Case 1: Volendam Lutheran Church and Cemetery

My name is Takeo Nakamura. I became aware of the paranormal when I was a teenager. I had never been ‘sensitive’ to the paranormal as others might put it, and while I had heard of stories and legends about ghosts, I had never experienced one first-hand until I was in high school, not long after me and my friends had experienced a tragedy like no other.

The year was 2022. I was sixteen years old and had been living in the United States with the American side of my family for ten years in a small upstate New York town called Volendam. It was just west of Schenectady and Amsterdam, right on the edge of what most people would consider the Capital District, that being the region centered around Albany, New York’s capital city. Aside from the two villages, one named Leesville and another also named Volendam, most of the town was empty save for a few very tiny hamlets. These hamlets, named South Volendam, Dana, and Amesbury, have little to them aside from a store or two, one, two, or maybe three churches, and a fire station each. The Erie Canal, and later the Barge Canal/canalized Mohawk River, provided the area with a steady stream of business for many years, as did railroads and later highways. With plenty of historic buildings and sites dating back to before British settlement in the area, there were plenty of places that townspeople alleged were haunted.

At the time, I had a pretty good friend group, the most important of which for this story being Jared Unser and Marie Desmomd, both of whom were the same age as me, and Ashley Yoon, who was a year younger than me. My then fourteen-year-old little sister, Yukiko, would also tag along a lot with us, with Marie and Ashley in particular bonding with her. If you have not yet guessed by now, me, my sister, and Ashley were indeed Asians, myself being of almost entirely Japanese descent while Ashley was half-Korean and half-white. Living in rural New York was not always easy for us, but we managed, and in Ashley’s case, a girl named Naomi Smith was always there to comfort her if anyone gave her shit for her background.

Naomi was a cheerful girl, although she could have the mouth of a sailor at times. She had known Ashley for years, dating all the way back to elementary school, and when me, Jared, and Marie became friends with Ashley, Naomi of course came along in a package deal of sorts. It was joked among us that Naomi was secretly in love with Ashley, although those jokes ended up becoming reality when one day, Naomi and Ashley shared a kiss in front of us and came out. After that, things went well for a good seven months… Until July of 2022.

It was July 4th weekend when Naomi was killed. A drunk driver struck her while she was riding a side-by-side, mudding in the forest behind her family’s house when she tried to cross the road. She never had a chance. That piece of shit drunk was doing seventy in a forty-five and had none of his lights on. He killed himself in the accident, so the worst part for us, or me at least, was that he could never truly be held accountable in court.

We were all heartbroken… And we were all so angry. She was so young, and the life she had ahead of her was taken away by a lowlife who did not know his limits. In the age of ride-sharing apps, drunk driving is a choice. You could get service even in our relatively rural town. There was no fucking excuse.

To put it mildly, Ashley was devastated. She had lost her girlfriend, the love of her life. We were young, but she truly did love Naomi with all her heart, and now she was gone. Even so, we all persevered in spite of her loss, with even Ashley pointing out the day after her funeral that her girlfriend would haunt each and every one of us if we let her death bring us down. It was that comment, however, that led us to finding out a secret from Marie.

Marie is a nerd. Well, let me rephrase that. We all were nerds, but she was definitely the most into things like anime and video games and whatnot. She is also amazing at cosplay, while the rest of us either were not really into it (Jared, Naomi, and Ashley) or were beginners (me, Yukiko). She has had a bit of a rough life in the past, including (in her own words, not mine) a half-hearted suicide attempt that occurred several months prior to Naomi’s own death that she told no one about until much later, and I bring this up because it is actually rather critical to what she revealed to us.

You see, Marie is, for lack of a better phrase, ‘force-sensitive’… but with ghosts.

As long as she can recall, she has seen the spirits of the dead. That said, she has not been bombarded by them, but according to her, she does run into them more than the average person, and can sense them far earlier than the average person. The attempt I mentioned is relevant because the number of sightings apparently got worse after said attempt, including seeing an old woman in her home that she had never seen before.

Fast-forward to December of the same year. Me and Ashley had begun dating, and that year, Marie and her family had flown down to Florida for a week for Christmas. She asked us if we could watch the house in some capacity for the week, and we all said yes. For two nights, Jared, who, without getting into too many details, does not have the best home life, slept over at her house in a spare bedroom, and on both nights, he woke up at exactly three twenty-two in the morning. He would go back to bed after, but it weirded him out. Keep in mind, Jared is a rather tough guy, so him being weirded out is very unusual.

