. My phone was locked. And whoever — or whatever — could have somehow made those calls would have had to find the phone, make 14 calls to a woman I hadn’t spoken to in ages, and then leave the phone lying in the grass exactly where I found it.

So, I’ve spent years wondering what happened that morning.

I can’t prove that my friend’s father somehow found a way to contact his daughter.

I can’t prove that a spirit picked up my phone and dialed her number. And I certainly can’t tell you that this experience means ghosts are real.

All I can tell you is what happened.

I know where my phone was.

I know where I was.

I know who received the calls.

And I know what her father had in common with the place where my phone had spent the night.

Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe there is a perfectly logical explanation that I simply haven’t found.

Or maybe, just maybe, a father saw an opportunity to say hello to his little girl from the other side — and took it.

And if that’s what happened, I don’t find it particularly frightening. Actually, I think there’s something kind of beautiful about it.