Author Notes
*Some punctuation has been purposely omitted...*
HARKER'S MILL CEMETERY - GATEWAY TO HELL?
There are graveyards across America, places with names like Bachelor's Grove and Pinewood Cemetery, that defy all definitions of a haunted cemetery. They are places that go beyond the legends of merely being haunted and enter into the realm of the diabolical. These are places said to be so terrifying that the Devil himself holds court with his worshippers there... and in the case of Harker's Mill Cemetery, is one of the gateways to hell itself...
But just how terrifying are these places? While there are few of us who would challenge the supernatural presence of a place like Bachelor's Grove, there are some who claim that Harker's Mill Cemetery does not deserve the blood-curdling reputation that it has gained over the years.
All through the 1980's and up until today, stories have been told about Harker's Mill Cemetery and, as time has passed, most have grown more horrifying and hard to believe. The problem seems to be that the cemetery has a lack of real, documented accounts of strange activity. The weird tales seem to be little more that urban legends and second-hand stories from teenagers and college students.
One story told of two young men who were visiting the cemetery one night and became frightened when a strong wind began blowing out of nowhere. They ran back to their car, only to find that the vehicle had been moved to the other side of the highway and was now facing in the opposite direction. Another man claimed to experience this same anomalous wind, but inside of the church rather than in the graveyard. He claimed that the sinister air current knocked him to the floor and would not allow him to move for some time. Incidentally, it is inside of this same church where witnesses say that no rain will fall... even though the crumbling building has no roof!
The legends also say that the Devil has been appearing here since the 1850's and insist that the original name of the town was "Hades" and that the later corruption of that into "Harker's" was simply to cover the fact that the area was steeped in black magic. It was said that the witchcraft-practicing early settlers were so repentant about their past deeds that they changed the name of the town. In truth, the town was called "Bear Creek Community" until 1899, when the last name of the first postmaster, Orlan Harker, was adopted as the name of the village. The post office closed down in 1903, but the name stuck.
In 1980, an article appeared in the City Times that added further fuel to the rumors about Harker's Mill Cemetery and the abandoned church. The article was quoted as saying that the Devil chose two places to appear on Earth every Halloween. One of them was the tumbleweed hamlet of Harker's Mill, and the other, which occurs simultaneously at midnight, is someplace on the desolate plain of India. From these sites, according to the article, the Devil gathers all the people who died violent deaths over the past year for a prance around the Earth at the witching hour.
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