The spirit of the season

I’m the one at the top of the stairs in the reflective vest. That’s my friend and cemetery guide behind me, wondering what the heck I’m up to.

There was an evening in October a few years ago that was going to be fun no matter what. Fun is what happens when a half-dozen women who aren’t as young as they used to be dress up as zombies a few days before Halloween and go for a nighttime run in a cemetery that dates to the Civil War.

My running friends are prone to silly adventures. But, for me at least, that night was more eventful.

A lot of history and many stories reside in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery. A former city mayor is buried there. So is a 14-year-old boy whose grieving family marked his resting place with a bronze statue of a lion. There is a person named Clemons, whose grave I encountered the day I took a lunchtime walk looking for a way to process the grief that all Bruce Springsteen fans felt after the death of his famous sidekick, E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons. There is a man with the same surname as the best boss I ever had; I once snapped a photo of his headstone so my staff and I could torment the boss with it later.

Popular wisdom also says Oakwood Cemetery is haunted. I’ll get to that.

The night of our run, the six of us, complete with white face makeup and blinking skeleton necklaces (and, yes, reflective vests for safety’s sake), ran a few blocks through the city from one friend’s house and slipped into a secondary entrance to the sprawling old cemetery. Our university professor friend was our guide, pointing out historic headstones and mausoleums and sharing the stories behind them. We admired some architecture and learned some history, then paused on one of the curving, crumbling asphalt roads at the base of a small rise. I don’t know why I did it, but I told my friends, “I want to see who’s buried up there.” I ran up a path that led to a cluster of headstones. I stepped in front of them and looked at the one that had caught my attention.

Her name was CLAIRE. Spelled like mine.

I couldn’t hear my boisterous friends talking. I couldn’t hear the traffic a block way. I didn’t feel the nip of a Central New York evening in late October. I was only aware of Claire. I stared at her grave, ignoring the headstones on either side of it, waiting for whatever I was going to feel. It seemed like a moment for some Dickensian fear, like the whole Ghost-of-Christmas-Yet-to-Come thing might send me screaming back to the safety of my pack.

But that didn’t happen. My heart rate slowed, and I nodded slightly at the grave.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I finally said. “Thank you for saying hello. I hope you rest in peace.”

I trotted down to my friends, who were getting agitated about losing sight of me in a dark cemetery that has frequently been the site of minor criminal activity. They wanted to know what I’d been doing up there.

“I wanted to see that grave. It’s a woman named Claire. I think she wanted to say hello,” I told them.

There was some breathless disbelief from my companions who were full of questions, but I wanted to preserve my peaceful moment a little longer. I sprinted ahead of them, and they were gabbing about something else by the time they caught me.

People with knowledge of such things have reported signs of paranormal activity at Oakwood. The cemetery has been featured on hauntedhouses.com, and the local historic association sponsors ghost walks there. “Restive spirits,” they say. But there was nothing restive about my encounter with my Claire sister. It was gentle and peaceful. I was safe. My friends were nearby. And maybe a new friend was closer than I knew.