Of Zombies and Graves - Part I

The school walls of HA and Sharada sandwiched a graveyard, along the road to Mitapudur. One side of the school compound wall bordered the grave yard, separating it from the school campus. The school walls had a huge metal gate (main gate) opening out into the Mitapudur road. Each of the buttress pillars on either side of the main gate of the school had a concrete angel atop crouched in prayer position. The serene and calm looking gaurdian angels always gave an impression that they would take a sword to fight any terrespassing zombies from the grave.

The wall was bordered by an avenue of tall Palm and Pongamia trees which added to the eeriness especially on a quiet evening when the wind rustled through the leaves creating creepy and wretched noises. The wind also made the palm trees creak slowly as they moved out of heaviness. "tat rat rat tat tat..." would go the sound and it was always misinterpreted as the sound of invisible doors opening and closing slowly. This proximity of the graveyard to the school building inevitably resulted in fueling the imagination of budding story tellers as a result adding chapters to the almanac of the uncanny.

Haunted and spooky tales were whispered along the corridors among small groups of wide eyed girls during the recess. The most horrifying of all tales was that, the whole school was built upon an old cemetery. Ancient graves had been dug up to lay the foundation of the school and the bones thrown away with no regard to the dead. The story was so spun that it was akin to the digging of a huge holocaust grave, letting all the spooky restless ghosts out. The after effect of these stories made any little girl treading the school grounds, miss a heart beat at every twig that snapped underfoot likening it to the crunching of bones. The story tellers always came up with accurate details on where exactly which type of bone was found causing chills to run down one's spine. Any oddly shaped stone that was picked up was immediately named as a bone fossil.

Tales related to ghosts and excorcism was narrated with much ado. When any one found an iron nail sticking out of a tree trunk, hurried whispers on exorcism and how the evil spirit was nailed to the tree, spread like wild fire. Such trees were always cordoned off. No one dared near the tree again. There was even a talk that the skeleton in the physics lab was found in one of these unknown graves that was dug up. You might wonder what a skeleton did in a physics lab. Once upon a time when the school had only the “big” building, the physics and the biology labs were combined in one large room. All the biological specimens like babies in different stages of development in bottles were also placed in the far corner of this room. I always used to wonder about these babies. What would they have grown up into if they had seen life out of their mother’s womb? Why did they have to end up in bottles in our school lab? Why were they all forever frozen in time? Well I always got spooked with these thoughts (even now) that I will let them go for now.

.............. read on in Part II