Estimated reading time — 33 minutes

Let me just begin by saying that even though I’m not the biggest computer geek in the world, or by any means what you would refer to as an “iPad Kid”, being grounded sucks. Having my phone and Xbox taken away wasn’t the worst part of being grounded. However, it certainly wasn’t the best, the worst part was that I was cooped up inside our small townhouse on Halloween. Halloween was never my favorite holiday; however, I did enjoy getting to dress up and be someone else, even if it was just for an afternoon. Once you turn 18 the days of playing pretend are all but gone unless you would like to be the weird kid at school and it was already hard enough to find a girlfriend since the only “sport” I ever played was golf and I was never one much for parties and hookup culture in general, although I had changed my morals on that a few times when some of the cheerleaders started flirting with me at a bonfire this past summer. All that being said, I still enjoyed Halloween for three good reasons: hanging out with my friends, seeing said cheerleaders in costumes my mother would refer to as “unladylike”, and because I had a fascination with scary stories.

Now, maybe it was because my grandfather was the crazy greenskeeper at our local cemetery, or just a morbid fascination and the small adrenaline rush that you get from listening to a story about a man running from the Rougarou in the bayou, but I thoroughly enjoyed a good scary story. It wasn’t uncommon for me to sit and listen to podcasts about ghosts and cryptids while mowing lawns during the summer for extra cash, or to sit down and read one of the dusty H.P. Lovecraft books my parents kept as decoration on the living room book shelf when the power went out and the internet was rendered a relic in my memory.

Halloween had always been a day I looked forward to when the autumn breeze began to blow in off the bayou even though my friends and I had become much too old to trick or treat anymore so our Halloweens mostly consisted of us sneaking into abandoned plantation home ruins or visiting the old mansion downtown that the town turned into a haunted house attraction every fall in the hope that one of our female companions would get frightened enough to hold our hands and make us look and feel like the heroes and characters we were dressed up as. Living in a smaller town in southern Mississippi, you wouldn’t expect the town council to allocate a ton of funds to decorating; however, the town of Leland loved to decorate for the holidays. Halloween always got a little extra attention since it coincided with the anniversary of our town’s main claim to fame, the Battle of Wilted Rose. In 1863, the Union Army had already begun turning the tide of the war. Lee had suffered a defeat at Gettysburg, and while General Grant prepared to push into Northern Virginia, General Sherman was gearing up for his own campaign here in the deeper portions of the South. Now I never paid a ton of attention in history class, not because I didn’t enjoy history, but because my history teacher, Mr. Larame, would only teach history in between venting to his students about his most recent divorce, since his salary wasn’t enough to cover a therapist. Some of the broader details may be wrong because of my lack of attention during Mr. Larame’s budget counseling sessions, but this next part I know is right because it is repeated to every tourist and town citizen every year when they funnel out to the old Wilted Rose Plantation to watch the event of the year.

The story goes that somehow, elements of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry and 9th Pennsylvania cavalry found themselves separated from a main Union force operating nearby. Low on supplies and seeking shelter from a late autumn storm that was beginning to roll in, they began to search for places that could accommodate the some 3,000 union soldiers. While scouting, some of the Union cavalry came upon Wilted Rose Plantation, a 200-acre Greek revival estate located on the banks of the nearby Mad Boar Creek. After the scouts reported back, the main force began to make their way to the plantation; however, unbeknownst to them, the owner of the plantation, Dr. Arther Gardner, made his way into the nearby town of Leland and alerted the Confederate militia known as Remould’s Raiders as to the impending “Invaders” approach. The raiders were a rough group of semi-uniformed guerrilla fighters who often would ambush supply convoys on horseback and ride off with their spoils before a battle could begin. Under the command of Colonel Beauford “Rufus” Remould, they had harassed Union soldiers since the war first came to Mississippi. Rufus supported the confederacy in ways that even Robert E. Lee himself may have found trouble wrapping his head around, so the thought of northern troops being in his hometown gave him a resolve that was unrivaled. The group of 5-600 raiders made their way on horseback to the plantation right at the first northern troops arrived, and started navigating the endless cotton fields, their blue uniforms betraying their locations against a backdrop of endless white.

The raiders began their attack, believing the union force to be much smaller than it was, with union soldiers initially being caught off guard and both sides forming crude linear formations in the cotton field for an archaic exchange of lead and smoke. The initial success the raiders achieved was short-lived, as the main force arrived and union formations cut off the raiders by surrounding the property. Historians widely agree that Rufus initially had an escape route back down the main path they rode in on, however, either through a willingness to make a courageous stand and prevent northern troops from progressing into larger cities or just a tactical error in the heat of battle, he did not take advantage of this opportunity and in minutes the union cavalry had flanked the raiders and truly boxed them in. surrounded, Rufus ordered some of his men to take up positions in the main house on the property while he and the other men continued to slug it out in the open fields. What followed would be less reminiscent of a Civil War battle and more reminiscent of Custer’s last stand. The once spotless white fluff became dripping crimson flowers as sharpshooters picked off men in blue from the house, and the raiders still outside began to switch from their now empty muskets for swords and bayonets. Union forces continued to box in the raiders until Rufus and a dozen or so raiders were all that was left. Seeing no other choice, they retreated into the house and barricaded themselves inside. Hours passed, and frustrated with a lack of surrender and the occasional casualty suffered from a sniper inside the house, the union commanders decided to simply set fire to the old mansion rather than suffer any more losses. It is said that as the flames raged, the men were still taking shots from inside until one by one their guns fell silent. In and ending that could be just as made up as it is true, it is said that old Colonel Rufus himself came out of the house bleeding and burnt still wielding his saber in one hand and his pistol in the other and yelled out to the Union soldiers, “Dixie will never fall, I’ll be back for you Yankee bastards and you’ll pay…”, his words were cut off by the crack of multiple federal rifles before he crumbled to the ground and the plantation house caved in on itself in a fiery hellscape behind where his lifeless body lay.

