Joe Wyznowski, Cemetary Custodian

Yeah, I know, it's a creepy job taking care of a cemetery. Some of my friends thought I was nuts, but hell, the pay is good and I get this nice little cottage to live in. It's a quiet neighborhood...ha ha ha...and door to door salesmen never come around. I got nice gardening all around me that the ladies from the Historical Society take care of and there's lots of songbirds and squirrels and such. Yeah, I like it here just fine.

Oh sure, we get some vandals every now and then...and there have been a few exhumations by the cops, you know, to help solve crimes. Last one of those was just a few weeks ago, when they dug up old Jasper Hood in order to find out if his wife had poisoned him. Turned out she did, with some poison mushrooms in his pasta sauce. Kinda put me off Italian for a couple of weeks, I tell ya.

Every now and then you get a wacko coming on the grounds, like that creepy goth guy who insisted that his dead girlfriend was not really dead. He got hauled off by the cops because he had all this vampire slaying stuff in his bag. They sent him up to Pinewood Sanitarium, but I heard that he slit his own throat a few days later and bled out. Anyway, they cremated him and that was that.

Ghosts? No, I haven't seen...ok, look, I'll tell ya this but it's just between you and me...I've seen a couple of folks walking around the grounds who had a see through complexion. Nothing threatening, just one is some guy from around 1890 who strolls around with a big phantom boxer dog and the other is this young chick from about 1968, a hippie type, who dances on some of the headstones near her grave. But like I said, nothing sinister. Actually, the guy tips his hat when he sees me and the girl flashes me the peace sign.

Zombies? Hey, you've been reading too much pop fiction. But even if they did show up, I 've got a 12 gage pump action that would take off a head slick as a whistle.

So anyway, it might be a creepy job for some folks, but all in all, it beats pumping gas.