Old Tully Cuthbert
It was Epiphany. Snow fell thickly over the graveyard among the trees and on the narrow path designed for biers–not hearses. We parked and walked back towards the older headstones that leaned uniformly toward the path from the subsiding bank rising on the right, among tree roots frozen by time and this bitter chill. Tall conifers scraped the heavy sky and ivy tangled, clinging on to everything for dear life amid dead leaves–so picturesque.
I took my camera out and snapped the scene.
Quite without warning my spouse pushed me to one side and sprang to the other.
“What are you doing, pushing me?”
“I thought I heard a carriage, a–a cart or something coming from behind but…”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“It really felt real. Spooked me.”
“You don’t believe in that sort of thing.”
There was a sudden flurry and beating wings among the greenery.
“There, you see?” I said. “It’s just wood pigeons squabbling.”
“I expect they don’t like the snow.”
“And nor do I.”
The place was utterly deserted as we trudged to the grave we’d come to visit and laid our wreath–a little late this year because of severe weather. We didn’t linger for the cold, but returned immediately to the car, glad to sit in heated comfort again. The snow fell heavier as we drove off, the air a thin white gruel of it.
The carriage came from nowhere, its pallid lamp alight. It looked a few hundred years out of time. There was no place to pass.
“Oh, God!” I shuddered and spoke the words aloud.
I saw the horse’s hooves crash through the bonnet and my heart lurched. I covered my face with my hands but the apparition passed straight through us.
“What the blazes is wrong with you?” said my husband, braking hard due to my reaction.
“I–nothing,” I said. He hadn’t seen it. It wasn’t real. “It was nothing. It’s just–spooky here, like you said.”
“Well, don’t ever do that to me again!”
Upon returning home I uploaded the photo I’d taken. There on the photograph, a yellow orb above a certain headstone–I had seen no light.
“What do you suppose that is?” I asked my husband.
“Trick of the light,” he said and looked away.
I told him what I’d seen.
I had to know whose grave–but not any time soon. I walked over the new spring grass, admiring the resurrected snowdrops until I reached that grave–the one with the light. . I was wearing a cross. I never wear a cross, but today I did. It looked peaceful and benign today in bright sunshine.
The headstone read:
Tully Cuthbert
Undertaker of this parish
who departed this life on
6th January
ANNO DOMINI 1812.
Two hundred years to the day the photo was taken.

