Season of Shadows Blog

During this past summer, my mom and I frequented several cemeteries, spanning from Albuquerque, all the way down to Magdalena, New Mexico. Armed with the basics: a digital camera, digital voice recorders and EMF detectors; our intentions were to capture communication from the “other side.” Being new to conducting paranormal investigations (even in an amateur way), but not being strangers to supernatural happenings, we assumed graveyards were as good a place as any to begin our experiments.

After just a few visits, we started receiving bizarre, precursor clicking sounds, followed by disembodied voices in the form of EVP (admittedly, most were Class “C” quality) embedded on our digital voice recorders. At that point, we were very excited and highly motivated to continue our search with even more gusto.

One location in particular, the “Tome Cemetery,” appropriately located in Tome, New Mexico, became our focal point for many sessions. Tome (pronounced ‘toe-may’) was appealing to us for several reasons:

1.) It has quite the history, dating back to the 1600’s.

2.) The cemetery has a “good feeling” about it, with a simple, unobstructed, yet spacious layout.

3.) It’s fairly secluded and appears to have minimal visitors, so there was less chance for contamination on our devices.

4.) We were receiving various forms of communication with each visit. Everything from the anomalous clicking sounds (mentioned above), to voices responding to our questions and the sound of responsive knocks and disembodied “mimics” appeared on our recorders. For example, I began a game of knocking on fence posts and asking for a mimicking response. On more than one occasion, while all was silent in the cemetery, I received a variety of phantom knocks next to the recorder, which indeed appeared to be direct responses to my requests. These were definitely not echoes from my original knocking sound.

Things are About to Get Strange

As the summer grew hotter, we found it necessary to begin our visits to Tome even earlier in the day. It was towards the end of June, at roughly 8:45 AM, that we encountered our strangest experience to date.

We drove through the cemetery gates and immediately, off to the left, I noticed a woman walking amidst the headstones. As I started commenting to my mom that someone is here, we both noticed a woman directly ahead of us as well, who was making her way through the tombstones rather quickly.

Though these women looked to be flesh and blood human beings, two things immediately struck us as odd about their presence: there was no car anywhere inside or outside the cemetery fence and neither one ever made eye contact with us or with our truck. In fact, they never even looked up when we drove through the gate.

When you consider the circumstances of two women being completely isolated, in a fairly secluded cemetery, I would assume they’d have arrived in a car or at least they would be very observant about their surroundings, but they weren’t.

As we drove further onto the grounds, I tried giving the second woman a cordial wave, but her gaze stayed completely fixed on the graves.

Once the truck was parked, I looked back to the location where I had spotted the first lady, but she was no longer there. In fact, I never saw her again. At the time, I didn’t concern myself with her disappearance because, as I said, she looked like a real person, so I just assumed she had walked outside the gate.

As I began gathering our gear from the backseat, my mom, standing on the gravelly road, inside the cemetery, was keeping close watch on the second lady. I noticed, from my peripheral vision that the woman never faltered – all the while, she moved rapidly from stone to stone without once lifting her head.

In an attempt to search another section of graves, she eventually crossed the road, walking within about ten to twenty feet of my mom. Later on, my mom recalled something strange as the woman walked in front of her – there were no sounds being produced by her movements. She was completely quiet.

A Disappearing Act

After gathering our gear, we made plans to walk towards the back of the graveyard, in an effort to remove ourselves from the female visitor. At this point, though the entire situation struck us as weird, we were still assuming she was a living person. After all, she wasn’t dressed in antiquated clothing and her body wasn’t translucent, nor was it giving off any anomalous light. Nevertheless, we decided to keep an eye on her as we walked to the older section of the grounds.

We had taken maybe ten steps, when I turned to pinpoint her location. She was still moving from stone to stone with the same demeanor. Another ten or fifteen steps more and this time, my mom decided to have a look.

She couldn’t find her. “Where did she go,” my mom asked. “She’s right there,” I said.
– “No, she’s not.”
– “Yes, she is.”

No sooner had the words left my mouth, when I spun around and found my mom was right – the woman was nowhere to be seen.

Now, before I go any further, it’s important to note that Tome Cemetery is about the length of two football fields and contains only one or two small juniper trees inside the main section of the grounds. A few sparse trees also line the perimeter, but they provide very little cover. It’s practically as flat as the eye can see and contains no mausoleums, high statues or tall headstones. The entire grounds are fenced, so the only way in or out is through the front gate.

Speaking of the gate, I would estimate that the woman was at least sixty yards from the entrance when I last saw her. Even if she had sprinted, I don’t believe there’s anyway she could have made it to the exit between the last time I checked and the moment my mom looked for her.

Once we realized she had vanished, I never took my eye off the center/front of the cemetery (where she was last seen). I stood my ground and continued to watch that entire area like a hawk. After a few minutes, I started running through the place looking for her. I covered the entire grounds and found absolutely nothing.

No Way Out

Another interesting aspect to this story — it had rained the night before, causing the sand at the cemetery’s entrance to be on the muddy side (but having no visible puddles). As I walked through the mud and out the gate (presuming I might find her on the dirt road outside the cemetery), my shoes were the only pair of footprints being left behind. No one else had walked in or out of the gate since it had rained.

Now, unless you climb the fence, you have to go through that gated opening to leave the grounds. With that in mind, I walked the external length of the cemetery fence, down both sides, just in case she had climbed out, and once again, my tracks were the only ones being left in the mud.

As for her description, she appeared to be middle-aged, wearing a plain t-shirt and “peddle pushers” (slacks/pants that only came down to her upper-calves). We never noticed her feet or if she was even wearing shoes. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and it didn’t appear as if she was wearing any make-up.

Reflecting back on the entire experience, I’d say I’m 99% certain the woman was either a ghost or else she was some form of an imprinted memory on the location. For me to concede that final percentage point, I would have had to see her dematerialize right before my eyes, but essentially, it appears she indeed vanished.

To this day, there are still two other circumstances about this encounter, which continue to bother me. What happened to the first woman? And, if the second woman was a ghost or a “residual” type memory, how did she stay visible for several minutes?

What to Make of It?

Regarding the first woman:

I believe that she may have also been a ghost, or better yet, there was some strange doppelganger-like effect occurring in the cemetery. From what I can recall, she looked an awful lot like the second woman; too much so for them to have been two different apparitions.

Regarding the length of the second woman’s appearance:

I have no idea how long a ghost or an imprinted, residual memory can stay visible to the human eye, but it would seem like it’s probably a much shorter time span than several minutes. If she was indeed a spirit, and at this point, based on all the evidence, I believe she was, then it’s possible she may represent one of the longest-lasting visual encounters ever.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Okay, so where are the pictures of the ghost?” That’s the kicker in all of this, I never snapped off a shot. Though the circumstances surrounding the woman’s presence and her behavior seemed strange, until she disappeared, I believed she was a person. It’s for that reason that I didn’t point my camera at her. I didn’t want to be a putz by invading someone’s privacy, especially in a cemetery of all places.

However, because of my discretion, I missed an incredible opportunity. Let’s just say I’ll know better next time. When something strikes me as extremely odd, I’ll carefully use my video camera to monitor it, just in case.

I apologize for not having any photos of the cemetery layout to accompany this post. I deleted all of my Tome photos a few months ago, and there doesn’t appear to be any available online either. I’ll be going back soon, however, and will post my pictures in a follow-up entry.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 8:54 pm and is filed under Cemeteries, Ghosts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.