Lighthouse Horror Podcast - I Work at a Graveyard in New Mexico. These Are My SCARIEST Stories

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

Join Lighthouse Horror on Patreon: Lighthouse Horror | PatreonNew Merch out! https://hauntedstuff.com/Art & Credits: ninerioartsMusic by Lucas King, Myuu, Kevin MacLeod & Darren CurtisOriginal YouTube link: I Work at a Cemetery in New Mexico. These Are My SCARIEST Stories. Copyright © 2025 Lighthouse Horror. All rights reservedThank you for listening to this scary story! If you enjoyed this story, please check out some of my other horror stories. We'll be uploading new episodes every week, featuring ghost stories, haunted encounters, mysteries, true stories, creepypasta, and anything supernatural and paranormal. Don't miss out on the thrill and suspense that await you in each episode!

The first thing you notice about working nights at a graveyard, it's not the quiet. People always say that, like it's supposed to be peaceful out there once the sun goes down. It's not, it's just different. During the day, you've got families walking through, maintenance crews, the occasional service. There's movement, voices, cars coming in and out of the gate. At night, well, all of that stops. What's left is everything that doesn't need permission to be there. My name is Scott Hardy.

I work the night shift at a county graveyard just outside a small town in New Mexico. The place sits about two miles off the main road, surrounded by dry land and scrub that never really grows into anything taller than your waist. From the highway, you wouldn't even notice it unless you already knew where to look. There's a chain-link fence running the full perimeter, one vehicle gate at the front, and a smaller maintenance gate around the back. stay locked once my shift starts. The property itself is divided into three sections. The front rows are newer, clean headstones, flat markers, well-kept grass patches that get just enough irrigation

to survive the heat. The middle section is older, maybe 20 to 40 years back. The stones there lean a little, some cracked, some worn down enough that the names are hard to read unless you're standing right over them. Then there's the back section. No one really says it. officially, but that part of the land is different. The ground isn't level. The rows don't line up the way they should, and a lot of the markers are either missing or replaced with plain metal tags. My shift runs from 9 at night to 5 in the morning. I show up just before sunset, unlock the front gate, and do a quick pass through the grounds before it gets dark. Once the sun drops, I lock everything down and start the real work. That's when I walk the rows, check for damage, make sure you

sure nobody's jumped the fence and keep an eye on anything that looks out of place. Most nights it's routine. Broken flowers, knocked over markers, the occasional animal that slipped in and can't find its way back out. There's a small office next to the maintenance shed where we keep records. Not just burial logs, but old county reports, incident notes, things that never made it into any official system. A lot of its handwritten.

Some of it goes back decades. When I first started, I didn't pay much attention to any of that. It was just paperwork. Names, dates, plot numbers. But that changed after a few months. You spend enough time walking those rows alone, and you start to notice things. Certain graves get visited more than others, even years after the burial. Some plots get disturbed, nothing major at first, just soil that looks like it's settled wrong,

or footprints where there shouldn't be any. Then you check the records and you realize those same names keep coming up, not because of who they were, but because of what happened before they ended up here. Most people think the graveyard is where things end, that whatever happened in a person's life is done the moment they're buried. But that's not exactly how it works. Out here, the grave is usually the last step in a chain of events that started somewhere else. and sometimes what led to that burial isn't something you can file away as normal. I don't deal in rumors. If I'm going to talk about something, it's because there's a report tied to it.

A police report, a coroner's note, a statement from someone who saw it up close. I've read through all of it. I've walked past the graves connected to those reports hundreds of times. I know which ones line up with what's written in those files and which one's done. There are four graves out here that matter more than the rest. You wouldn't know it just by looking at him. No special markers, no fences around him, nothing to draw attention. But every one of them is tied to something that had to be put down before it could be buried.

Not accidents. Not natural causes. Situations where people ran out of options and did what they had to do. The county doesn't advertise that. If it shows up in the official records you'd get if you requested them. What's public, it's clean. Cause of death, date of burial, plot location. What's not public is everything that happened in the hours or days leading up to that.

