It was 1992, when my friend Eric O’Brien and I were just out of college and still at an age when a bad idea usually sounded better if someone asked, “What if?”
Eric was especially good at that.
A group of us were camping at Indian Cave State Park in southeastern Nebraska. We had been sitting around the campsite drinking beer. Somebody had some weed. Somewhere along the way, we noticed a huge thunderstorm building to the west.
Most reasonable people would have stayed at camp.
We decided we needed a better view.
There was a clearing nearby at the old St. Deroin Cemetery, so five of us headed up there and sat among the gravestones to watch the storm come in.
And it was spectacular.
Huge clouds were building in front of us, illuminated by lightning. The storm kept getting closer until it was close enough that we started thinking maybe sitting in the middle of a cemetery wasn’t such a brilliant idea after all.
Then the wind changed.
Completely.
The storm split.
We watched one part move north of us and another move south, as though the cemetery were sitting inside a bubble. For nearly half an hour, lightning flashed around us while the storm passed on either side.
Not a drop of rain touched the ground where we were sitting.
Eventually the two sides seemed to come together again beyond us.
That’s about the time I noticed the soldiers.
There were maybe a dozen of them moving along a ridge below the cemetery, parallel to us.
They looked old. Dark uniforms. Caps. Long rifles. What looked like bayonets.
Between the moonlight, clouds and flashes of lightning, everything had that strange blue-white color the world sometimes gets during a nighttime storm.
I told everyone what I was seeing.
They couldn’t see them.
Of course, that caused everyone to start yelling.
And that’s when the figures seemed to change.
I don’t know how else to explain it. A moment earlier they had looked like soldiers. Once everyone reacted, their appearance became stranger and more threatening. For a moment I thought I was looking at Klansmen.
Maybe the light changed.
Maybe my frightened brain changed what it thought it was seeing.
Maybe the beer and weed deserve some credit.
I don’t know.
But we weren’t interested in hanging around to investigate.
We started moving out of the cemetery—FAST.
Eric was ahead of me when I saw the little girl.
She couldn’t have been more than a few years old. She was wearing what looked like an old prairie dress and bonnet and was holding flowers.
Unlike everything else that night, there was nothing frightening about her.
She was just standing there.
Calm.
Peaceful.
I yelled to Eric to watch out for the little girl.
He never saw her.
Before he reached where she was standing, his foot caught something—a rut, a dirt clod, who knows—and he went down.
When we got to him, he was practically face-to-face with a gravestone.
It belonged to a little girl.
I don’t remember her name anymore. I don’t remember the dates. What I remember is how close together those dates were.
She had only been a few years old.
And the little girl I’d seen was gone.
That was enough for everybody else.
They headed back to camp.
Eric and I did not.
Because Eric and I had always been the guys who wanted to know what was around the next corner. If something didn’t make sense, we didn’t necessarily run away from it.
We asked, “What if?”
Nearby was another old burial ground we’d always known as the Half-Breed Cemetery, named for the historic Nemaha Half-Breed Reservation that once occupied this part of Nebraska.
So after everything we’d just experienced, Eric and I walked there.
At night.
With only the moonlight to guide us.
Looking back, I have no idea how I made it to 30.
The feeling in that cemetery was completely different.
There was no fear.
There was sadness.
Eric felt it too.
We walked among the graves quietly, and somehow both of us came away with the feeling that the people buried there had been carrying pain for a very long time.
We didn’t know what to do with that.
So we danced.
Not because we were making fun of anyone. Quite the opposite.
Two young white guys in the middle of the Nebraska woods attempted what we imagined a tribal dance might be because, in that moment, it was the only way we could think of to say:
We know you’re here.
You haven’t been forgotten.
You’re not alone.
And something changed.
I can’t prove that.
I can’t prove there were soldiers on that ridge. I can’t explain the little girl. I can’t explain why Eric fell beside the grave of a child about the same age as the one I thought I’d seen.
And thunderstorms split all the time.
Years later, I learned more about St. Deroin and the old reservation. I even learned that U.S. Dragoons—the mounted soldiers who preceded the U.S. Cavalry—had operated on the Nebraska frontier.
Were those the soldiers I saw?
I have no idea.
Maybe five young people drinking beer and smoking weed watched a spectacular thunderstorm, scared themselves in an old cemetery and let their imaginations take over.
That’s a perfectly reasonable explanation.
But it doesn’t explain how I remember the end of that night.
Because when Eric and I finally stopped dancing and stood there under the moonlight, the sadness we’d felt when we arrived seemed to be gone.
Everything felt lighter.
Peaceful.
We walked back to camp believing, somehow, that they were free.
More than thirty years later, I still don’t know what happened in those cemeteries.
But of all the strange things I’ve experienced in my life, what I remember most isn’t being frightened.
It’s dancing with my friend in the moonlight because we thought somebody needed to know they weren’t alone.
If this resonated with you, you’re not alone.
