The United States of America, where the most horror films are filmed, is also the leader in the number of urban legends with an “afterlife” bias.
One of them tells of a young man returning home from a party late at night. On the way, he notices a young girl in a long white dress on the roadside and gives her a lift. Noticing that the stranger is trembling from the cold, the young man invites her to put on his jacket. Arriving at the girl's house, he opens the door to help her out, and then notices that his fellow traveler has disappeared. In the end, our hero decides that she just ran into the house.
The next day, the young man remembers that his new acquaintance forgot to return his jacket. He goes to her home and meets the girl's mother there, who says that her daughter died in a car accident 10 years ago. She shows him her daughter's grave. His jacket is on the tombstone.
Another variant. At night, a young man, very drunk, returns home from a bar. He tries to catch the car, and in the end some girl offers him a lift. The stranger calls her name and brings it to her home. In the morning he wakes up at the grave. The name of the same girl is engraved on the headstone.
In some versions of the legend, the girl suddenly disappears from the car near the cemetery, and the driver notices his jacket on one of the tombstones, which he had just lent her. Sometimes he gets to the house of the parents of the deceased and sees pictures of her, in which she is depicted in the same dress in which he met her.
Another option. A group of youngsters go for a car ride in a car belonging to the father of one of them. On the way, they come across a girl, and they offer to give her a lift.
The stranger sits in the back seat between two guys. At one of the intersections, she asks to drop her off, but the idiots have other plans. The girl raises a cry and suddenly begins to decompose right before our eyes … Unlucky adventurers jump out of the car in horror. There is no corpse in it, but everything is saturated with the smell of decay.
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Some even mention the name of the ghost - Mary from Resurrection. Legend has it that Mary, a resident of Chicago, died in a car accident in 1934, returning from a dance evening, and was buried in the Resurrection Cemetery. Since 1939, the ghost of a beautiful blonde woman with blue eyes, dressed in a ball gown, began to appear in the vicinity of Chicago.
Sometimes she tries to jump onto the hood of a passing car, provoking an accident, sometimes she stops the car and asks for a ride to a nightclub. It usually ends up with her and the car driver spending the night at the club.
Shortly before dawn, the girl asks to take her home, but does not give the exact address, but says that she must go along Anker Avenue to the north. When the car passes the Voskresenskoye cemetery, the driver suddenly sees that his passenger begins to melt and, finally, dissolves into thin air.
The second most popular among "cemetery" horror stories is the legend of a spirit with a hook that watches over late visitors in the cemetery and slits their throats.
Here is one such story. The guy brings the girl to the cemetery and tells her a story about a ghost with a hook. The girl, frightened, asks him to take her home. When they drive up to the house, the young man comes out first and sees that a hook hangs from the car door handle.
Another story is much more bloody. It all starts the same way: a young couple arrives at the cemetery to have sex right in the car. At this time, a message was broadcast on the radio that a maniac killer escaped from a nearby mental hospital. The lovers decide to leave this place, but the engine will not start.
The guy goes for help, but the girl stays in the car. After some time, the girl hears something scratching on the roof of the car. She thinks they are tree branches.
Her lover never appears, but a police car drives up to the cemetery. The police officer approaches the girl, tells her to get out of the car and walk towards him without looking back. But, of course, the curious girl looks around and sees her boyfriend: his body is hanging from a tree, his throat is cut from ear to ear, and the fingers of the dead man's hands are scratching the roof of the car.
Another legend, already purely modern. One night a phone rings in an elderly woman's apartment. When she picks up the phone, she hears the voice of her deceased husband. He doesn't say anything, only moans, as if from terrible pain. The widow hangs up, but the call is repeated. Until the morning she cannot close her eyes. The next morning she goes to the cemetery and finds out that at night the wind cut off the telephone wire, and its scraps fell on her husband's grave.
And here is an even more creepy story. A young man or girl decides on a bet to spend the night in the cemetery crypt. An alternative option - the hero needs to go through a rite of passage into a secret society of youth. The next morning he is found lost his mind, with gray hair. No one will ever know what happened at night.
Another variation of the same legend. Most often, the heroine is female for some reason. She spends the night at a grave with a tombstone in the form of an angel or an elderly woman with outstretched hands, and in the morning she is found dead in the arms of a stone statue. Sometimes there is no damage to the body of the deceased, sometimes she sits on the knees of the statue with broken ribs.
Black Angels
By the way, about the tombstones. Two eerie legends are associated with the so-called black angels. Both of these angel statues are located in Iowa, but in different cemeteries.
One of the statues, with bronze and gold plating, eight and a half feet high, was installed in 1912 at Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City.
The tombstone was commissioned by a certain Teresa Feldevert, an obstetrician by profession, who emigrated to America from Bohemia.
The monument, designed by Bohemian artist Mario Korbel, was intended for the grave where the ashes of her son and husband lay. The first died in 1891, the second in 1911. Teresa herself died in 1924 and was also buried "under an angel."
Soon the surface of the monument began to gradually darken, and within a few years its color became completely black. Perhaps this happened as a result of the oxidation of the metal, but they also talked about mystical reasons. So, one of the legends says that the members of the Feldevert family either committed many sins or practiced witchcraft.
No wonder the head and wings of the angel are lowered down, and not up, as usual. Another legend tells that on the night after Teresa's funeral, lightning hit the tombstone, so it turned black. The third - that Teresa swore on her husband's grave, that she would be faithful to him until his death, and if she cheated, then let the angel turn black … Apparently, she still did not keep her vow.
Finally, the most terrible legend is that Teresa killed her son (according to the official version, he died of meningitis at the age of 20). And the angel turned black, because he could not bear the burden of her sin …
Gloomy beliefs are also associated with this monument. For example, if a girl kisses the feet of a black angel on a full moon, then in six months she will die. Another variation of the same belief: if you touch an angel on Halloween night, you will die in seven years. And if you kiss an angel directly on the lips, it will supposedly cause instant cardiac arrest.
Council Bluffs has Fairview Cemetery, one of the oldest in the area. Once there were Indian burials, then the cemetery became the property of the Mormon community.
Around 1919, an angel memorial appeared at the grave of Ruth Ann Doge, wife of General Grenville M. Doge, a Civil War veteran and chief engineer of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Ruth died in 1916. On the eve of her death, she had visions in which a beautiful being - an angel - handed her a vessel with the water of immortality.
Mrs Doge's daughters, Anna and Eleanor, turned to the famous American sculptor Daniel Chester French, ordering him to sculpt an angel statue that would exactly match their mother's dying descriptions.
The order was completed. In the hand of the angel is a vase-fountain, constantly filled with water. After the consecration of the monument in 1920, quotations from the Bible were knocked out on it: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God”; “And he showed me the clear river of the water of life, bright as a crystal, coming from the throne of God and the Lamb”; "And let him who is thirsty come and whoever wants to take the water of life free."
In 1960, the fountain was turned off. In 1984, restoration work began on the monument. Apparently, over the previous quarter of a century, it darkened. Now water is again splashing in the angel's bowl, and the tombstone itself is included in the register of national historical monuments.