I learned about the first one from a deputy who came out to check the fence line after a storm. He didn't say much at first. Just asked if I'd noticed anything unusual around a specific section in the middle rows. I told him no, he nodded, like he expected that answer, and then pointed to a grave about 20 yards off the path. Flat marker, nothing special, name, date, same as any other. And then he said, If you, uh, see anything digging around that one, you call it in. Don't try to handle it yourself. I asked him what he meant to buy anything. He didn't answer right away. Just looked at the marker for a second longer than he needed to, then said, just don't handle it.

After he left, I went back to the office and pulled the filed time to that name. It wasn't in the main logbook. It was in a separate folder, with a handful of other reports clipped together, the kind of stuff that doesn't get thrown away, but doesn't get talked about either. And that was the first time I realized the graveyard wasn't just holding people. It was holding me end of things that shouldn't have existed in the first place. And once you know which graves those are, you don't walk the rows the same anymore. Story one. Now, the first grave was in row 18 plot 42, about 30 yards west of the maintenance path. The marker belonged to Nathan Price, a cattle and goat rancher from just outside Tellerosa, New Mexico. He was buried there in 1998, but the

file tied to his name, started six weeks before he died. The first report came from a small ranch off Mesa Road, where Nathan kept 32 goats in a fenced pen behind his house. His wife, Linda Price, was the one who called the sheriff. She told them something had gotten into the pen during the night and killed four animals without knocking down the fence, breaking the gate, or leaving blood on the ground. And that was the part that got everyone's attention. Coyotes make a mess.

Dogs make a worse one. Whatever killed those goats didn't tear them apart like a normal animal. The report said all four were found on their sides near the back corner of the pen, leg stiff, eyes open, bodies intact except for two puncture wounds below the jaw and damage along the lower ribs. Nathan thought it was a bad prank at first. That's what his brother told the deputy. Somebody had to be messing with him. But then the deputy checked the ground and found tracks inside the pen.

They were small, narrow and deep, with three long toe marks pressed into the dirt. Not paw prints, not hooves, not bird tracks either. Two nights later it happened again. This time it was six goats, all in the same pen, all killed the same way. sat outside the next night, with a rifle across his lap and a spotlight plugged into an extension cord from the barn. According to Lisa's statement, he stayed awake until just after three in the morning. Then he heard the goats shifting hard against the fence. He turned on the light and saw something crouched between the water trough and the back post. He described

it to the sheriff as being about the size of a large dog, but too thin through the middle. Its back was raised higher than its head, and there were stiff ridges running down the spine from the neck to the tailbone. It had patchy gray skin with dark hair around the shoulders and hips. Its front legs were longer than the rear legs, and when the light hit it, it didn't run right away. It turned and looked at him. Nathan fired once and hit the dirt beside it. The goat scattered. The thing moved under them, fast enough that he lost it for a second. Then it hit him. the fence and went over without climbing. That was in the report. Not through or under, over. The next day, Nathan found blood on the top strand of wire, not goat blood, according to the county

vet. They didn't know what it belonged to. For most people, that would have been enough to call someone and stay inside. Nathan didn't do that. He called two men he trusted. One was Harold Jenkins, a retired sheriff's deputy who lived a few miles north. The other was Peter Wallace, a mechanic from town who had grown up hunting coyotes and feral dogs. Both men gave statements later, and both statements matched close enough that I don't think either of them was lying. They waited in Nathan's barn the following night with the lights off. Nathan had his rifle. Harold had a shotgun. Peter had another rifle and a flashlight taped under the barrel.

They left two dead goats near the rear of the pen because Nathan believed the thing would come back for what it had already killed. At 2.40 in the morning, the goat started pressing toward the gate. That was the first clear sign. Animals don't all move in the same direction for no reason. Harold wrote it in his statement that the pen went real quiet before they saw anything. Not peaceful quiet. The kind that happens when every animal stops making sound, right at once. And then the thing came under the fence. That detail matters, because Nathan had watched it

go over the fence two nights before. This time, it flattened itself real low, pushed its front half under the bottom wire, and dragged the rest of its body through like its ribs could fold. Peter said it moved like a sick animal, until it reached the dead goats. Then it got steady. It didn't eat right away. It circled the bodies once, keeping its head low, and then opened its mouth around the throat of the nearest goat. That was when Harold turned on the flashlight. All three men saw it clearly.