Having burned their original location for shelter, the remaining Union soldiers made their way into the town of Leland itself, where they would occupy it for the remainder of the war. Given that the Plantations’ main house was destroyed and the slaves who were forced to harvest the endless cotton fields had either been killed in the crossfire or newly freed, the land was now useless in a sense. Since there were now over 2,000 dead men lying across the property, the decision was made to bury the dead of both sides of the conflict on the plantation grounds. In the late 1920s, the grounds were purchased by the town of Leland, which built a mausoleum complete with two stone Confederate guards on either side of the iron gates that led down and into the decorated tomb of Colonel Rufus. The other soldiers had new headstones placed with names on the known graves and regiments and respective sides on those who were unknown. The town also rebuilt the plantation home on the foundation of the old burnt down house and began holding a festival each October 31st to celebrate the battle and Halloween, beginning with a reenactor riding into town to alert the raider reenactors before the crowd and reenactors would make their way to a field adjacent the cemetery to reenact the battle before honoring the dead with a 21 gun salute.

In our town it was tradition to hang out around the festival complete with homemade apple butter, blacksmiths tend, and canvas tents surrounded by reenactors educating visitors on civil war life and antiques before watching the reenactment before the younger kids and their parents would briskly return to town for trick or treating and us older kids and young adults would make our ways to parties or other activities that our parents condemned but most certainly did in their youth. It was for this reason that it wasn’t uncommon for half of the costumes in the town to be Civil War themed, adults and children alike. Even I had rocked General Grant a few times, fake beard and all. This year, however, I was stuck inside after being grounded for a week. Just a few days earlier, my younger sister Emily had her heart ripped out by her boyfriend Dylan. Dylan had apparently decided that Emily and her friend Carrissa looked so similar that he accidentally slept with the wrong girl. It’s an understandable mistake, just like how I accidentally knocked a few of his pretty white teeth out of his broccoli-haired skull after having to console my crying sister. To my sister, I was a hero big brother; however, to my parents, specifically my very religious mother, I was grounded for assaulting someone and not “using my words”. My father, an army vet and blue-collar man through and through, was more proud than upset, but my mother was one adversary he would never win against, despite all his strength. Although I had hopes that my father would be able get me out of being grounded, especially since Dylan’s equally religious parents had decided not to press charges, all hopes of that were dashed when he was given a last minute load to haul to Ohio and had to leave before Halloween, and before my mother had been convinced to unground me. Argue as I might, I finally relented that this Halloween I’d be stuck in our little townhouse.

The first day of being grounded were fine, but after watching the people make their way passed my house and toward the Wilted Rose Plantation the boredom reached its peak and in a desperate attempt to get my mind off of the fun I was missing, I went prowling some of the old stuff in the basement to see if I could find any of my great grandpas old war metals or something of the like. I was met with a lack of luck and a bounty of cobwebs. Running out of options and boxes to look through, I relented to looking in the box of some of my grandpa’s old belongings. My grandfather and I were never really close. We would take pictures at family gatherings, and he would send me money for my birthday and the holidays, but he typically relegated himself to his duties as a greenskeeper at the old Wilted Rose Cemetery. He was fanatical about it, working dawn to dusk and, on some nights, not sleeping at all. He was especially particular about the night of the festival, staying up all night on Halloween with just a lantern and an old 30-30 lever-action rifle to “keep pests away”. He would always say that things “Had to be ready for the night” and that we “didn’t want to upset the colonel”. His commitment to the long-dead colonel and lack of commitment to his family are what made my father decide to join the army after my grandmother died. My grandfather worked in that cemetery until he got sick, and even as the cancer ate away at him, he continued to do his duties and stand his post like one of the old stone statues outside of the mausoleum. Many in the town, myself included, just saw him as the kooky old greenskeeper, even though he always dressed well and appeared normal in outward appearances. The last memory I have of him before the funeral was him calling me to his bedside and handing me an old leatherbound journal with yellowed pages and filled with neat cursive handwriting, while pleading with me to take over his duties and informing me that it was “my job to keep the colonel at bay”. I told him I would and he seemed to calm down, I didn’t mean it but I wasn’t going to distress a dying man in his final moments, the journal ended up in a cardboard box in the basement and even those his words did unsettle me a bit, I chalked them up to the fever causing him to become delirious in his final hours. I almost became a little emotional recalling these memories as I flipped through the diary, not even paying attention to the dates. However, whether it was fate or my morbid enjoyment of creepy stories, one entry was underlined at the top of one of the longest entries in the decaying manuscript of my late grandfather’s life. It simply said, “Something was wrong with the Reenactors today,” and was dated October 31st, 1963. With nothing better to do, I carried the box up to my room and sat by my bedside desk, clicked on the lamp, and began to read my grandfather’s diary.

