Voice in the Cemetery
VOICE IN THE CEMETERY – June 25, 2025 – Wellington, Utah, USA
For anyone under the age of twelve in the rural Utah town of Wellington, summer evenings revolved around “night games”. After dinner, at least 40 kids gathered in the centrally located park – the only place in town with a decent lawn. The games were innocent and involved lots of running around – things like capture the flag, freeze tag, and sardines.
The only non-juvenile thing about night games was when hide-and-seek sometimes spilled over into the small cemetery next to the park. But that rarely happened because the kids were told to be respectful and stay away from the graves. As boys and girls became teenagers, they naturally aged out of night games because they saw themselves as too cool to chase little kids around.
Wesley Pratt and Katelynn Tanner were tweens on the cusp of aging out. They lived in opposite directions of the park, and during the summer, only met during the games. Wesley had a tragically bad home-kitchen haircut, made worse by the cowlicks swirling through his mousy hair. He wore hand-me-down T-shirts and jeans and sported a scar above his eyebrow he got from tripping over a wheelbarrow while helping to build a cinder-block wall.
Katelynn had her own scars. They were mostly around her shins and knees and came from jumping irrigation ditches. She spent the entire summer wearing shorts and hoped the sun would lighten her reddish hair to blonde. It mostly darkened the freckles on her nose.
Wesley thought a lot about Katelynn. As long as she kept returning to night games, he would too. Whenever they played sardines, he followed her and quietly settled next to her in the same hiding spot. He subtly arranged to stand next to her and clasp her hand during red rover. He daydreamed of being alone with her but had no idea how he might arrange it. And he did not dare mention the infatuation to anyone. It was not something you told your older brothers and sisters or friends without being mercilessly teased.
One afternoon, as Wesley was again thinking about Katelynn, he hatched a plan to get her alone without revealing his true feelings. Instead of telling his friends he had a crush on her, he would say he wanted to play a prank and scare her. He could claim he was trying to be funny. He pulled aside his friend, Ammon Hyde, and explained what he had in mind.
“Wouldn’t it be funny if I got Katelynn to walk through the cemetery and you pretended to be a ghost?”
Ammon was always up for a good prank, but he wondered, “Why Katelynn?”
Wesley quickly answered, “She always talks brave and tough. It’ll be funny to see her scared.”
That evening, the two boys stayed late after night games to plot how the scaring would work. They walked through the dimly-lit cemetery searching for places Ammon might hide. There were no trees and all the gravestones either lay flush with the ground or rose less than two feet high.
Ammon crouched behind one of the larger markers but was still visible. He shouted toward Wesley, “She’ll see me unless it’s pitch black out here.”
“Try sounding like a ghost,” Wesley called back.
“Boooo. Woooo. Boooo.”
“Sounds more like a baby cow. I don’t think that’ll scare anybody. We need a better plan.”
“What about leaving a phone behind one of the graves? We could call it and make scary noises.”
“Where are we gonna get phones?”
Both Wesley’s and Ammon’s parents believed the boys were too young to have their own phones. Borrowing phones from older siblings seemed unlikely.
“We might be able to use something else,” Ammon said after they dismissed the phone idea. “I’ve got a box of electrical stuff my dad was gonna throw away. We could check in there.”
“Does it have any walky-talkies?”
“If it did, don’t you think I’d already be using them all the time?”
Even if the box of old electronics did not contain walky-talkies, the boys decided it was worth investigating. They ran to Ammon’s house, which was one of the nicer brick homes located near the park. It was large enough for Ammon to have his own room. He kept the cardboard box filled with wires and components in his closet next to his Lego sets.
“Here’s an old alarm clock,” Ammon said as he pulled parts from the box. “These are speakers. Here’s a radio and a microphone. Batteries. Plugs for different holes.” As he reached the bottom of the box, he pulled out a small cassette tape player. “You know what this is? It plays music and stuff.”
Ammon pressed the Play button and a song by Blondie rattled from the player’s small speaker.
“Still works. And I think you can even record yourself talking.”