The creature had a narrow head, long ears folded back, tight against the skull, and a mouth had opened wider than it should have. The teeth weren't long like wolves. They were short, crowded. and sharp all the way around. Its eyes reflected orange in the light, not red. Orange, they said, like a roadside reflector. Nathan fired first. The shot hit it high in the shoulder and knocked it sideways. It screamed. That was in all three reports. Not a growl or a bark, a high tearing sound that made the goats slam into the fence trying to get away.

Harold fired next. Buckshot, caught. it across the ribs and tore open the skin along its side. That should have dropped it, but it didn't. It pushed itself upright and ran straight at the barn. Peter fired twice and missed once. The second shot hit low in the chest. The creature hit the open barn door hard enough to crack the wood. Nathan fired again from less than ten feet away and blew out part of its neck.

And that stopped it from running. But it still didn't die right away. Harold's statement said it kept crawling toward Nathan with its front legs, dragging the back half behind it, snapping its mouth open and shut. Nathan backed up, tripped over a feed bucket and fell. The creature got close enough to bite him on the forearm before Harold put the shotgun against the back of its head and fired. And that killed it.

They wrapped the body in a tarp, and they loaded it into Nathan's truck. Nobody wanted to leave it on the property. They drove it to the county sheriff's office before sunrise, and they put it behind the building near the old evidence shed. And that's where the story should have become public. It didn't. The sheriff at the time was Dennis Bryant. His report was short, and the language was careful.

He didn't call it a chupacabra. He didn't call it anything. He wrote, Unidentified, diseased animal. possible canine mutation and noted that the body was badly damaged by gunfire. But the photos were still in the folder when I found him, and I saw them myself. That thing on the tarp was not a coyote. Wasn't a dog.

It had the general shape of an animal you might recognize at a distance, but every close detail was very wrong. The spine rose too sharply. The forelimbs were too long. The skin around the mouth looked stretched back, like the jaw had more room to open than the skull should have allowed. There were quills or spines along the ridge of the back, snapped in places from where it hit the barn door. The county vet refused to take it. Animal control refused to store it. State wildlife said they would send someone, but according to the note,

clip to the report. Nobody ever came. By the third day, the body had started to smell so bad that Sheriff Bryant ordered it buried. That was another part nobody likes talking about. They buried the creature in the county graveyard in an unmarked hole near the back of the old service road. No service, no marker, no record in the public burial log. Just a handwritten note with a plot number and the words animal remains. Sealed box. Well, Nathan Price died nine days later. The bite on his arm got infected almost immediately. Linda said the wound turned black around the edges by the second day. The hospital treated it like a severe bacterial infection, but the tissue kept dying even after they cut away the damaged skin. By the end of the week, Nathan had a fever so high he was strapped to the bed,

because he kept trying to get up. He told Linda that there were more of them. That was in her statement. She said he woke up twice, claiming he could hear goats screaming outside the hospital window, even though his room was on the second floor. On the last night, he told her the one they killed had been sick, and that something else had driven it down from the hills. He died before sunrise.

Nathan was buried in row 18, plot 42. The creature was buried less than 100 yards away, under no name at all. For years, nothing happened. At least nothing anyone wrote down. And then in 2017, one of the groundskeepers before me found three dead rabbits lined up near Nathan's grave. No blood around him. Two punctures under the jaw.

Lower ribs opened clean. He threw him away, and he didn't report it, because he thought someone was trying to scare him. I would have thought the same thing if I hadn't read the file. The reason I remember Nathan's grave so clearly is because it still gets disturbed after heavy rain, not destroyed or dug open, just loosened around the edges, like something underneath shifted, and the soil had to settle again. I filled it twice since I started working there. The unmarked animal plot, it's worse.

Grass doesn't grow right over it. The dirt stays dry, even when the rows around it take water. I found that out during my third month on the job, when one of the irrigation lines broke and flooded part of the old service road. Every patch of ground turned muddy, except one square about five feet long. I checked the map the next morning. Same spot.