The following is an excerpt from the Diary:

October 31st, 1963. Something was wrong with the reenactors today. The day started fairly normally. Johnny, Lee, and I had met up at the old dinner in town and were enjoying the milkshakes that a full day of piling and burning brush had allowed us to pay for. We were cutting up and talking about the one thing that mattered to any young country boy this time of year, hunting season. For the last few weeks between school, baseball, and work, all any of us guys wanted to was get in the woods and scout out good spots to hunt when rifle season came in. while we were carrying on our lighthearted conversation I was suddenly drawn to the short dark haired girl that had just walked in with a group of her friends. The girl in question was Elizabeth Madison, but everyone typically called her Lizzy. Lizzy was by far one of the prettiest women I had ever laid eyes on, and she had the best turn of any gal in school. She was friendly to everyone, even the kids who stuck to themselves and were considered to be outcasts. I’ll admit I wanted to ask her out for a long time, but just never could seem to work up the courage; better to not know whether I had a chance than to know I didn’t have one. Not that she wouldn’t let me down easily, she was too nice to break anyone’s heart on purpose; everyone liked Lizzy. Well, almost everyone. The one thing that Lizzy had working against her was the tan she was able to keep almost year-round; most of us kept tans in the Mississippi sun, but Lizzy’s was always a shade darker. To almost everyone, that could go completely unnoticed, but to some who knew why she kept that tan, it made them view her as one of the outcasts she always managed to find the time to carry on a brief conversation with during the day. Lizzy’s father was a descendant of the Cherokee people, and although most of us didn’t care, the town did have some campions of the Lost Cause. A few times, they had given her grief or even shouted insults at her when she didn’t respond to their initial catcalls. Every town has them, but being a southern town that had a major civil war battle take place, we had some true “south will rise again” believers. Although I didn’t have the courage to ask Lizzy on a date, I did have the courage to ask her and her friends to join me and the guys while we finished up our milkshakes and waited for the clock to strike seven pm.

Seven pm is when the rider would make his way into town and shout that the yanks were headed toward the Wilted Rose Plantation before firing his pistol in the air and riding back off. This would be followed by the raider reenactors mounting their horses and riding through town to set up for the main battle while the townsfolk and tourists made their way to the festival grounds. Sure enough when the clock struck seven we ass shuffled our way out of the dinner and onto the sidewalk just in time to watch a man dressed as an antebellum gentlemen ride a horse into the middle of town proclaim his plantation was being invaded, and fire his old black powder pistol in the air leaving a plume of smoke to dance in the temperate air as he rode back to the plantation. Shortly after the “Raiders” mounted their horses, donated by local ranches for the reenactment, and rode off toward the plantation grounds themselves, whooping and hollering the whole way out of town, with the onlookers cheering them on. It was after this that Johnny suggested the girls come with us to watch the reenactment, and much to my excitement, they said yes. We walked with the girls and the rest of the townsfolk to the reenactment grounds, where we picked a spot close to the temporary fence that had been erected to keep audience members off the “battlefield” while the reenactment was going on. What followed next was the same production that had gone on for years now, the battle raged for a little over an hour (minus the plantation burning) and then ended with Colonel Rufus making his proclamation to return to fight the Yankees before being gunned down just outside the main steps to the big house. I hadn’t noticed it until we had begun getting ready to stand up but Lizzy had moved a little closer to me during the show, almost to the point of brushing against my shoulder, when I turned to look she just smiled at me while looking at me with those beautiful dark eyes that I never could hold eye contact with for more than a moment without feeling nervous. I smiled back and then offered to walk her home, which she agreed to. I would love to say I took her home and she thanked me with a kiss before retiring for the evening, but that would be a lie. She did, however, agree to go the next weekend with me and grab something at dinner before going to watch the stars, so I couldn’t have been happier.

On my way back home, I met up with Johnny and Lee and informed them of the date I had secured, and brushed off their inquiries as to whether or not I obtained the kiss I never received. I didn’t tell them I did, but I wasn’t going to tell them I didn’t either; I had a reputation to uphold after all. The guys just laughed it off and poked fun as we walked back through town toward our houses. Right before we rounded the corner to Lee’s house, though, things took a turn for the bizarre. As we turned onto the street, we saw some of the Confederate raider reenactors going door to door with their rifles and ordering people out of their homes. It was strange that this had never been part of the show before. Some of the people seemed confused, while others simply followed the leads of the soldiers, thinking that the reenactment was somehow continuing. The first strange thing we noticed was that they were only asking for the men or teenage boys to go back to the festival grounds, while the women were allowed to stay behind. We were curious, so we continued to walk toward the reenactors and the men who were now making their way back to the plantation. However, as we walked past the men, we realized they looked concerned, almost scared, to be completely honest. Growing up in a small town in the south, it was strange to see men show any emotion other than when they were happy about something or in church on Sunday morning. Many of the men, including mine and Lee’s fathers, had served in World War II and didn’t seem to get spooked easily by anything, yet there they were, walking past us with looks of fear and worry in their eyes. It was enough to get us to stop walking toward the reenactors and begin slowly walking back the way we had originally come. Even though we had stopped our advance, we had already gotten close enough to see some of the reenactors accompanying the men back to the battlegrounds, and let me tell you, they were strange.

