Please check out Maggie Serota’s extremely enjoyable Daily Urban Legend for my latest contribution, exposing the horrible truth about NASA.
After you’ve clicked through, come back here, because I have another urban “legend” to share, this one from my personal past. I dared not let Maggie post it out of fear that people might think it untrue. It’s about “The Damian Grave:”
When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, a persistent myth circulated around a particular burial plot in Resurrection Cemetery called “the Damian Grave.” This tombstone, sitting atop a lonely hill, is carved from jet-black stone and engraved with an upside-down cross, the name Damian, and the epitaph, “This is not goodbye, just so long.” Legend had it that if anyone harmed or defiled that gravesite, terrible events would befall them. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had been killed, or lost a leg, or God knows what else after they fucked with that grave….(You can verify this. Check out shots of the tombstone in this video and an encapsulation of the myth on this site under “Damian’s Grave.”)
Anyway, my junior year of high school, my friends and I were really into the occult and Grant Morrison comic books and shit like that. So once or twice a week we’d get together in a cemetery, get drunk on stolen pony cans of Genesee and look for hidden secrets among the graves. Sometimes we’d bring a little weed to up the paranoia level.
We all knew about the Damian Grave, but we never had the courage to check it out until one Tuesday night in September. We steeled ourselves with some extra beer and a bottle of Beefeater that my friend had copped from an estate sale (really), and we drove up the hill to Resurrection. We could see the tombstone glowing red all the way from the parking lot.
We camped ourselves on the grave, and everything seemed harmless enough, like the red light might just be a strange reflection from the highway. So we relaxed a little, drank way too much, and started daring each other to interact with the tombstone. Touch it. Talk to it. Kiss it. That eventually of course built to pissing on it. That’s when I started feeling very weird. Maybe it was all the mixed drinking, but I leaned over and threw up all over the tombstone. Everyone laughed. Even me. Until we heard the sounds. We couldn’t tell where they were coming from — they seemed to be all around us. Strange rumblings that sounded almost like, this seems crazy, but almost like screaming. Distant screaming. We just couldn’t tell. But when the noise grew louder and closer, we chickened the hell out and ran. We left the empties, piled into the car, and lit out for home.
We screamed down the highway in my Ford Tempo at 75+ mph. The car was shaking, redlined. We weren’t only drunk, but freaking the fuck out about the curse.
“We’re doomed, man!”
“What the fuck did we do?! Oh god, oh god!”
“I don’t want to die. I never really believed that shit…”
I’ll admit it. I was driving. Terrified. Not watching the road. Blind from the cheap beer and the dark two-lane road, running alongside one of Pittsburgh’s many ridge lines. When the headlights came at me, I panicked. If I’d just kept going, kept my cool, it would’ve been fine. But instead I swerved hard to the right. Toward the guardrail. Toward the black slope of the hill beneath it.
The curse was real. I scraped the fender on the guardrail a little, and my mom was pretty pissed. And that semester I failed every one of my chemistry tests.
