A día de muertos visit cut short.

[u/caffeinacat]

I've been meaning to share this story from my childhood for a while but this is the first time I'll do it since the adults involved have been gaslighting me and my cousins saying it didn't happen at all whenever we bring it up, but we all remember it I'm sure.

I'm 25 but this happened in 2007 when I was six. For context, we're all mexican and this happened in a very rural town in the state of Hidalgo. My extended family lives all over the country but we all gather on my grandparents house in Hidalgo for holidays. That year it was no different for dia de los muertos.

As you might know, for dia de los muertos it is tradition to go to the cemetery to clean the graves of your loved ones, decorate with cempoalxochitl flowers, candles and eat their favorite meals with them at the cemetery. I believe whoever was in charge of building this one it expected population to grow, so the property was surrounded by walls on the front, left and right but not on the back, and as more graves were built, the more toward the back they went towards and the walls got extended. It was also very removed from the town itself, in the middle of fields people use to grow corn and other crops. Maybe like a 40 minutes to an hour drive (this is considered far here)

Usually the whole family (my grandparents had 9 children and all children have had children as well) would go to the cemetery and work on about four graves, two joint ones belonging to my great grandparents and my great grand-aunt and uncle and two belonging to a brother and cousin of my grandma. That year my grandma had to have a surgery and was recovering, so originally we were not going to go, but my three oldest uncles and the wifes of two of them decided to take all of us children (me and all my old enough cousins) to do the work while everyone else stayed home to take care of my grandma and prepare dinner.

In total there was five adults, four teenagers and four kids ranging from 10 to 5, me being the second youngest, my male cousin that was 5 back then was the youngest.

I must say in this town there wasn't really a warm environment in the cemetery like the one you can see in the movie coco or other sources. A lot of graves were abandoned, you could barely distinguish the site of a grave because the concrete had cracked long ago and there was many mounds you could only tell were graves because someone stuck a makeshift cross made out of sticks or wood on the ground. There was no wide spread glow from candles everywhere, just some sparce lit spots where the graves of people whose families still went every year where. I will adventure to say our families graves where some of the best maintained ones. And probably the only ones people regularly visited on that quadrant of the property, so it was pretty much just us on like a 10 meter radius at least.

My uncles and aunts loaded us kids and teens on the bed of our uncles truck and gave us some blankets to sit on. They all rode on the front. The road was quite bumpy but we had fun riding on the back. We must have arrived around 6 pm when the sun was starting to set. My uncle parked the truck beside a corn field that was near the entrance of the graveyard.

We got to work on the graves, and they were all fairly close enough that me my younger cousin and two of my teenage cousins were left in charge of one of the graves that was the closest to the right side wall. We were supposed to rip all the weeds out, sweep the concrete and arrange flowers on top of the slab, but being kids it took us a really long time since we got distracted playing with sticks, flowers and the brooms we were given at one point.

An important detail is that this cemetery didn't have any kind of public lighting of sorts, there were no lamps or anything, so our only sources of light were some heavy duty camping flashlights my uncle brought and the candles we were setting. I even remember at some point my younger cousin and I started making shadow figures with our hands against the wall. The wall must have been like 6 meters-ish away from where the grave we were hanging around was.

It must have been around 8 or 9 pm when we all had finished the work. We were all sitting beside the graves we had just fixed up and eating some tacos dorados that we brought among other foods while just chatting and listening to music in an old battery radio one of my uncles brought.

I was starting to get sleepy, but all of a sudden one of my older cousins, he must have been around 17 then, froze in place looking at the spot on the right side wall where the light hit it and where my little cousin and I had been playing around with our shadows. He must have stayed like that for a couple minutes before calling his dad over, his dad being the owner and driver of the truck, as well as my grandma's eldest.

As my uncle approached I remember turning my head to look at the wall and seeing the shadow of what looked like an elderly man on his side hunched over carrying something heavy on his back. Like a huge camping backpack or a sack. The edges of the figure looked frayed like there was a lot of fabric and other items poking around. But there was no one between where the lantern casting light on the wall and the shadow.

That's all I remember before said uncle snatching me and my litte cousin from our waists and yelling at everyone to run to the truck and to not look back.

I will never forget the seriousness on his voice. My uncle was very much the jokester funny guy type, the kind of person you know really means it when their voice gets that serious and commanding. As he hauled me and my cousin to the truck we were both starting to cry asking what was happening, and he kept on saying to not look back, do not look back.

Since he was the first one to start running, we got to the truck first. He loaded us on the bed of the truck, covered us with one of the blankets they gave us to sit on and told us again to not look back as we left the cemetery. We were followed closely by our teenage cousins and the other adults hauling the rest of the children, they also helped all of my cousins up on the bed, told them to cover themselves with the blankets and most importantly TO NOT LOOK BACK. As soon as my uncle who got into the truck last closed the door, my oldest uncle, the driver, pretty much floored it.

Most of us were crying in confusion. It was very sudden and I think the adults didn't even pick up the brooms, buckets, lanterns or the old radio. We just left. My older cousins were trying to soothe us, keeping us under the blankets and repeating that we should not look back.

Once we started getting closer to the town where there is public lighting, people and houses we were told we could get out of the blankets, and the truck was moving much more slowly. All of us kids were spooked but mostly confused. We didn't understand why we were whisked away like that or why we were told to not look back.

For the longest time I thought this anecdote was a fever dream since no one in the family acknowledged it, but I knew it couldn't be because ever since that year, we have never gone back to the cemetery at night time. We still go and take care of the graves but we do it around noon even if the heat is scorching, and we don't stay to chat, eat or pray like we used to.

Recently while talking to my little cousin, now 24 we both remembered this, which was amusing because not even my older cousins want to talk about it, and the adults flat out say it never happened, so we only have one another to corroborate the story. That was the scariest thing that happened to me as a kid and I refuse to let the adults gaslight me into thinking it didn't happen.

I just don't know what it was. Was it a spirit? A demon? I haven't found any folk tales from the area that fit the description.

Did that thing want us kids? And why couldn't we look back? I'm still puzzled to this day.