All of this happened yesterday morning, so I wanted to get it into writing as soon as possible. My girlfriend and I were both sitting around; thumbing through dumb content on our phones together. Its early June here in the Twin Cities, and according to the weather it was going to be a beautiful day. It was a rare Sunday morning where neither of us had to work, so we were also trying to figure out what kind of adventure we could get ourselves into. By 9am, we'd decided: We were going to the local Zoo. We both started getting ready, and as I waited for her to finish putting her makeup on I decided to plop back on the couch and surf social media. Within a few minutes I wound up stumbling on an article that my cousin had posted. It was something along the lines of, "The Most Haunted Place in Minnesota; and You've Probably Never Even Heard of it." My GF and I both have a penscient for all things macabre, so naturally I clicked on it.
The article was pretty short, and it focused on a very small town called Grey Cloud Island. A quick google maps search showed me that it was only about 25 minutes from where we lived. Even with its close proximity to my home, I'd never heard of it. According to the article, the town is located on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi River. It has no police force or fire department of its own, and is sparsely populated by fewer than 300 residents. A second google search showed that the island itself had been populated for over 2000 years. It had been a significant burial location for the both the Dakota Sioux and the Hopewell People that predated the Sioux by centuries. Hopewell Burial mounds were said to still be dotted throughout the island. Very prominently featured by the article was the French Settlers' Cemetery that had been in continual use since 1873. This cemetery was said to be the epicenter of the paranormal activity on the island. Sightings of a spectral Sioux Chief wandering the cemetery alone, holding a green lantern. A woman sobbing over the grave of her long dead infant. A row of graves that when you count them from West to East they total twelve; but when you count them from East to West they total thirteen.
This was all I needed to hear. Without doing any further research on the subject, I turned to my girlfriend and said:
"Nevermind the zoo, we're going on a spooky adventure."
She was more than game.
To my surprise, when I typed the cemetery into my GPS, it came right up. About twenty minutes later we were getting off of busy Highway 61, and heading south on Grey Cloud Island Drive. Once we were less than a mile off of the highway, the din of the highway and the city completely disappeared. The town was nothing more than a blip on the map. Boarded up farm houses, collapsed barns, and large parcels of unkempt land were pretty much all that the "town" had to offer. We drove by a small abandoned brick building that said "Grey Cloud Island Town Hall." This was the only municipal building in the entire town, at least as far as I could see. This was a gray day that was unseasonably cold, much more like a November afternoon than a June one. The island was completely windless, though the quickly moving clouds overhead gave off that feeling of electricity that is usually only present in late fall.
A little further down the road the GPS told me to turn left onto a dirt road. The only problem was, this dirt road appeared to be either a private drive, or someones driveway. I pulled in nonetheless, and noticed that about twenty feet down the road was a stop sign. Below this stop sign was a very clearly marked NO TRESPASSING-PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. These by themselves sent a clear enough message that outsiders were not wanted. The thing that really set me on edge though, was the large motion activated camera that sat on top of the signpost. I looked up at its lens and unblinking red light, pointed at our car. Knowing that the cemetery itself was public property, I figured that this was the fault of the GPS; and maybe it happened often enough that the landowner was tired of people coming up his drive looking for some spooky cemetery.
The whole thing made me really uneasy though. This was the first time I'd ever seen such a strong "keep out" message on someone's private property, let alone the very expensive and capable looking camera attached. I backed out of the drive, and back on to the main road. I continued heading south, and made a left turn after about a hundred yards onto the next road. It was an old washboarded out dirt road, and I pulled over to look at the satellite map on my phone. Sure enough, there the cemetery was on the map, but it seemed to be completely surrounded by private property. We slowly continued down the thickly wooded dirt road, thinking that there must be a public entrance to the cemetery somewhere. As we continued down the road, there were locked gates on the front of the several spaced out driveways that led in the direction of the cemetery. All you could see was woods, overgrown driveways and the occasional house. No sign of our destination at all.
