Your True Tales
November 2004 – Page 9

Strange Cemetery Incident
by Maggie

This is an interesting thing that happened to my first husband back in 1972 when we were college students at Eastern Michigan University. He and his best friend often called each other by the code names Frank Brainard and Buzz Murdock – two TV characters from the old series "Route 66." My husband's code name was Buzz Murdock.

Near campus was a huge, old, pretty cemetery that was wooded and hilly and overlooked the Huron River. We often took walks through there and liked to examine the old grave markers. Late one afternoon, my husband returned to our apartment and said he had an odd experience. He had decided to take a walk through the cemetery after class and happened upon a spot he'd not seen before that had an old stone chair that was sculpted to look like a tree trunk that had been carved into a chair. He sat down in it and was quietly contemplating being in the woods when he felt himself slipping into a meditative state. (We had both practiced a lot of meditation at the time.) When he came out of it, he was quite surprised to realize that a good two hours had slipped by and he was absolutely certain he had not fallen asleep. He kept saying he had felt like he was in deep meditation, but it was more than that and very difficult to describe.

Intrigued, I asked him to take me to the spot the next day. He found it again with very little trouble. I sat down in the stone chair and looked around. My eyes settled on a grave marker about eight feet in front of the chair. I gasped.

The first surprise was the family name on the marker was "Murdock." The grave belonged to a little girl who had died at the age of 11 in the 1860s, and the second surprise was the date of her death: July 20 – my husband's birthday.

My husband swore he did not see that grave marker the day before and was as surprised as I was. Was his strange, long meditative state somehow connected with the shared name of Murdock and the shared date of July 20 – her death and his birth?

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