The men looked the same as they had only a few hours before, all except for two factors: the first was that the men appeared to be in a trance. Meaning they looked as though they weren’t in control of their own bodies, but you wouldn’t notice it unless you looked at them for a long second, or they made certain movements, like how their elbows didn’t quite flex when they moved their arms, or how their heads turned just a little too quickly. The other, frankly more unsettling, detail was their eyes. They didn’t glow like in the movies or when people told us stories of monsters, but when the streetlights hit them, they reflected a bright greenish yellow like when a deer got caught in the headlights of dad’s truck. When they walked through the shadows, though, their eyes had the same distant stare that my dad and some of the other older guys in town had when the anniversary of certain battles came up. I had never been as unsettled as I was at that exact moment; they were still the same reenactors, somewhere even members of the community, but something was just wrong. The best way to describe it was like watching a bunch of guys whose lights were on, but no one was home. It was at this point that the guys and I began to pick up the pace in our retreat. What happened next began the most terrifying night of my life. One of the men down the street, Mr. Quillen, began protesting against being pulled out of his home. Some of the raiders began to pull at his arms as if his words just bounced off their blank faces.

Eventually, angered and tired of negotiating peacefully, he shoved a raider off of him and began to walk back inside. That is when the shot rang out. I can still hear that first shot. When the reenactor leveled his musket and fired, the smoke that came out was a dark black instead of the normal white smoke left by black powder rifles, and the sound that followed was a gunshot, but accompanied by the sound of a dozen demented souls screaming as if escaping hell itself. At first, I thought the scream came from Mr. Quillen, but when he hit the ground and then stood back up awkwardly with a new blank expression strewn across his face, I second-guessed. That is when Johnny yelled, “What the hell man!”, followed by Lee yelling at us to “Go! Go!”, before I felt his hand grab me, and we all started running. Some of the men also began to run, and some turned to fight off the reenactors. That’s when more of the haunting gunshots rang out, and I realized the demented screams were coming from the barrels of the muskets, not the lungs of the victims. We ran faster than we had ever run, even during our district football match. I hadn’t seen Lee run as fast as he had then. All the while, we had black smoke trailing “bullets” streaking past us and ghostly wails each time a shot was fired.

We turned the street corner running full tilt, and I yelled at the other guys to make their way toward downtown and where the police station was, especially since we figured it would be faster than trying to get in contact with an operator and get connected with the police. We ran for what felt like forever, occasionally having to change streets due to the reenactors that were marching from door to door and either walking the townsfolk back to the battleground or opening fire with demonic muskets. When we finally made it to the police station, Johnny and I both bent over double at the door, gasping for air, and Lee decorated the bushes with the contents of his stomach. After a brief moment, we burst through the doors only to find that the sheriff’s office was completely empty. Although we hesitated at first, we began to look around the station for any sign of a police officer or Sheriff Remould and found absolutely nobody, even the cells were empty. The guns were all missing from the armory, so we all came to the conclusion that they had already been made aware of the situation and were going to combat it. We sat in the station for some time, but after twenty minutes or so, we grew bored and concerned for our families. Johnny’s house was the closest, being only a block away, so we quietly made our way toward his place to make sure everything was in order. When we rounded the corner, though, the door was ajar and Johnny’s mother was sitting on the porch crying, her sobs turning from grief and fear to joy when she saw Johnny approaching.

“Ma, what happened?” he asked, trying to choke down tears of his own.

She responded in broken sobs, “They took him, they just took him, the neighbors fought, and they did something to them, I don’t know, possessed them or something.” She just slumped back to the porch and continued crying.

Johnny went inside and, after a moment, came out with a lever-action 30-30 rifle and a revolver his dad had given him two summers ago.

“Hey man, what the hell are you doing?” Lee asked, but Johnny simply responded by telling us he was going to get his father and the others and that he would be back.

“Well, you aren’t going alone man, we’ve got your back man.” I didn’t want to go but I reassured him anyway.

“Alright, here.”, Johnny said, handing me the rifle before he turned to his mother and said, “I’ll be back Ma, I’ll bring Pa with me.”.

She reached out as if to stop him, but she was so weak from crying that it did little good, and before I knew it, we were off and headed toward the battlegrounds.

The journey to the old battleground didn’t take nearly as long as I would have liked, but Johnny seemed as eager to get there as anything. We made a brief stop at Lee’s house on the edge of town to grab binoculars and a backpack, and he kept a large buck knife along with other survival gear. When we started to get closer, four green-yellow dots appeared near the gate leading to the festival grounds. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that these were guards, so we decided to work our way around the rear of the property across the creek and up a hill with a better view. We had to stop twice to let groups of raiders and townsfolk that had been “possessed,” as Johnny’s mother put it, before we eventually made our way to the top of the hill and hunkered down. Lee began scanning the field with his binoculars, trying to assess the situation before us.