We drove a little farther, and to our surprise there was a young family doing yard work in front of a house that was directly across from where the cemetery should've been. Certainly this family would know where the public entrance was. To us, this was our best shot of finding out how to get there without accidentally trespassing and winding up shot on someone's property. The family in their yard was a young man, maybe in his late twenties, his wife, and their two young girls. The girls were playing in the large yard with two Great Danes, and when we stopped our car at the end of their driveway, they both started to yell,
"PEOPLE! PEOPLE, Daddy, PEOPLE, Don't you see?!"
The father turned his head from our car back to his family, and said something sharply that I couldn't quite make out. The mother quickly gathered the children and dogs, and were out of sight. We both got out and took a few steps down their long drive, and the father met us at the end. He was wearing gloves that were gripped tightly to a metal rake, and looked at us with what was obvious annoyance and distrust.
"Hey man, sorry to bother you like this, but we're trying to find out how to get into Grey Cloud Island cemetery. Would you happen to know where the public entrance is?" My GF asked with as much diplomacy as she could muster, trying to temper the annoyance in his eyes.
His eyes only seemed to sharpen further as he quickly shot back, "What?"
He leaned into us a little, and I repeated back what my GF had just said. He continued to stare at us for a couple more seconds before saying, "I'm sorry I don't know what you're talking about."
Surprised, I said back, "Isn't there supposed to be a cemetery near here?"
Turning to walk back down his driveway, he said facing away from us, "Not that I know of."
The air was thick and quiet, and all I wanted to do was get the hell back to the car. We both got in, pulled a U-turn, and headed back in the opposite direction down the dirt road. As we put that house behind us, we both remarked at how strange the whole interaction was. I mean, maybe he really didn't know that there was a cemetery in the woods just across from his property. Maybe he and his family had just moved in and hadn't explored the area yet? These were plausible, but not as plausible as that he may have just wanted us to fuck off, leave him alone and get off his property. I mean, either way, it had to be there. I'd just been staring at it on the map.
Needless to say, at this point we both figured that it was time to abort the mission. Between the motion camera on the stop sign and the cringey interaction that we'd just had with the neighbor; one thing was clear. Outsiders were not wanted here, and pressing our luck any further would be just about the biggest scary movie cliche imaginable. I started back in the direction of the highway, but slowed down when I saw the dilapidated old town hall building. I figured, since we'd driven all the way down here, it would be a shame to leave empty handed. So I pulled into the tiny dirt parking lot, and hopped out with my old Canon film camera to take a couple pictures. The building itself was simply made, and couldn't have been more than sixty years old. It was all cinder block with only one set of glass block windows on the building's front. A giant, ancient oak left the tiny building in total shade. I found a decent spot to take a picture, and held my camera up to my face. While I was adjusting the lens, I heard the sound of tires loudly braking in the gravel just behind where I was standing.
I turned around to see that a pickup truck with a man, probably in his late sixties had just pulled up to my GF and I, and had stopped about five feet from us.
"Can I help you guys with something?" He shot out of a rolled down window. He was thin, with a full head of white hair and a neat, white beard. The thick accent of a lifelong Minnesotan was immediately evident. The tone that he'd used to ask us this question was very severe, which was contrasted by the large, easy smile he had on his face. A few of his teeth were missing, but for some reason his smile was still very disarming. The most notable thing about him, though, were his eyes. They were steel gray and very milky. Those eyes scanned us for an answer.
"We were looking for the cemetery around here." My GF said.
"And why? Do you have relation buried there?" He snapped at us before she'd finished her sentence, still smiling. He still scanned us with those eyes, trying to get a definitive read on both of us.
"No, we don't. But we were just hoping to have a look," I said. This didn't seem to do anything for him, so my GF took the wheel from here.
"I just got my master's in American History, and this whole island has a lot of historical significance. It's interesting and we just want to have a look." My GF said this with as much charm as she could muster, given the fact that we were just getting grilled by a stranger in an old pickup truck.
"I know it does!" The old man said indignantly, the smile gone. "Look, there have been a lot of people who just come out here looking for ghosts, and we don't want any of that kind of crap here."