One night, I volunteered to sleep over. Ashley joined me, and you can probably guess what we got down to… And yes, Marie did not give a shit. Anyway, as Jared had, we woke up at three twenty-two. However, unlike Jared, we had a more… Interesting discovery upon waking up.

…

I remember waking up first. Although it was rather cold out, you can guess how much clothing the two of us were wearing at this point… Or lack thereof. Thankfully Marie’s house was rather well-heated, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, upon waking up at three twenty-two in the morning as Jared apparently had, I shook Ashley awake. “Hey, Ash, wake up.”

“I was trying to go back to sleep,” she groggily said to me. Apparently, she had also awoken around the same time, but had not moved, hoping she would go back to sleep if she just stayed still and closed her eyes. “What is it?”

“I woke up, too. It feels weird.”

“Try to go back to bed, Takeo.”

It was at that moment I turned my head and looked over at the closet at the other side of the room. For a brief second or two, I looked at… Something over there, trying to piece together what it was. Once my brain started working, I grabbed Ashley and screamed, “Ash, get up! Get up!”

Ashley looked over to where I was looking and screamed in fear, her cry echoing throughout the house before she yelled out, “What the fuck?!”

An old woman was staring at both of us. She was dressed all in some kind of nightgown, and all she did was look at us with the widest stare I have ever seen. We both jumped out of the bed and barely had time to grab our clothes to rush them over to another room as I yelled, “Go! Go! Go! We need to get out of here!”

We soon locked ourselves in a bathroom, got dressed as fast as we could, and then bolted out of there, fearing the old woman was going to follow us. Needless to say, we got the Hell out of Marie’s house and called my parents to pick us up, which is how they found out Ashley was sleeping with me. After a talk about, well, certain things, we both were taken home to our respective houses for the night.

…

When we told Marie about the time of three twenty-two in the morning, Marie confirmed that most days, she too woke up at that time before falling back asleep. She apologized to us for the encounter, which she didn’t have to do. It’s not her fault that her house is haunted, after all.

Curious, I began to look into the background of Marie’s house, and what I found both answered our questions and disturbed me. Before Marie’s family had purchased the house, an old woman had hanged herself in the closet of that room, and it was estimated that she died around three twenty-two in the morning. Once Marie came home, we all theorized that perhaps she began to appear more often after Marie’s own thankfully unsuccessful attempt, disturbed in some way by the event.

In January of 2023, we all began to discuss the paranormal more in-depth, and it was in that month that we settled on doing our first investigation: A cemetery deep in the woods near our town that had not been maintained in a while that was attached to a Lutheran church that had also seen better days but was still in use. There had long been stories about ghosts in the area, of course, but nothing had been caught on camera or otherwise recorded, at least not that we knew. Among the stories was the usual ‘vanishing hitchhiker’ story, this time involving a man dressed in clothes from the 1930s who would ask for rides on the road near the cemetery and then disappear soon after, as well as a rather creepy legend that the statues would cry out at night. The last burial had taken place in 1982, and the cemetery had stopped being maintained sometime soon after that.

We went there on February 17, 2023, a Saturday night, of course not telling our parents because Hell no would they have let us do that. Armed with cellphone cameras, a regular camcorder I had, and a digital voice recorder and Polaroid camera that my sister volunteered to carry, we walked around the cemetery. Marie could feel something inside there as soon as she walked in.

…

As we walked in, going past the rusted cemetery gates and overgrown grass around the graves, Marie turned to all of us and simply said, “There is something in here.”

Ashley asked her, “What? Is someone in here?”

“No, no, not a person,” Marie replied to her. “This… This isn’t a person.”

Jared asked her while I turned to Yukiko to turn on the DVR, “What the Hell are you talking about?”

Marie then turned to her right and immediately stepped back as she began to panic. “Okay, okay, hold on, oh no!”

“Marie, what’s up?” I asked.

Marie turned to us and whispered, “I just saw a guy over there.” She pointed to an area where the oldest graves in the cemetery were located, all of them dating back to the American Revolution. “I swear to God, someone is watching us.”

Yukiko, taking the opportunity, pulled out the Polaroid camera and took two photos in the general direction of where Marie was pointing to. Jared also joined in, taking a photo with his phone. The former asked Marie, “Do you want to continue? You can go back if you want.”

“No,” Marie insisted. “I’m gonna stay with you guys. I’m not gonna abandon you here.”

With that out of the way, we began to walk more into the cemetery, not taking a look at the photos we had gotten at the time. When we stopped in front of a rather large tree in the center of the cemetery, we looked around for a bit before I told the others, “Let’s do an EVP session.”

Jared asked me, “Is that the ghost voice shit?”

