Off to the Woods

August shielded her eyes from the sun as she climbed out of the SUV.

Rounding the car, she squeezed the handle of the back lift gate. There lay her shovel, a stun gun, and a metal pipe.

Today brought her just outside of Sleepy Hollow, NY. A recent Tiktok trend of the Summer was doubling her workload, which was both fun and… difficult.

The new trend was to go out to abandoned cemeteries with a power washer and record ~satisfying~ footage. This would be of the gravestones going from gross and obscured to like-new. Or at least, as close to like-new as antique weathered headstones could be.

How did this double her workload? The past few hundred years had seen the hunting and killing of many a supernatural creature. Some deaths, particularly vampires, were from being fatally wounded, or so they thought, and buried in things such as iron coffins chained shut.

If enough vitality of you is left, you can regenerate. It could take hours or years, but there's a possibility to come back. Magical items could push that regeneration time closer to 100 years.

A lot of these grave markers were lost to time. Whole vampire families guarding last known whereabouts had been wiped out by hunters, leaving unknowns. Word of mouth and old journals was commonly how clues were found. In the digital age with the rise of social media and ancestry sites, people were uploading old cemeteries' locations and pictures daily. Good samaritans were taking these locations as projects to restore and log online for hopes of descendants finding a lost ancestor.

Not every buried vampire survived. Some just didn't make it. It happens, not enough vitality left, something went wrong, or I guess what you'd call a regenerative disorder prevented it.

Every grave under suspicion had to be searched. Worst case scenario actually wasn't digging up a human skeleton. The worst case was finding one of our own in quite a state. Some go mad down there, the mind deprived of stimulation for years, with just your thoughts, is a scary thing.

Attaching the stun gun to her belt, she grabbed the shovel and pipe.

Just behind her, a bit off the old hiking trail was a small cemetery. It was just a few graves, from the photos online it seemed to be rather at random who was here. A jogger off this path had uploaded pictures, ignoring the signs to stay on the path. Nathanial Prost was one of those graves, setting off internet bots at the agency. Nathaniel Prost was buried in 1882, not much was known there, but a found journal of a vampire hunter had boasted of the staking and burial of one N. Prost outside of Sleepy Hollow, NY. Imagine keeping a little diary of people you murdered. Weird flex, Mr. Hunter.

Staking was a hard one, the survival rate on that was low. Iron stakes and spiritual woods, you weren't coming back from that. The wrong kind of wood though… you had a chance.

Wading thru the brush, she located the spot. Crooked from erosion, the headstones sat slanted. "Nathanial Prost, taken too soon, 1882"

Taken. Someone had found the grave and made a marker. The grief of knowing your friend or lover had been murdered and buried here would have been intense. Who was it, she wondered, who had he left behind to mourn and memorialize him with this stone. Vampires were outcasted if found out, had they known?

She stuck the shovel into the dirt. This was the worst part, forgotten graves had so much damn plant life above them. Gnarled roots, stones, and sometimes even whole trees would take over the space. Hacking her way through the clay and debris, 5ft down the shovel struck something solid. Not a rock, this was definitely wood. She hit it again,

Thunk

A coffin indeed. These older ones tended to be quite brittle from the elements breaking them down. If you hit one right the whole lid could cave in from the weight of the dirt. That's something you really don't want if you're required to send a photo of the coffin contents for approval.

Clearing the dirt from the rest of the coffin, she glanced over her shoulder. Good, still no hikers wandering around. Steadying herself, she raised her foot and brought all her weight down through her hiking boot.

Splinters went sailing through the air, August fell down into the broken coffin, and more notably…

Someone started screaming.