What would you do for $2,000? Would you eat a jar of spiders or make it through Timesquare

shave your eyebrows? Would you be buried in a coffin in America's most haunted graveyard?

That was exactly what they were offering. Two grand for a night spent six feet under.

It wasn't in the name of scientific exploration in case you were wondering. It was for one

of those ghost hunting shows, the ones where the only ghosts they find are. Well, none,

because ghosts don't exist. Anyway, they wanted independent, unaffiliated civilians to prove

the Westmont cemetery was a place of supernatural interest.

How, you ask? By burying three people alive in different parts of the cemetery for one

night. We would have oxygen tubes, water, and not a whole lot else. I guess they figured

by burying us, we might see ghoulish apparitions. Who knows? Who cares? I didn't, so I volunteered.

Why the hell not?

When I hit the cemetery in nightfall, the producers had me sign away my life. It was one of those

liability waivers indoor trampling places make you John Hancock in case your kid lands

funny and snaps their neck. That was fine by me. I would have signed a letter of endorsement

to my public official saying I believed after birth smoothies should be mandated for

man, woman, and child if in men I got any money at all. Was I nervous? Well, no. Yes,

but not really. It was all rather goth. The kind of stuff sixteen year old me, drenched

in black clothes, smoking clothes and listening to skinny puppy would have relished. The cemetery

was creepy enough. Westmont, the sprawl of dead and buried, they made our town famous.

It was totally overgrown. A patchwork of gravestones whose epitaphs have been scrubbed away

by time. A thick mind snarling up the rusted raw tie and gait, off approximately 600 gallons

of fog rolling in half the woods. It certainly looked haunted, but so did plenty of places.

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