“What do you see? Come on man, what is it?” Johnny asked with impatience in his voice.

“It looks like an old camp, they have a couple of fires, looks like there is a line leading to the big house, and some lines forming or…”, his words were cut off as I could see his eyes widen. “Christ save us.”, he murmured.

“What is it dude?” I asked, he said nothing, just handed me the binoculars, and pointed just outside the old mausoleum.

I can’t do what I saw justice to what I saw by just describing it here, but here’s the best I’ve got: sitting atop a black horse was what I can only describe as a half rotten half skeletal corpse in a cavalry officers’ uniform, an old saber by his side giving orders to the men around him. When I say giving orders, I don’t mean verbally; he simply pointed a rotten hand and they followed, some were in confederate uniforms, some in union uniforms, and some civilians armed with modern rifles. One of the most disturbing parts, though, was that his eyes were glowing; he wasn’t like the others, where light was reflected, his eyes gave off their own light. Behind him, the iron doors to the mausoleum were left wide open. I could not believe what I was seeing. I had heard ghost stories and even seen the “Night of the Living Dead” picture with some of the guys, but that stuff can’t be real, can it? In a span of seconds, looking at the Colonel, or what was left of him, I questioned everything I had ever known about this world. I felt my head start to spin and dropped the binoculars. I have never been so afraid that I’ve almost blacked out, but I was struggling to pull air into my lungs at that moment, and the dark forest around me was somehow getting darker. I was pulled out of this episode by Johnny leaning over me to take a look for himself. Based on the horrified look he gave, he saw the same thing I had. None of us said a word. What could you say after seeing something like that? Johnny was the first to speak up again, “I don’t know what the hell that thing is, but the soldiers are coming out of the big house, whatever is going on, is going on there.”. Before Lee or I could speak, he was making his way down the hill and toward the plantation home. We followed behind whispering for him to wait up. By the time we caught up, he was already sneaking from headstone to headstone, trying to get close enough to see through one of the windows of the large house. I thought for sure that we would be caught, but by some miracle, or curse, we made it to the side of the house unseen and took a peek inside. It looked like something from a movie, a man in an officers uniform sat at a desk and the townsfolk lined up in front, when they reached the desk they either signed their name in the book and were handed a weapon and let out toward the gruesome colonel, or were escorted to another room by some of the possessed raiders nearby. After about ten or so men entered, the muffled sound of demonic gunfire could be heard, and a new batch of possessed townspeople would walk out and be handed their rifles before making their way to the colonel as well.

“It looks like they are building an army.”, Lee whispered.

“Yeah, but why man?” I responded. “Nothing good, it can’t be.”, Johnny remarked before quietly gasping and whispering, “Dad?”.

In the room, Johnny’s father stood in line waiting for his turn to approach the table, but before we had a chance to even begin to formulate a plan, Lee yelled, “Oh shit, go man go!” as a raider rounded the side of the house and leveled off his musket. We rounded the house just in time to hear the wailing soul of a bullet go screeching past as the other soldiers became aware that we had infiltrated their operations. More rounds moaned by as we zig-zagged through the headstones in the cemetery, along with the sound of zipping bullets from what sounded like regular rifles.

“We won’t make it to the tree line!” Lee yelled.

“The mausoleum, we can hide there, go!” Johnny yelled.

We ran fast toward the large stone monument that led downward into what was formerly the colonel’s crypt, before finally flying through the iron doors and almost falling down the stairs. We hunkered down and raised our guns, waiting for the men to come through the door at any time, but the men seemed to go past us, and the other quickly lost interest and returned to forming battle lines. After some time, we backed further into the tomb, trying to form a plan to get out of this stone prison we had trapped ourselves in. That’s when we noticed it, even though we had no lights, it was not dark in the tomb as it should have been. As we worked our way down the stairs, we found what looked like a ritual site. Around the now-empty crypt, there were dozens of lit candles and symbols, and hung above the tomb was a large glass mirror. This mirror wasn’t reflective, though; it seemed fogged, but as though it was fogged from the inside, as if the air on the back of the mirror was somehow hotter than the crypt we were standing in.

“What is this place?” Lee said.

“I don’t know, man, but I’d rather take my chances with whatever those things outside are than whatever cult shit is going on down here.”, I said.

“We can’t go out there, those things are looking for us man.”, Johnny said.

“Well, are we just going to rot down here then? Because unless you have some better idea, going back out is the only way we don’t stay down here until they find us anyway.”, I tried to reason with him.

“Well, if we walk back out there, then they are going to kill us.”, Johnny barked back.

“Now why would we do that?” a new voice joined the conversation, causing us to all turn around, guns raised. “Whoa there, easy boys, I don’t mean you no harm, put those things down before someone gets hurt.”

It was Sheriff Remould standing halfway down the stairs to the tomb. Although I knew something was wrong, it felt even more wrong to point the sights of a rifle at a police officer, especially Sheriff Remould. He was an average-sized, well-built man with a friendly disposition and was often very involved in the community, which is why he won election so quickly despite his young age, only 30 years old. Even given the stress of the situation, I’ll admit I relaxed a bit at the sight of a police officer; however, Johnny didn’t seem to be relaxing. If anything, he seemed more on edge.

