Lindsey parked her car off to the side of the cracked blacktop and checked her text messages. The friends she had coerced into her ghost hunting adventure had backed out, citing idiocy and poor judgement. No matter. She was used to going off the beaten path by herself, and she had been here before. The stories were too intriguing to not pursue. The derelict barn at the bottom of the hill, slowly being consumed by undergrowth, was reputedly haunted, with reports of strange lights and noises coming from the area, coinciding with the full moon of each month.
The sun was still high, but she booked it down the hill to her destination. The doors stuck, and she jammed her shoulder against one of them to force it open. The interior was just as she remembered it, with cracking cement flooring and Virginia Creeper prying its way under the window frames. Her boots scuffed through the dust. She was not the only one who visited here, she noted. Someone had spray-painted large intimidating letters on the inner door of the entrance, admonishing "Get out of my house!"
A cursory look around showed nothing much had changed, so she took a short walk up the hill that overlooked the valley. She took stock of her equipment. Her phone no longer got reception, but the small video camera she had borrowed from her school was fully charged and ready to record. All there was to do was wait, so she wrapped her jacket more tightly around herself against the autumn air and watched the sun go down and the full moon edge itself up over the horizon. She squinted at the barn in the distance-- had she seen a flash of light? She started filming the barn, but the dimming light gave her little satisfaction with the results. She made her way cautiously down the hillside, using her phone as a flashlight in the deepening shadows.
There! She was sure of it. Many lights -- multiple lights- flashing across the surface of the dusty windows at her destination. She flipped of her flashlight and crouched in the shadows, heart beating quickly. Was it ghosts? Was it real? Would she regret this, or would she be left with irrefutable proof of the afterlife? Could this be the foundation of renewed spirituality for her?
She crept closer, finally reaching a vantage point outside of one of the more intact windows. She heard footsteps from the interior, and gasped, flattening her body under the window against the wall. As she heard the footsteps recede, she got up the courage to peer over the ledge inside, just in time to see...
A person, walking away. Dressed in a sheet. Not even a very convincing costume -- no more than a bedsheet. The crushing disappointment of not having a paranormal experience made her slide down the wall to the ground.
She heard more, other footsteps, but she was in no position to investigate them without being seen herself, so she slipped away as quietly as she could to the higher, banked side of the barn where she knew a broken opening in the siding would allow her to peer down on them. She relaxed a little here, feeling more secure in her spot of concealment, and pulled out her video camera again. More people - perhaps 20 or 30 -dressed in bedsheets were entering the barn, and she eyed them up critically. If anyone were to create a supernatural rite, they could at least have been a little classy about it. There was not a one convincing costume in the bunch -- just plain bedsheets with crude holes cut for eyes and mouth. One was even on a patterned bedsheet, like her grandmother would have had, another used a part of a fitted sheet with the elastic still on it, and yet another's had a yellowish stain down the side.
Suddenly, a hand clamped down on the back of her shoulder, causing her to drop the camera where it hit the slate flagstone. She momentarily wondered if it was permanently damaged, but this was soon overridden by the great possibility that she was in very real trouble. The hand on her shoulder was as solid as steel, and her position against the side of the barn gave her nowhere to flee to. "I... I'm sorry" Lindsey stammered, "I thought it was haunted -- I was out ghost hunting -- I didn't mean to..." She trailed off, seeing a dismissive quality in the eyes through the fraying holes of the sheet. He grabbed her other arm and twisted it behind her- shoving her toward the entrance of the barn that she had just pressed her way into a little while before.
Not much had changed with the interior of the barn, but the little that had made her eyes widen. Most of the "ghosts" carried flashlights to illuminate their way around the large interior room, but a great quantity of candles had been lit around the periphery casting flickering shadows across the walls and ceiling. A folding table had been set up to the side, covered with unusual and unidentifiable instruments. And some sort of smooth stone altar had been set up in the center -- not hard and angular like any other altar she had seen, but dipped and curved like the slopes of a woman's body.
The firm hand pushed Lindsey slowly towards the center, and other "ghosts" approached. Before she could register what was happening they started removing her clothing, pulling off what was easy and cutting the more difficult clasps and buttons with knives until she was naked before them all. She pulled against the hand on her arm, but wrenching against his grasp only put a pressure on her shoulder that threatened to become real injury.