“Yeah,” Marie replied to him. “It is.”

Ashley then commented as she turned around, “I heard footsteps behind me.”

Marie looked around and replied to her, “I don’t see anything, but I do sense we’re being watched.”

“Dude,” Jared then said to me. “This is getting creepy. How much longer do you wanna do this?”

“We’ll be fine,” I assured him.

“I started the recording,” Yukiko then mentioned to me. “Who wants to go first?”

I offered to go as I began to ponder what question to start with, taking a deep breath as I looked around and took in the sights of the decrepit graveyard as best as I could despite the darkness surrounding us. “Is there anyone with us?” After a pause to allow any ghosts to reply, I followed with, “Did you see my friend Marie earlier?”

Marie then chimed in after the second pause, telling us with a hint of worry in her voice, “I just felt an arm run down my back.”

Jared replied to her, “An arm? What the Hell?”

Ashley then decided to ask a question. “How do you feel about your resting place being abandoned?” Marie around this time took several photos of us and the surrounding area.

After a third pause, we decided to stop the recording and play it back. We listened in as close as we could, and it was Jared in fact who picked up on something that was heard after Ashley’s question. After playing it back a few times, we determined it was a male voice, although we were unable to determine what was being said exactly. The thing was, neither me nor Jared sounded like the man we heard.

As we were stopping the recording following our fourth listen-through, Jared was looking at the photos he had taken when he stopped on one in particular and asked the group, “Guys, take a look at this.”

Marie was the first to take a peek, and when she looked at it, her eyes widened with fear. “That’s the man I saw. It has to be.” The photo Jared had taken was aimed at the same area Marie claimed to have seen the man earlier when we walked in. In said photo was a faint shadow figure standing behind several of the graves. Needless to say, we were all freaked out.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Jared suggested. “This is getting really creepy.”

“Come on,” I insisted. “We can stay a bit longer. It isn’t too bad.” Of course, right as I said that, a squirrel jumped out of a nearby bush, startling all of us as we wondered if maybe any spirits inside the cemetery were trying to get us before we realized the true origin of the rustling sound.

“It was a squirrel,” Ashley said as she took a deep breath. “Thank God. That scared the shit out of me.”

After we all shared a brief laugh, Marie asked me, “Takeo, can we go to another part of the cemetery, please? I don’t really feel so good around here.”

Yukiko asked her, “What’s wrong, Marie?”

“Yeah,” I added. “What’s up?”

“I feel like we’re being watched, like, very intensely,” she explained as she looked at the church building from afar. “And it’s getting chillier, too.”

Indeed, all of us had felt a slight drop in temperature at that spot. While it was already rather cold given that it was February, it inexplicably felt freezing, far colder than it had been when we entered the cemetery despite the weather forecast not mentioning the temperature dipping down so low. Realizing how uncomfortable Marie was getting, I agreed, and we began walking towards the church.

We could not enter the church, at least not legally, since it was closed for the night, and we did not feel like getting arrested by state troopers or county sheriff deputies for trespassing, although to be fair, both would probably have been rather far from our location, especially at night. Instead, we walked as close as we could from the outside and began taking pictures all around the church.

While Marie, Jared, and Ashley split off to go take more photos, me and Yukiko stayed put in one spot next to the fence separating the church from the cemetery to conduct an EVP session. Because the two of us were alone, we began talking to each other in Japanese instead. “Oniichan,” Yukiko asked me, using a term for older brothers in our other native language. “Do you want me to hold it while you ask the questions?”

“No,” I replied to her. “Just keep rolling with the camera.” Switching back to English for the session, I began to ask questions after pressing record on the digital voice recorder. “Is there anyone here with us?” Pause. “How do you feel about us walking through here tonight?” Pause. “Do you have a message to anyone you want to say?” Pause.

“It doesn’t feel so cold over here,” Yukiko commented. “Maybe they’re not here, oniichan.”

“We’ll keep going,” I insisted. I then went back to using English to keep asking questions. “Were you buried in the cemetery?” Pause. “Did you attend church here?” Pause.

After this, me and her began to play back the recording to see if we had captured anything. However, our review session was paused when we suddenly heard screaming from the rear of the church. Yukiko turned to me and said, “That sounds like Marie-chan.”

“It does,” I replied as we both ran over to see what had happened.

When we rounded the corner, we found Marie cowering against the rear of the church, visibly shaking as Ashley talked to her. “You’re okay, you’re okay. Marie, they’re not here anymore.”

Deeply concerned as I switched back to English, I asked the trio, “What the Hell was that?! What happened to Marie?!”