Now, to be clear, I don't think that Chupacabra is alive. I don't think Nathan is either. The creature was shot, boxed, buried, and left there. Nathan died from what it did to him, and he was buried with a proper marker in his name in stone. That case ended. But every time I walk past row 18, I look at the fence line. Because I think something drove that thing onto Nathan Price's ranch. Something made it desperate enough to crawl into a goat pen with three armed men waiting for it.

And if Nathan was right in that hospital room, they killed the sick one. Not the last one. Story two. The second grave is older. You can tell that just by looking at it. Row four sits closer to the front road, but the markers there don't match the newer sections. Most of them are narrow stone slabs. some leaning, some half sunk into the ground. The names are carved deep, but times worn down the edges.

You have to brush dust off with your hand to read them. The one tied to this case belongs to Earl Whittaker, listed as a surveyor for the county, died in 1934. The date's clean. The rest of the stone isn't. There's no mention of the marker or how he died that parts in the records. I found his file in a box labeled pre-1950 reports, tied together with twine, and stacked under a set of maintenance logs from the 70s. The paper was brittle enough that I had to lay each page flat just to read it. Most of it was tight, some handwritten notes in the margins, sheriff's office, county land survey department, and one short report from a state ranger. Back then, the cemetery wasn't as big. The land behind row four hadn't been cleared yet.

It was rough terrain, scattered trees, and low rock outcroppings leading into the hills west of town. Earl Whittaker had been sent out there to mark boundary lines for future expansion. He didn't go alone. According to the survey log, he had a partner named Clarence Dodd, and a local hand named Benjamin Cole, helping with equipment and transport. All three men were experienced with that kind of work. been in rough land before. The first two days went without incident. They set markers, took measurements, and logged elevations along the slope behind what would eventually

become the back section of the cemetery. On the third day, Clarence noted in the log that they found large tracks near a dry wash about half a mile west of their working line. He described them as man-shaped but oversized, with clear heel impressions and five-tomersions and five toe marks, no claws or hoof splints, just large, deep prints in the dirt. The spacing didn't make sense. The stride between prints was longer than any man could manage without running, and the depth suggested a weight that didn't match a human body. They kept working. But that night something came through their camp. They'd set up near a stand of trees

where the ground was flatter. Clarence wrote that they woke to the sound of wood snapping, not branches falling, something breaking them at shoulder height. When they stepped out of the tent, the fire was still burning, but the equipment had been moved. Not stolen, moved.

Their tools, level stakes, and measuring rods had been piled together about ten feet from where they left them. The mule they'd brought for hauling was gone. The rope that tied it to a post was still there, cut clean. They found the mule about 30 yards away. Its neck was broken. No signs of struggle. No blood.

Just lying on its side with its legs folded under it like had been dropped. That was the point where most men would have packed up and left. According to Clarence's note, Earl didn't want to stop the survey. He told them they were behind schedule and that whatever they were dealing with was either a purpose. person trying to scare him, or an animal that had wandered in from farther out. They stayed one more day. The fourth day is when the sheriff's report takes over. Around noon, a man named Thomas Keller, who owned land south of the survey site, rode into

town and reported hearing gunshots in the hills. Not one or two. Multiple shots spaced out, followed by a long silence. He said it sounded like men firing rifles, not constantly. more like warning shots or something defensive. Sheriff Walter Briggs and Deputy James Turner rode out to investigate. They found the camp first. The tents were still standing.

The fire pit was cold. The tools were scattered again, but this time not in a pile. Some were broken. The mule was still where it had been left. Claren's dodd was found near the end of the camp. He was dead. The report says his body was. was lying on his back with both arms extended outward. There were no cuts, no bullet wounds,

no visible trauma except for the chest. The rib cage had been crushed inward, with enough force to break multiple bones at once. His shirt was torn, but there was almost no blood on the ground around him. They found Earl Whitaker about 50 yards into the tree line. He had a rifle in his hands. One round fired, four still in the chamber. His body was. His body was body was positioned against a tree, sitting upright like he tried to hold his ground. His spine was broken. Same as Clarence. Massive blunt force, no tearing, no claw marks.

