New Zealand Ghosts & Other Haunts

This is a short tale that I love telling because it has the potential to scare the bejeesus out of people.

Imagine this: You're knocked unconscious. You slip into a coma. Due to the less sophisticated environs you're in at the time, everyone thinks you are dead. To the casual observer, you seem dead. So with much wailing and heaving of anguished breasts, they bury you.
You wake up in a coffin, in the dark, in the ground. What do you do? What *could* you do?
Luckily nowadays there's no chance of being buried alive. Modern medical procedures can tell easily whether you're alive or not. We can even keep people who are actually dead breathing and their heart pumping. Besides which, if you weren't really dead to begin with, you would be when the undertaker got through embalming you.
But a hundred years ago being buried alive was a more real and sinister possibility. During the relocation of bodies and coffins during the vast suburbanite-building of the 1950's, some coffins were unearthed with scratch marks on the inside of the lid. Few more grisly fates could be imagined.

This is a more ghostly tale about being buried alive.

A shopkeeper named Johan Gregor owned a small store. For the sake of many of the patrons of the town, he often kept his store open late into the night. In the depths of the night he had all sorts of strange customers come by, but few were as odd as one he had on a night in 1875.
It was near to midnight. There were no other patrons in the store. Johan was barely awake, waiting for his help to arrive so that he could go home to be with his wife. She had been complaining of sickness recently and he wanted to be with her as much as possible. In those days, the slightest illness could prove fatal and he didn't want to be out of her presence.
He was busy cleaning the gathering cobwebs out of a corner of the store when he happened to glance back. A woman in grey veils was standing at the cash register, not saying a word. Her thin grey veils covered almost all of her, save for her nose and lips. Her skin was a strickened pale, and for a moment Johan feared that she had a sort of disease or illness that he might fear.

Putting a cloth to his nose and lips, he returned to the front. The lady in grey said nothing, but merely pointed to a bottle of milk. Johan hesitated, not knowing what to make of her. Up close, her features were more ominous. She was exceedingly thin, and the paleness of her skin showed through almost to bone. She said nothing, merely pointed again to a bottle of milk.
Johan felt afraid - and he did not know why. Perhaps she was ill, yes. But he was afraid of her for reasons more than that. He did not know why. He was a large man. Nothing in her poise or her look would give any man any fear. But Johan could say nothing to her. He handed her the bottle of milk and she quickly walked out without saying a word or even offering to pay. Johan rubbed sweat from his brow and let the matter rest.

He was not to wait long. The next night, the woman in grey returned, just after midnight. Once again she pointed to a bottle of milk. Again Johan gave it to her without asking for payment.

That night, he couldn't sleep. He had nightmares of the woman in grey. He lay awake fearing that she would come to his home and had dreams of her standing at the foot of his bed. His wife had grown better and seemed to be in improving health, but she could tell that her husband's stress was rising. He would not talk about it, but instead she decided to keep him company at the store, and he readily agreed.
That night she stayed with him, and once again the woman in grey came into the store and pointed at a bottle of milk. Once again Johan gave her the milk. The whole time his wife was so fearful of this woman, who said nothing, that she backed into the corner of the store and did not move until the woman in grey had left.
By this time, Johan knew that something strange, perhaps even something very terrible was happening, and resolved to get to the bottom of it. The next night, he made sure that a few of his friends were present in the store at midnight.

Ten minutes past the stroke of twelve, the woman in grey entered the store. She walked to the counter, and pointed at the bottle of milk. Johan thought for a moment of refusing it to her, but something in the very chill that came from her body taught him better. He gave her the milk and she left.

This time, however, Johan and his friends followed her. She walked quickly through the town, her feet making no noise on the stones, and Johan and his friends were hard pressed to keep up. She wandered down alleyways and side streets, but before long it became clear to all of them where she was leading them.

They were quickly following her to the cemetery.
The woman in grey walked quickly through the cemetery, then halted above one particular grave. Then, to Johan and his friend's astonishment, she simply disappeared. There was to be no sleep that night. The grave was that of a woman and her infant, died of a sickness a few days before. The grave was still fresh.

Johan and his friends bribed the groundskeeper to permit them to unearth the grave. The soil was still settling and the digging went fast. The men all laboured with a grim intensity, bent on finding the truth, even though in their own minds, they laboured though the surreal nature of unearthing a strange grave at night to seek a woman who stalked the streets as easily as the living.

They opened the grave of the mother and child and looked inside. Two of Johan's friends fled the scene immediately. There was the mother, a duplicate of the woman in grey that they'd seen in the store, but she was undoubtedly dead. Even as they looked, they saw the child move, weak and ill, but still alive. As Johan reached in to take the baby up, he saw that the casket also contained four empty milk bottles.
Stauf Stevems
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Shanachie