Trick or Treat!

Since I wasn't able to do much this year for Halloween due to it being midterm season I decided to treat myself by attending the Haunted NYC: Gravesend Cemetery event hosted by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation this past Sunday. Located on Gravesend Neck Road and McDonald Avenue Gravesend Cemetery is one of the oldest cemeteries in New York City and it is never open to the public so it sounded like a great idea to get a tour of it, even if it was at night time. I arrived prepared with a flashlight at 7:00 pm sharp and was greeted by a large crowd of about fifty people all waiting to get inside. Word had sure gotten around about the event! The park ranger in charge was already there and was busy getting everyone to sign in. When this was done she opened the gates without much ceremony and we followed her to the center of the cemetery. The actual cemetery is not very big but since it is not crowded with occupants (or at least gravestones) it was quite easy to walk around without tripping on anything. The ranger let us to the center and once we had all surrounded her in a circle she proceeded to flip through some printed pages for quite some time looking for a story to tell... This was no tour of the graveyard but rather a ghost story telling hour which would have been fine except the ranger tended to read the stories as if she was in class giving a book report. Maybe she should have rehearsed her stories in advance. Needless to say once the excitement of being in a cemetery at night had worn off the event didn't have much else to offer. Bored, I started to flash the light at the gravestones curious to see if I would recognize some historical names. Being nightime and having poor eye sight I started moving away from the crowd to get a closer read. Unfortunately there was no hint of any ghostly apparitions and most of the gravestones I approached had been wiped clean by the elements. I did see next to a stone that someone had left their lighter behind. After about ten minutes of this there was one angry ranger (who in all fairness had asked people not to wander off) who told me and several other people who had followed in my footsteps that we had to leave. And that was that.