Benjamin Cole was still alive when they found him. He was farther up slope, near a rock outcropping. According to Deputy Turner's note, Benjamin was conscious, but not making much sense. He had a broken leg and dislocated shoulder. They got him onto a horse and brought him back into town. His statement is the only direct account of what happened. It's short and parts of it repeat. He said they saw it just before the shooting started,

not in the trees or hiding, but standing in the open, about 30 yards from camp. He described it as a man at first, tall, broad shoulders, arms hanging low. But when it moved, he realized it wasn't walking right. The knees bent wrong. The arm swung too far forward. He said it took one step and covered the distance of three. Earl fired a warning shot, but the thing didn't stop. Clarence fired next and hit it in the upper body.

Benjamin said he saw the impact. The thing reacted, but it didn't fall. It just turned its head toward them and started moving faster. And that's when all three men opened fire. Benjamin said the shots hit. He saw dust kick off the body. He saw it stumble once, but it kept coming. He ran?

That's the part he repeated the most. He said he ran because he knew they weren't going to stop it. He heard Clarence shouting behind him, that a sound he couldn't describe. Not an animal sound, not a human one either. Something louder, deeper. Like a tree splitting from the inside. He didn't see what happened to Clarence or Earl.

He just kept running until he fell and couldn't get back up. Benjamin died two days later in the hospital. Before he died, he told Sheriff Briggs one more thing. He said when he looked back from the ridge, he saw it standing over the camp, not moving, just standing there between the trees, watching him leave. The sheriff's report ends there. But there's an addendum attached from the following week. A larger group was sent out to recover the bodies and clear the site.

This time they brought more men and heavier rifles. According to that report, they found tracks again, same size and spacing, leading away from the camp and into a narrow pass between two rock formations. They followed. In about a quarter mile into the pass, they found it. The description is brief, but it matches what Benjamin said. Tall, covered in dark hair, arms longer than a man's. It was already injured when they found it.

There were bullet wounds across the torso and one through the upper thigh. It was sitting against a rock wall, breathing hard. When the men approached, it stood up, and they opened fire immediately. This time, there were enough rifles to bring it down. The report says it took sustain. stained fire to the chest and head before it stopped moving. Even then, one of the men fired two more shots into the skull, just to be sure. They didn't bring the body back to town. The decision came from Sheriff Briggs. The note says they didn't want to transport it through the populated

areas or risk anyone seeing it. Instead, they loaded it onto a wagon, brought it to the edge of the existing cemetery grounds, and buried it there, along with it. with Earl Whitigur and Clarence Dodd, three graves in the same row. Benjamin Cole was buried two days later, same section. If you walk row four now, you will see four markers close together, all from 1934. Most people don't stop there. There's nothing about them that stands out unless you know what you're looking at. The ground in that row settles deeper than the others after rain, not unevenly.

uneven like erosion, just lower, like the soil compresses more than it should. I have filled those depressions three times since I started working here. Every time the dirt sinks again within a week. The fence line near that section doesn't get damaged. Nothing gets in or out. But the ground remembers. Whatever that thing was, they didn't leave it in the house. They brought it here, put it in the ground.

with the man it killed and buried it. Story 3. The third grave isn't avoided because people don't care. It's avoided because they do. Row 11 sits in the middle section, not far from the irrigation line that runs east to west across the property. The grass there stays a little greener than the rows around it, but Plot 67 never fills in right.

The marker reads, Travis Delgado, died in 2000, died in 2006, age 32, occupation lists as electrician, nothing unusual on the surface. If you didn't know the file, you'd walk past it without thinking twice. I didn't hear about that one from law enforcement first. I heard it from a woman who came out just after midnight and stood by the grave for nearly an hour without saying a word. Her name was Angela Torres. She signed the visitor log, which almost nobody does at that hour. When I walked over to check on her, she didn't look surprised to see me, just nodded, and asked if I worked nights every day. I told her I did.