“What is going on?” Johnny demanded, “What are those things?”.

“Johnny son, put that pistol down and let’s talk like gentlemen, I assure you I’ll answer all your questions if you get that barrel out of my face.”, the sheriff replied, still holding his calm, friendly demeaner.

Johnny lowered his gun, although he was still visibly tense. Apparently satisfied with this, he kept his bargain, “Listen, son, those things as you called them are the same as you and me, they are just men who are doing their duty to their country.”.

I chimed in with my own comment, “That thing on the horse isn’t like you and me, not even close.”.

“The Colonel?”, the sheriff laughed, “Yes, he can be quite frightening, but he is serving his purpose, he is leading these fine men in restoring a proud and prosperous confederacy.”.

Johnny raised his gun again and said, “So that’s what this is, turn everyone into mindless slaves to some lost cause?”.

The sheriff kept his voice calm but raised his hands slightly, “Not lost son, just forgotten. The South could be as great as it once was with an army to take it back; these Yankee bastards have ruined it piece by piece, and I can abide by that no longer. The federals burnt our home, made our southern lands bleed, but we will take back what is rightfully ours, piece by piece, and we need an army for that. I have left the women and children alone. I don’t want harm to come to these good people; I want to see them prosper in a new, better nation. Even the men are given a choice, they can enlist willingly or be drafted, how is it any different than what the federal government has done for the last hundred years?”.

Johnny responded by reaffirming his grip on this revolver and saying, “You’re shooting people to ‘draft’ them, turning them into mindless shells.”.

The sheriff responded calmly again, “The colonel needs men, his passion for the cause was strong enough to bring him back, but his men did not have enough spark to them. Now he needs a new army, so we open the doors for the souls, and the rifles weaken the bodies for possession. We aren’t killing these good people, just using them to help us achieve our greater goals. Even though you boys have caused a ruckus, we don’t want harm to come to you. If you hand over those weapons, we will let you return home, after all, you young men are the future of the confederacy.”.

Even though none of us wanted to turn our guns over, we knew that there really wasn’t any room to argue; if we did, we would probably just end up being one of those things outside, or worse. With seemingly no other way out, Johnny lowered his gun, and we both handed our weapons over to the sheriff and nervously stood back waiting to see what happened.

The sheriff smiled and stood aside and motioned us out, saying, “See you boys have good heads on your shoulders, y’all run on home now, them boys outside won’t hurt you none so long as you don’t cause them any trouble.”.

With that, we quickly ran up and out of the mausoleum and quickly made our way back toward town, a few of the soldiers following behind us. When we got almost to the edge of town Johnny whispered to us, “When I tell you, run toward the tree line to the left.”, and before I could argue he shouted, “Now!”, and we took off tormented souls sounding off behind us as the soldiers tried to ass us to their ranks. We ran and we ran quickly, sprinting through the forest until we were sure that we had lost them.

“Great, what now man? We have no guns, and even if we did, it might not do anything. The police are useless, and we have no idea how to stop any of them.” I stumbled.

Johnny seemed to think for a bit before responding, “You still have your rifles at home, we can go get those and then try and figure something out.”.

“We don’t even know if a gun will do anything.”, I responded.

“Well, having a gun and not knowing if it works is better than not having one at all.”, Lee chimed in.

He was right, and after relenting, we made our way carefully to my house and snuck in through the back window. I didn’t want to upset my mother, so I quickly gathered my deer rifle and then headed back out. Thankfully, Lee still had his backpack with matches and a small lantern dangling on the side. The town was crawling with soldiers, so we made our way back into the forest and began walking back toward the hill overlooking the plantation so we could plot our next move. We stopped short of the hill and took a rest by some fallen trees. This felt like it was the longest night of my life. Lee’s watch had already read 11:22 pm, and it was beginning to feel like there would be nothing we could do.

“How are we going to do anything about this?” Lee asked.

“We could break that mirror, maybe that will shut whatever door the sheriff was talking about.”, Johnny said.

“Or open the door even wider.”, I said.

We sat for a few more moments before Lee came up with an idea, “The sheriff said that the rifles weakened the people they shot and opened them up for possession, maybe if we got some holy water or something, we could force whatever was possessing them out.”.
Johnny considered it before speaking, “It could work, only problem is they could be possessed again as soon as we helped them, and God knows how many more soldiers they’ve already got; the church doesn’t have that much holy water so we will have to use it well.”.

“What if we hit the colonel with it, the sheriff said he needed new men, maybe if we stop him whatever door the sheriff used him to open will close.”.

The guys shook their heads in agreement. We knew it might not work, but it was better than doing nothing at all. So, with our new plan in motion, we made our way to the rustic old church at the end of my street, gathered what holy water we could, and made our move.

Lee and I made our way through the forest and back up to the small observation post we had set up over the hill, looking down over the battlefield. Lee took his binoculars again and we both watched over the ever-growing ranks of possessed soldiers below, me with the scope of the bolt-action hunting rifle I had taken from my house, and Lee with the binoculars. Johnny had branched off to do his own part of our little makeshift operation, which he had agreed would be him joining the ranks in an effort to get close to the colonel, while Lee and I were supposed to find some way to distract the troops and allow Johnny to get close. Finally, we saw Johnny begin to join the formation, and Lee and I took this as a sign to begin doing our part. We decided that our distraction would best be used in the form of targeting the ritual site, which appeared to be where whatever was taking the people over was coming from. With a couple of old dishrags and some water in my old hunting canteen, we quickly made our way to the mausoleum and found the iron door had been locked.