"No, no, that's not at all what we're here to do," I assured him. Even if it was exactly what we were here to do, this seemed like hardly the time to come clean.
He thought for a minute, and then sighed deeply and said, "Alright. Follow me."
Now, I know you must be thinking, 'There's no way in hell they followed that man, who knows where he came from or what his intentions were?' Well, you'd be wrong. For whatever reason, we were so fixated on the idea of seeing this silly little cemetery that we were willing to follow an old stranger down an unfamiliar dirt road in a nearly abandoned town. Darwin award material, without a doubt.
He turned down the dirt road where we'd spoken to the man doing yard work, and we followed. He pulled his truck to a stop just shy of the other man's property, and pulled a quick u-turn, and pulled next to us.
"Alright, this is the entrance," he said, pointing across the road to a locked green gate. The gate was old, and wide enough for two lanes of traffic to get through, although there was not a road or path beyond. There was a long field behind the gate, and at the far end you could see dense forest. Just before that forest, however, was the small old cemetery.
"Just go around the gate, don't worry, won't nobody give you any trouble, just don't go off this property here, all the rest of it is private property." He looked back toward the cemetery for a minute before narrowing his eyes and saying, "Make sure when you're back there, you say hi to my mother, my father, two of my brothers, and more neighbors than I can count, ok?" The tone of his voice had a hint of discipline to it, as though by sharing this information with us he was entrusting us to be on our best behavior.
We got out of the car, locked it and walked toward the gate. He stared at us both in his rear view mirror as we walked. After a few steps, he looks at my GF from head to toe in the mirror. Finally after a few seconds, with a sick smile on his face and in his voice he says, "Wow, you sure are a COLORFUL young lady," and drives off.
My GF is 5'11, dark olive skinned with black hair, and has large colorful tattoo pieces on her body. We walked together toward the cemetery, and chalked it up to him being a friendly, but weird old man. However as we walked, neither of us could shake not only his words but the creepy, deliberate way that he had said them. Just one of those things that makes you feel like you need to immediately go wash your hands.
The cemetery itself was set on a small hill against the woods, with graves that started at the end of the nineteenth century and went up until present day. Many of the graves were very unusual, and on some of the older ones even appeared to be home made. One odd thing about the cemetery was that many of the graves, even some of the oldest, were still maintained with flowers, wooden crosses, stuffed animals, unopened whiskey bottles, and too many types of trinkets to count. Many of the last names were the same, so this led me to believe that this place was still a central part of this incredibly small town. Honoring the dead must be a local tradition; and no matter how long dead ancestors are, they are to be remembered. Odd, I thought, but kind of endearing. Just like the rest of the island that day, the air was dead quiet and cold. The cemetery was certainly one of the more unique that we'd seen, but the feeling of eyes on you through that cold air was one of the most memorable parts of the day. Whether it was cameras in the woods or something more, I'm not sure. The bottom line is that we were not alone in that cemetery, and we knew it.
We spent less than ten minutes in the place. It was obvious that it was the town's opinion that outsiders were not welcome in this place, and that feeling was penetrating. On the drive out of town, we started asking ourselves the same questions over and over. Why the camera on the stop sign? Why would that man clearly lie to us about his knowledge of the cemetery? How on earth did the man in the truck know how to find us, and who was he? What did he mean by his creepy comment about my GF's color?
As I drove, my GF did a little more reading on the experiences that others have had with Grey Cloud Island. She turned to Reddit as well as a few other paranormal forums on the internet. It turns out it is very common, especially late at night, to be violently chased off by a man in a pickup truck. He'll come up on you quickly, and try to run you off the road if you're, in his opinion, up to no good. I guess on that front, we got lucky. The last thing that we read, though, was the thing that made us decide to never return to Grey Cloud Island, and may have given us an answer about the man's odd comment. As it turns out, the town also has a well known history as a gathering place for the KKK, even going so far as to host a retreat at a camp on the island.
So, everyone on Grey Cloud Island, lets never meet again.