She looked down at the marker and said, Then you should know what's in there. I didn't answer right away. People say strange things sometimes. Most of the time it's grief talking, but she didn't sound emotional. She sounded steady. I asked her how she knew Travis. She said he was her brother.

And then she told me to not let anyone dig that grave up again. And that made me go back to the office and pull the file up. There were police reports attached, not old ones either. 2006, all within a three-week window leading up to Travis' death. Multiple calls from different addresses across town. All describing the same basic situation. Someone's showing up where they should be. be. Not breaking in or forcing entry, just appearing at doors, windows, backyards, standing

there long enough to be seen, then leaving. At first the reports didn't connect, different names and neighborhoods, but the descriptions lined up in ways that didn't make sense. Height, build, clothing, and the face? Every witness described the same man, but they didn't all know him. One of the earliest reports came from a man named Dylan, who worked on the south side of town. He told police someone had come to his front door just after 10 p.m. When he opened it, he saw his co-worker standing there, same clothes and face, but his co-worker had been at work an hour earlier and lived across town. Dylan said the man didn't say anything at first. Just stood there looking at him. When Dylan asked what he wanted, the man.

man answered, but the voice didn't sound right, saying words and tone, just like someone repeating something they'd heard instead of saying it themselves. Dylan shut the door and locked it. When he looked through the window a few seconds later, the man was gone. That report didn't go anywhere, no crime or damage. But two nights later, a similar call came in from Rachel Kim, who said her brother had come to her apartment late at night. She let him in. She let him in. because she recognized him. Once inside, he walked through the place slowly, touching things. Pictures, furniture, door frames.

When she asked what he was doing, he didn't answer right away. And then he turned and looked at her. She told the officer his face looked wrong up close. His eyes didn't line up with the rest of his expression. The way his mouth moved didn't match the words. She told him to leave. He didn't argue, just walked out the front door and disappeared down the stairs. Her real brother showed up the next morning after she called him.

By the end of that week, there were six reports like that. Different people, different faces. Same behavior. The connection to Travis Delgado came after the seventh report. A man named Oscar Reed called in saying Travis had been standing in his backyard near the fence line. Oscar knew Travis. They'd worked together on a job site earlier that year. He went outside to ask what he was doing there.

He said Travis turned toward him slowly, like he didn't expect to be seen. When Oscar spoke, Travis answered, but not directly. He repeated part of the question back before responding. Oscar backed away. And that's when Travis started walking toward him. Oscar went inside and locked the door. and when he looked out again, the yard was empty. Police went to Travis's house the next morning, and he was there.

Alive, no signs of injury, no reason to suspect anything. He told them he'd been home all night. They didn't have anything to charge him with, no evidence he'd been at any of the other locations, no witnesses, placing him anywhere except the people who said they saw him. And that's when things escalated. Three days later, Angela Toriard, Torres called in. She said Travis had come to her house. She let him in. She was his sister.

She told the officer he walked through her house the same way the others had described. Slow, deliberate, touching things. When she asked what he was doing, he didn't answer right away. And then he said her name, but not the way he normally did. He said it like he was testing how it sounded. Angela stepped back. She said she knew something was wrong at that moment, not because of how he looked, but because of how he moved. The timing was off. The pauses between his words were too long. She told him to leave, but he didn't move. She picked up a kitchen knife and told him again, and that's when he rushed her. She managed to get out of the house and lock the door behind her. When police arrived, the house was empty.

No sign of forced entry, no sign of Travis. They found Travis Delgado the next day, outside of town, near an abandoned structure off a dirt road. He was dead. The report says his body showed signs of trauma consistent with blunt force and tearing injuries. There are no defensive wounds, no indication of a struggle in the area where he was found. And that should have ended it. But it didn't. The sightings continued, same face and movements,

now tied to a man who was already dead. And that's when the sheriff's office decided to handle it differently. They didn't release that part publicly. It's in a separate report, stamped and signed with fewer names attached. They set up a controlled response. A group of six men, including two deputies and four volunteers who had reported sightings, agreed to meet at the abandoned structure where Travis's body had been found. They believed whatever was appearing in town was tied to that location.