“This isn’t good man. Do you know how to pick the lock?” Lee asked.

“Hell no, do you?”, I returned.

“Not a clue, but we can’t just stand here; we have to do something.”

Lee was right about that, so I did the only thing that I could think to do to get us in that crypt in a hurry. The rifles report and the sound of the heavy metal lock hitting the ground is one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard in my life, not because it was any louder than any other time I have shot that gun, but because I heard every single soldier on that field shift to their attention towards me and lee the second the shot rang out. For the faintest of moments, nothing happened, just several blank glowing eyes staring back into my own. It is an image I will never forget as long as I live, and what I heard next, I know for certain I will never forget either. The Colonel’s weathered saber slowly slid from its scabbard as he pointed it directly at me and Lee. He then spoke, if you could call it that, in what I can only describe as a mixture of multiple people trying to talk at once in a large gym where the echo bounces off the walls and feels like waves in the ocean hitting you again and again. “Kill…Them…”, came his haunting voice as multiple cries and shrieks of hellish rage and delight filled the air. Just like that, it seemed like every single soldier, at least those possessed, ran toward us in one motion, covering ground much faster than they should have been able to. Lee swung the iron door open, and we rushed inside, but just as I turned to slam the door behind us, I could feel one of the soldiers’ unnaturally strong hands grip my left arm. I turned to see Johnny’s father standing there, eyes glistening with hatred and joy at the same time. The blank expression was gone, but it had been replaced by something you’d expect to see plastered on the face of a mental patient. My rifle was still in my right hand, and I raised it up to the figure that was once a man who had welcomed me into his home and taught me and Johnny how to fix our bicycles when the chains would slip. The thought that the man before me was still a human and might be just under some kind of spell or influence made me hesitate, but friend or not, I knew in that moment, he was not Johnny’s father; he was something else. I placed the barrel of the rifle on the shoulder of the arm that was gripping mine and fired. An awful red and white mist sprayed from the man I’d once known. I hadn’t killed him, but the 30-06 rifle had damn near blown his arm off. It didn’t stop him long, but it caused him to let go long enough for me to get away and slam the door shut. I tied the chains back the best I could and hoped beyond hope that it would stall the animals at the other side long enough for Johnny to do his part. The soldiers seemed to fumble with the chain and began using their weight to try to smash the door open. The ones against the door were breaking their own bones, being pushed into the heavy iron doors over and over. Lee and I quickly began washing the symbols off the crypt and surrounding walls, the best we could. Thankfully, the crypt was far enough down that the demonic bullets that were howling out of the soldiers’ muskets in frustration weren’t hitting us; nevertheless, we worked frantically to do as much as we could as quickly as we could. Suddenly, we noticed that the banging had stopped; the silence was more frightening than I could have imagined. Then the sounds of chains being rattled together and discarded could be heard before a creaking iron door swung open and footsteps methodically made their way down the stone stairs. I raised the deer rifle in my hands as the sheriff walked into view, his own gun drawn on us.

“You two, you just couldn’t let well enough be, could you? All I am trying to do is make the south into what it once was, what it could’ve been, and y’all are doing your best to mess it up!” his friendly demeaner was now completely gone.

“I tried to let you boys see the truth, tried to let you be a part of something great, but I see my kindness has been viewed as weakness, I will not let you take this victory from my family again!”, he said as he raised his pistol and fired at Lee as he tried to duck out of the way.

The bullet struck Lee in his right forearm; the entry wound was relatively small, but the exit of the bullet left a gaping hole and crushed bone visible. Pulling myself out of the shock of Lee’s screams, I raised my rifle as the sheriff’s gun turned toward me, but right before he shot, a deafening scream bellowed out from somewhere outside the mausoleum. What I was hoping for at the time but didn’t know until later is that this was the moment that, in the confusion of trying to stop Lee and me, Johnny had gotten close enough to swing the glass lantern filled with holy water over the Colonel’s back and cause him to cry out. I never saw any of this, but when Johnny described it to me later, he stated that the glow of the Colonel’s eyes flickered after the holy water hit him, and a black mass was seemingly pulled away from the corpse that sat atop his horse. What I did see, though, was the Sheriff turn back to me with his pistol after hesitating, but right as he fired, a black mass shouldered him enough to send the round into the wall behind me. When I flinched and fired off a bullet of my own that hit the Sheriff right above his left knee and caused him to crumble to the ground for a moment. Then came the wind. When you live in Mississippi as long as I have, you know the difference between the wind of a passing thunderstorm and the wind off of a hurricane that has hit the coast. The wind that ran down that staircase felt as though I was the main target of the largest hurricane the state had ever seen. Even over the wind, I could hear the screaming, the same demonic, tortured screams that had sounded off from the muskets of those things outside. Black shapes flew down the stairs before violently being pulled into the mirror behind us. Hundreds of them flew past us and into the mirror, which seemed to shake enough to shatter, yet somehow it held together.

