We see where the commissioners of the City of Brownsville have approved a new ordinance for the historic Old City Cemetery at their last meeting.
Under the new rules, there will be no partying, fornicating, or otherwise untoward activity permitted there and paranormal groups will now have to get permission to communicate with the ghosts who live there. The new rules also state that no one is allowed to take anything from the graves or to cut any plants growing there.
Apparently, there are a number of paranormal groups in town who engage in seances to reach out beyond the dimension of life to see the ones on the other side, as Ozzy likes to say. Did you know, for example, that there are some 30,000 dearly departed stacked there? It' got to be bit crowded and one of the commissioners quipped that perhaps some of the breaks in the brick wall could be attributed to some of them wanting out.
Anyway, people coming back from the Great Beyond seemed so much bunk to me until recently, when I visited a friend who lives nearby. Apparently his family has relatives buried there and when his father was alive he used to take them as kids to clean the plots. His dad was a devout Catholic and kept an altar in his house where he prayed daily. This will probably banish me from his house forever, but it's worth telling.
On one of those outings to the Old City Cemetery, my friend saw some pretty bright red artificial flowers on one of the graves and thought it would be nice take one home to his mom who had stayed at home.
So her picked one and took it home for her.
That night, as the family slept, they heard footsteps in the hallway and when they looked, no one was there. This happened on consecutive nights until his dad asked him where he had gotten the red flower he gave his mom. When he told him it was from one of the graves at the Old City Cemetery near the family plot, his father took it, placed it on the altar, and the family said a prayer.
The footsteps in the night stopped after that.