Well, they went out just after sunset. They didn't wait long. According to the report, the figure appeared at the edge of the structure about 20 minutes after they arrived. Looked like Travis Delgado. Same height. Same clothing he'd been found wearing when his body was recovered. One of the deputies called out to it. It didn't respond. It turned its head slow, like it was deciding whether to recognize the voice.

And then it started walking toward him. The report notes that its gait was wrong. Too smooth in some places, too stiff in others. The arms didn't swing naturally. The head tilted slightly as it moved, adjusting its angle as if trying to match something it remembered. Well, they didn't wait for it to get close. The first shot hit center mass.

The figure staggered but didn't fall, and they kept firing. Multiple rounds struck the torso and legs. It kept moving forward until one of the deputies fired at the head from close range. And that dropped it. They approached carefully. What they found on the ground didn't match Travis' body from the recovery report. The structure was similar. but not exact. The proportions shifted slightly, even after it stopped moving. The skin didn't sit

right along the arms and neck. The face still looked like Travis, but up close the features didn't hold together the way a real face does. They secured the body and transported it back under county authority. There was no official classification, no release to state agencies. They buried it under Travis Delgado's name. One grave, one marker, two bodies tied to it. Angela Torres came back the day after the burial. That's the visit I saw. She stood over the grave and told me not to let anyone dig it up again.

I asked her why. She kept her eyes on the dirt when she answered. Because that's the only place it stays one thing. After the case closed, people around town started using a word for it. Not on the reports, though stayed clean, but in conversations, in statements that never made it into the official file. Some of them called it a skinwalker. Me, I don't know if that's accurate. The reports don't use that term, and nobody who saw it up close agreed on what it actually was.

But enough people said it that the name stuck, least outside the paperwork. Since then, nobody visits that plot after dark. Not family or friends. The soil stays uneven, like it was packed down in a hurry and never settled right. And whatever they ended up calling it, Skinwalker, or something else. It was shot, put in the ground, and buried under Travis Delgado's name. Story 4. Now the fourth section doesn't have a marker.

If you walk the graveyard during the day, you won't see anything that tells you it's there. No headstones or plaques, no numbered row post. Just a stretch of dry ground behind the last line of older graves where the land dips slightly, and the fence curves around it instead of cutting straight through. That curve was not an accident. That's the part of the property nobody touches. The file tied to that ground isn't stored with the others. It's in a separate folder, older paper, mostly handwritten,

with copies of reports that don't match modern formatting. The earliest one is dated 1931, right before the county started expanding the cemetery beyond the original boundary. Back then, that land wasn't part of the graveyard yet. It was just open ground leading onto a low ridge of rock and scrub. The county hired a crew to clear it. The foreman was Edward Franklin, and he had four men working under him. Their job was simple.

Cut back the brush, level the soil, and start laying out future plots. Same kind of work they'd already done in the front sections. They made it two days before they hit something. One of the men struck stone while digging a trench for a boundary marker. That wasn't unusual. but when they cleared the area, they realized it wasn't a loose rock or a layer of bedrock.

It was a flat surface. Smooth. The report described it as finished, like it been shaped, not formed. No cracks, no grain, no natural break lines, just a single surface extending out of the ground

in every direction they tested. They kept digging. By the end of the third day, they'd uncovered a section about 15 feet across. The edges still weren't visible. It didn't taper or break. It just kept going. And that was when they found the markings.

They weren't carved deep. Just shallow grooves across the surface. Lines, curves, intersecting shapes. Not random, but not anything the men recognized either. The foreman wrote that it didn't look like letters, didn't look like symbols he'd seen before. The county surveyor came out and made a note of it. Unknown construction is what he wrote.

They should have stopped there, but they didn't. On the fourth day, one of the workers, Louis Romero, reported hearing something from below the stone, not around it, below it. At first he thought it was vibration from shifting ground, but then he said it changed. The foreman dismissed it, told them to keep working. That night the crew stayed on site.