“What the hell have you done!” yelled the Sheriff, “You’ve ruined everything!” he shouted.

I looked at Lee, who had now passed out on the floor, most likely from shock or blood loss. Eventually, the wind blew the candles completely out, and whatever light we had in the crypt was gone. Then suddenly, the wind stopped. Next thing I knew, I was waking up tent and it was daylight outside. My mother and father were next to me and embraced me when I began trying to sit up. I was very confused, so I began asking them about everything that had gone on, and Pa just assured me that everything would be okay. I have not seen Johnny or Lee yet, but I will write again as soon as I do.

November 4th, 1963.
It has been a few days since everything happened, and somehow, things have gotten even stranger. I’ll start by saying that shortly after my last entry, I was able to find Johnny. I was so happy that he was okay that we really didn’t talk that much about what had happened. Mine and his main focus became finding Lee. After asking around, we found out that Lee had been sent to the local hospital. When we got there, he was still unconscious, he had lost a lot of blood, and it would be another day or so before we got to talk to him. The weird part is our stories all seemed to have slightly different details. For example, Lee remembers the eyes of the possessed soldiers being a different color, and Johnny swore that the Colonel wasn’t a corpse, but a human like the others, just one that seemed possessed. As strange as this seemed, our stories mostly lined up. The other strange thing is that by the time I had woken up in the large tent on the festival grounds, the area was swarmed with FBI agents and other men in black suits. Although it took them a few days, the men in suits would eventually pull each of us aside and ask us to recount the night’s events and describe how we felt. They then ran a series of what they called “medical and psychological” tests on us, before letting us be on our way. Johnny’s father was found badly bleeding but alive. They saved his arm but suspect we will never regain full function of it. I was worried Johnny would be upset with me after this, but he understood and actually seemed thankful I had wounded his father instead of shooting him fatally. Not everyone was as fortunate, though; many people had been found dead throughout the town and surrounding area. Some of the townsfolk apparently put up resistance that led to some of the reenactors being fatally shot. For the most part, many of those affected simply don’t remember anything past the reenactors acting strangely. Some of the deputies were also found dead behind the police station, probably those who went against the sheriff. As for the sheriff, no one ever reported seeing him. They followed a blood trail for a time but lost it at the creek. It is believed he has skipped town, although they are still looking for him. Things moved quickly, the bodies were buried, and the colonel’s remains, which were found outside the crypt, were taken away to be studied for some time before being reentered in the mausoleum, although the mausoleum itself was reinforced with thicker doors. To my knowledge, the mirror was taken away by some of the men in suits, and no one has seen it since it was loaded onto a truck. Officially, the story that was released in the paper said that there had been some contamination of the local water supply that had caused mass hallucinations and sporadic behavior by the townsfolk, which led to the incident. This hardly explains what has happened, but for our sakes, the guys and I have kept quiet about it. Apart from being followed by those guys in suits, my father warned me that similar individuals had been present around some of the bases in Kentucky following some incident with a fighter pilot called Mantell, who had crashed. My father simply told me that a lot of the guys who asked questions ended up losing their jobs and being labeled crazy. I don’t want to end up in the loony bin, so I think I’m going to take his advice. After all, I don’t see how understanding what happened is going to make me feel any better. I do feel like I have a duty to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The sheriff is still out there somewhere, and I’ve got to make sure that he doesn’t come back and try this all over again. For now, I’m just happy that everyone seems to be mostly okay, and I thank God for that.

End of Diary Excerpt.

After closing my grandfather’s diary, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of it had been true at all, or just the made-up story of some old kook. I flipped through the pages, trying to skim what information I could. Lee would end up recovering and stayed close with my grandfather; he is still alive as a matter of fact, although he always told everyone in town that the scar came from a hunting accident when he was younger. Johnny would go on to become a lieutenant in the army, but sadly, he never would return from his second deployment to Vietnam in the late 60s. My grandmother’s name was Elizabeth, so I guess my grandpa left quite the impression of Lizzy. As far as the timeline goes, my grandfather started working as the caretaker for the battlefield cemetery in the late 60s, where he remained until the cancer confined him to his bed. Looking through the rest of his stuff, there were countless books on the paranormal, UFOs, and several books on the MKUltra experiments conducted by the CIA. As outlandish as the story is, I figured it would be important to share it for a number of reasons. One is that it is simply entertaining, especially to someone who already takes an interest in the paranormal. Second is that even though my grandfather may have been a strange man, I can’t help but feel like I should’ve listened to him and taken his spot as caretaker, although the job had already been filled by an older gentleman from out of town. However, I’d say it won’t be long before the job is open again as the new guy, if you could call him that, isn’t exactly a spring chicken, especially with the way he limps around on his cane. The final reason is that when I snuck to look at my phone and text my friends, my buddy Alex had sent me a series of messages asking where I was or if I would be allowed out of the house at any point, but the most recent message and most chilling simply read, “Hey man, you should be here dude somethings up with the reenactors.”. Even now, as the raiders have begun making their way past my house and out toward the festival grounds, I am starting to notice that the reenactors in my town are acting strange.

Credit: DarkLaw28