The Ghosts of Cumberland by rockjock29bc
When I first left Vancouver, British Columbia, for the quieter shores of Vancouver Island, I settled in Courtenay with a pair of roommates who wasted no time filling my head with local legends. The one that stuck was the haunted Chinese cemetery in nearby Cumberland, a place whispered about every October. Halloween was approaching, and on a night when the storm seemed determined to tear the island apart—rain lashing sideways, wind screaming through the cedars—we decided to see it for ourselves.
Blake, Dave, and I piled into my rattling Civic just before midnight. Cumberland’s Chinese cemetery sits on a hill above the village, once home to the largest Chinese community outside San Francisco. Most of the men buried there had toiled in the coal mines that scarred the valley, their lives cheap and their graves modest. We parked at the bottom of the slope, engines off, wipers still. The moment we stepped out, three thunderous bangs cracked through the woods to our left—WHAM, WHAM, WHAM—like someone swinging a baseball bat against a tree trunk. No echo, no follow-up. Just those three deliberate blows.
We laughed it off, nerves jangling, and started up the gravel path. To the left: dense forest. Center: a narrow service road. Right: a low white picket fence enclosing the cemetery itself. Inside, rows of weathered concrete slabs covered the graves, some cracked open like broken teeth. Chinese characters—some crisp, some worn to ghosts—glowed faintly under our flashlights.
Halfway up the hill, Blake froze. “You see that?” At the crest, a swarm of pale green lights drifted in lazy spirals. Fireflies. Except British Columbia doesn’t have fireflies. Beside the lights stood a figure—taller than a man, blacker than the storm behind it, edges sharp as cut paper. A cloak, maybe. Or nothing at all. We stared. It stared back. Then the lights winked out and the figure was gone.
We stood in the sudden dark, rain drumming on our hoods. “Where’d it—” Blake started. “There!” Twenty feet to our left, between two shattered slabs, the same shape reappeared. This time its face shone pearl-white, featureless, glowing like moonlit bone. That was enough. We bolted.
Blake, skinny and fast, hit the downhill slope like a sprinter. Dave was right behind him. I lumbered in the rear, lungs burning. Then I saw it: Dave’s head snapped back as if an invisible arm had clotheslined him across the throat. His feet left the ground; he landed flat on his back with a wet thud. Before I could shout, he was up again, running harder, passing me like I was standing still.
We slammed into the car, doors locked, engine roaring. Dave yanked down the collar of his turtleneck. Angry red welts ringed his neck—four parallel lines, thick as fingers. “Felt exactly like a forearm,” he rasped. “Cold. Solid.”
In the shaky glow of the dome light, he told us something he’d never mentioned before: his great-great-grandfather had been foreman at the Cumberland mines. The same mines where Chinese workers—paid a fraction of white wages—were sent into the most dangerous shafts. In 1887, a methane explosion killed over a hundred men, mostly Chinese. Dozens more died over the years planting dynamite in crawlspaces too tight for anyone else. Their bones, Dave said quietly, were still down there.
The next morning the storm had blown itself out. Sunlight glittered on wet cedar, and curiosity dragged us back. We drove up the service road into the woods where the bangs had come from. A dozen paces in, the trees opened onto a perfect circle of earth. At its center rose a low, moss-covered mound ringed by hundreds of small headstones—no bigger than loaves of bread—each carved with a single name. Broken porcelain lay scattered across the grass: shards of bowls, teacups, incense burners. Copper coins glinted among the ferns. Offerings, maybe. Or remnants of funerals long past.
Years later, I married a woman brave enough to demand the full tour. I walked her through the cemetery, pointed out the slab with the fist-sized hole you could stare straight into the grave through, showed her the circular tomb in the woods. Afterward, we took our dogs down to the old swamp—once the heart of Cumberland’s Chinatown, now just reeds and interpretive signs. We read the placard, leashed the dogs, and started our walk.
When we returned to the car, something on the sign caught my eye: a single curved shard of blue-and-white porcelain wedged into the corner of the display. It looked familiar. Too familiar. We drove back up the hill. I carried the piece to the tomb, knelt among the offerings, and pressed it against a broken rice bowl half-buried in the dirt.
It fit. Perfectly. Not a chip out of place.
I’d studied that bowl an hour earlier—photographed it, even. The shard hadn’t been there. My wife watched me, eyes wide. We left the piece where it belonged. Some puzzles aren’t meant to be taken home.
I don’t visit after dark anymore. But every Halloween, when the wind picks up and the rain starts its sideways dance, I still hear those three deliberate bangs—WHAM, WHAM, WHAM—echoing from the trees above Cumberland. And I know the miners are keeping count