They set up a small camp near the trench, kept a fire going, same as they'd done the previous nights. Nothing in the official report mentions anything unusual until just before sunrise. And that's when it changed. There's a statement from one of the men, Calvin Ward, taken later by the sheriff. He didn't write it clean. parts of it repeat, but the details line up enough to matter. He said he woke up because the fire had gone out. He sat up and noticed the ground around the trench looked darker,

like the light wasn't hitting at the same white. When he stood and walked closer, he realized it wasn't the light. It was something standing there. At first, he thought it was one of the other men, but the shape didn't match. He said he saw two points. of light where the face should have been, not reflections or firelight. Glowing, low and steady. Like coals in a furnace, he said. It turned, and that's when the others woke up.

Edward Franklin stepped forward with a lantern and raised it. Calvin said that was when he saw the full shape. He said it reminded him of something ancient. Later, when the sheriff wrote the report, he added a note in the margin. Witness compares subject to figures from foreign myth. Another note references names that don't belong anywhere near New Mexico. Anubis. Tess Catlopoca Now the sheriff didn't endorse those comparisons.

He just wrote them down because that's what the witnesses said. What happened next is clearer. Edward Franklin raised his rifle and told the others to back away from the trench. The thing stepped forward. Franklin fired, and the shot hit. Calvin said he saw the impact in the center of the chest. The thing reacted, but not the way an animal does. It didn't jerk or fall, it shifted, like something inside it had absorbed the force and then

settled again. And then it moved faster. Calvin ran. That part is repeated three times in his statement. He ran without looking back. He heard more shots behind him, heard one of the men screaming, and then a sound he couldn't describe. Not an animal or a human voice, something deeper, louder, like the ground itself splitting open, he said. Well, he made it to the ridge and kept going until he reached the road. By the time the sheriff and a group of men got back to the site, the sun was up. The camp was still there, trench was still open, the stone was exposed, but the four men who stayed behind were all dead. Same as the earlier case in the 1912 report. Bodies lay down around the trench, spaced evenly, arms extended, faces intact, eyes open, cause of death,

listed as cardiac failure, all four. The sheriff didn't believe that. Well, they didn't search for the thing that day. They buried the men first, and then they came back with more rifles. The follow-up report is shorter, but it's clearer. They returned to the site at night. They set up positions around the trench and waited. According to the report, the thing came back, and they opened fire immediately. Multiple rifles close range. The report says it took sustained fire to bring it down. Even after it fell, they kept shooting. The body didn't bleed the way it should have. That's in the report. Limited external bleeding despite multiple entry wounds. They didn't transport it. They didn't

take it into town. They collapsed the trench, filled it in with dirt, rock, and whatever. material they had on hand. They buried it right there, not in a coffin or a marked grave, just covered, layered, and sealed. The county closed the site after that. No further digging, no expansion into that section. They built the rest of the cemetery around it. That's where it is today. Later, people started calling it an old god.

older than the land they were digging. Something that was never supposed to be found. Well, after a while, you stop thinking of this place as a graveyard exactly. I mean, that's what it's called. That's what the county records say. That's what people see when they drive past the gate during the day. Rows of stones, trimmed grass, names carved into markers like everything here belongs to the same category. It doesn't. Not everything is. Being buried here is the same. I know which graves to check after a storm. I know which ones sink faster than they should.

I know which sections of the fence line I don't have to worry about, and which ones I still look at every time I pass, even when nothing's moved in years. Row 18, row 4, row 11. And the ground behind the last line of markers were the fence curves. The stories tied to those graves are finished in one's. sense. Whatever needed to be shot, burned, or put down, that part's already done. The people who dealt with it made sure of that. They ended it the only way they knew how. And then they brought what was left here and put it in the ground. That part is consistent across every

file I've read. There are other places they could have used. Land farther out. Areas nobody would have seen. Places where you could bury something and forget it. They didn't do that, they chose this ground. And I've thought about that more than once. Why, this place? Why bring all of it here and put it under the same soil? And the only answer that makes sense is the simplest one. They needed somewhere controlled.

Somewhere already set aside for strange things. A place where digging is tracked, where movement gets noticed, where anything out of place stands out immediately. That's what a graveyard is. It's not just for the dead. It's also for containment.