The boys fiddled with the tape player until they ejected the Blondie cassette and put in another which was also in the box but had no lettering printed on it. They pressed the Record button and took turns holding the player near their mouths and saying their names.
“Now we gotta rewind and go backwards,” Ammon said. He pushed the Rewind button and then Play. The boys laughed when they heard their voices in the same way a caveman might react when flicking on a cigarette lighter.
“This could be just as good as a phone,” Wesley said excitedly. “Let’s see if we can sound scary.”
They practiced spooky moans and groans, trying to sound as mysterious as possible. After recording short snippets and listening to the playback, they were convinced it would sound terrifying in a dark cemetery.
“This is perfect,” Wesley said with a devious laugh. “Tomorrow, as it’s getting dark, you take off and start the tape playing. Then I’ll get Katelynn to follow me through the graves until we can hear it. She’ll freak out for sure.”
With the new plan in mind, the boys got to work on recording enough spooky sounds to allow time for Wesley to lead Katelynn through the cemetery. After fifteen minutes of recording, they reached the absolute limits of their attention spans. Ammon hit the Stop button on the tape player.
“That should be good enough.”.
“Yeah, I gotta get home anyway before my mom starts looking for me. Tomorrow’s gonna be the best night games ever.”
After dinner the next day, Ammon nonchalantly walked through the cemetery on his way to the park. He stopped at one of the larger gravestones and left the tape recorder behind it. He made sure he could find the spot again when the time was right. When he greeted Wesley, he grinned and nodded to show their plan was underway.
The night was warm and a large, energetic crowd showed up in the park. They played dodgeball and capture the flag until the youngest kids had to go home. By the time dusk set in, the only three remaining were Wesley, Ammon, and Katelynn. They reclined on the grass, recovering from all the running around they had done.
“You know what would be fun?” Wesley asked unprompted. “What if we told some ghost stories? We could even walk around the cemetery to make them spookier.”
This was the first time Katelynn had heard Wesley mention ghost stories, but she did not flinch. “I’ve heard a million ghost stories. I doubt any of yours will sound scary. But I guess I’ll listen.”
Wesley stood. “So then, we’ll walk through the cemetery?”
Katelynn rose to her feet and replied, “If you want.”
Ammon interrupted to say, “I just remembered my mom wants me home. You can tell stories if you want, but I gotta go.” Without another word, he took off running.
“That was weird. Do you think he’s scared?” Katelynn asked with a little laugh.
Wesley shrugged. “Okay, let me think of my best story.” He walked slowly toward the cemetery and Katelynn followed without noticing the grin on his face. The plan was working.
“Alright, did you know that a hundred years ago there was a murder in Wellington and they couldn’t figure out who did it?”
As Wesley spoke, Katelynn caught up to him so they walked side by side, but far enough apart there was no chance for accidental physical contact. The smell of freshly cut alfalfa drifted on the air as the last of the direct sunlight disappeared. Only the muted hues of the gloaming remained as the pair crossed over the boundary between park and cemetery.
Wesley’s heartrate increased as he kept track of Katelynn and listened for the sound of the tape recorder. With the distractions, his storytelling suffered. He rambled and repeated lines about a mountain man who was accused of the unsolved murder. He was about to point out where the man was buried when he heard the raspy sound of the tape recorder in the distance.
“Wait, do you hear something?”
Katelynn froze and listened. She inched closer to Wesley before saying. “I think so. What is it?”
In the most serious voice he could manage, Wesley replied, “I was gonna tell you about the ghosts that hang around this place. Sometimes they make noise. I think that’s what we’re hearing.”
Katelynn grabbed his arm and said in a weak voice, “Really?”
Wesley did not smirk, but he secretly felt triumphant. Things had worked out exactly as hoped. He was alone with Katelynn. She had vulnerably reached out and grabbed him. Unfortunately, this was as far as he had planned. What came next was left to chance. He would happily have stood there for an hour with Katelynn clutching his arm, but by the sound of her breathing, she did not sound like she was in a lingering mood. Maybe he could bravely lead her out of the cemetery, holding her hand. Maybe she would kiss him for a reward.
“Don’t be afraid. Stay next to me and I’ll lead us out of here,” Wesley said in his deepest voice.
He anticipated Katelynn grasping his hand and snuggling close, but he was blindingly clueless to her character. She had grown up on a farm pushing around animals ten times her size. Very little truly scared her. She let go of Wesley and narrowed her eyes toward the recorded wailing. “I think we should check it out.”
“Uh . . . I don’t think we should.”
“Why not? Are you scared?”
Wesley had not anticipated this reaction. He did not want her discovering the tape, but acting scared was worse. He slowly replied, “No,” and followed as Katelynn ducked her head and crept toward the noise.
“It’s probably nothing,” Wesley repeated.
The garbled moaning grew louder and louder until they were right on top of it. Katelynn reached down and picked up the cassette recorder. “This is one of those old-fashioned tape thingies. Why would someone leave it here?”
“Weird. We probably shouldn’t touch it. Somebody will come and get it.”
As Wesley finished speaking, the sound from the tape recorder abruptly changed from two boys moaning to a woman clearly speaking. “. . . that’s where I hid it. If it’s been a while and you can’t remember, just listen to the tape. You’ll get back there.” Then the voice went silent.
“Who was that?” Katelynn asked excitedly.
“Probably no one. We should leave it and go.”
“We’ve got to show this to someone. I’m taking it home.”
Wesley could not confess his plan so he had little choice but to follow Katelynn out of the cemetery and say goodbye as she ran for home. She breathlessly found her mother and insisted she listen. After rewinding the tape a little, they heard the boys moaning and then the woman speaking.
“That’s your Great Aunt Stacy!” Katelynn’s mom cried. “I’d recognize her voice anywhere.”
They listened to her sentences three more times before Katelynn’s mom explained more about Aunt Stacy. “She was part of a bank robbery in Salt Lake. She claimed she was innocent but they had her on camera. She walked out with two hundred and fifty thousand dollars but no one ever found the money. I heard lots of people say she hid it in Nine Mile Canyon.”
“Where is she now?”
“She died in prison. We don’t talk a lot about her.”
Katelynn’s mom rewound the tape to the beginning and listened carefully. “Someone recorded over the important part, but I’ll bet this is Aunt Stacy’s confession. She’s telling us where she buried the money. What kind of idiots would have recorded over this? Tell me exactly how you found it.”
Katelynn explained all details of the ghost story walk. The investigation accelerated from there. Within the hour, the County Sheriff was involved. Thirty minutes after that, a Sheriff’s patrol car pulled up to Wesley’s house. A deputy knocked on Wesley’s door with Katelynn and her mom standing behind him. When Wesley was summoned and asked about the tape recorder, he broke in less than a second. With a flushed face, he confessed everything about his plan.
Wesley and his mom followed the patrol car to Ammon’s house. He melted just as easily as Wesley and retrieved his cardboard box filled with electronic parts. His dad did most of the talking when the deputy asked how they got the tape recorder.
“I can’t remember for sure,” Ammon’s dad explained. “It might have come from a thrift store. Or maybe when I was clearing out someone’s house.”
“Did you know Stacy Gillory?”
“A little. My mom was a pretty good friend of hers.”
Tracking the path of the tape player proved impossible, but everyone who heard the cassette was sure the boys had recorded over Stacy’s confession. Two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars was still out in Nine Mile Canyon if anyone could find the location. The cassette was sent to specialists who tried to restore any bits and pieces hidden under the ghostly moaning. No luck.
Katelynn never let Wesley forget how he tried to scare her in the cemetery. Maybe by the time he reached high school, he would find it as funny as she did. Neither went back to night games. They both suddenly felt too old for that kind of thing. Along with Ammon, they learned two unforgettable lessons. First, be careful what you discard or erase. It might truly be worth something. And second, sometimes there really are ghostly voices in the cemetery.
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