“Bro,” Jared then said to me as he pulled out his phone to show me something. “You’re not gonna believe this…”

…

We all left the cemetery after that. Marie was deeply shaken by what had happened, and after what Jared had shown me, it was easy to see why.

Apparently, Ashley and Marie, both being filmed by Jared, were walking around the rear. Despite not having a digital voice recorder, they began to ask several questions of their own. In the video, Marie asked the spirits to show them a sign that they were present. Immediately after, all three of them noticed that the temperature had dropped around them.

Ashley then looked over at the church and seemed to notice something in a window, pointing it out to the others. When Marie turned to look, she must have felt something the others could not, because she immediately jumped, screamed, and turned away. Jared’s cellphone camera, aimed at the window briefly, captured some kind of human-like shape on the other side of the glass as it passed by. Meanwhile, Marie said to Ashley that she felt something touch her back, but in a more aggressive way. When Ashley pulled up part of Marie’s shirt to take a look, she noticed a small scratch running down the lower part of her back.

Needless to say, this all creeped us out to the point where we decided to call it a night. Marie even said on the ride home in Jared’s truck that she felt relieved to be out of that cemetery, and that while most of the energy in there felt benign if not positive, whatever was in the rear of the church was anything but. This was the first time she, or any of us for that matter, had been scratched by something paranormal. What are the odds of a scratching happening on one’s first investigation?

Back home the next day, me and Yukiko continued our review of the EVP session that had been interrupted, and we managed to capture one voice that answered twice in response to my questions about being buried and attending church in the area. Both times, a male voice could be heard saying ‘no’, with the second time being a bit more aggressive than the first.

Armed with this evidence, we concluded that to our knowledge, the legends about this abandoned cemetery and barely-active church in our town were indeed true to at least some capacity. The following Friday, February 23, me and my sister decided to venture into the cemetery by ourselves. Dropped off by Jared in his pickup truck, we went in and began a second investigation.

…

It was significantly colder that night, which would make measuring activity by temperature drops almost impossible. Armed with a single recorder and a video camera, we went in and began walking around, immediately making a beeline for the rear of the church where Marie had been scratched. Yukiko said to me in Japanese, which we used to communicate with each other throughout this visit since we were by ourselves, “Oniichan, I don’t think we’ll be able to get good temperature readings tonight.”

“Me neither. It’s too cold for that.” When we made it to the spot where Marie had been scratched, I pulled out the recorder while Yukiko filmed me, switching to English to ask the spirits around us questions. “Is anyone here with us? Would you like to talk to us?”

We paused, allowing any spirits around us to reply. After a few seconds, Yukiko said to me, “I feel like we’re being watched.”

Indeed, I had begun to feel the same thing as I looked around in the darkness, the only light being my sister’s camera and the red light on top of the digital voice recorder. “You’re right… I feel that, too.” I then asked a final question before I would stop the recording and play it back. “Do you remember us?”

I then hit pause on the recording and began to play it back. Nothing was captured in response to my first two questions, but there was a response to the third. We could faintly pick up a male voice replying to us in a soft voice, simply saying the word ‘yes.’ Yukiko asked me, “Oniichan, do you wanna take some photos?”

“Yeah,” I replied as I pulled out my cellphone and began to snap photos of the church as we walked in a circle around it. As we walked past the back door of the church, I suddenly felt a cold wind fly past me, causing me to stop as I also felt a sense of dread. “Did you feel that?”

“Yeah, I did. It didn’t feel like wind… Or, well, what wind normally feels like.”

“It’s not supposed to be a windy night at all.” I decided to stop taking photos and review the ones I had already taken. As I scrolled through them, one of them piqued my curiosity. “Hey, Yukiko, take a look at this one.”

As Yukiko looked at it, she remarked, “I don’t recall seeing that there.” The picture, which was of one of the windows and the roof line of the church, contained a shape reminiscent of a face on the bottom of the photo. “Wanna walk back and see what’s over there?”

“Sure.” Me and Yukiko walked over to the spot where the photo had been taken, and looked around to see if anything like the face was on the window or the outside wall. Of course, there was nothing to be found resembling the sort. I then pulled up the photo again for comparison, and as we looked at it, something happened that nearly scared us both to death.

Yukiko felt someone, or something, tug on her coat from behind, pulling her back about a foot and nearly making her drop the video camera. She screamed in response, immediately losing her composure as I turned to see if anything was behind her, quickly snapping a photo without even looking.

“Holy shit,” I remarked in English out of surprise. “Yukiko, are you alright?!”

“We need to go,” she yelled at me as she began to run. “We need to go now!”

As I began to run to catch up to her, we then both heard a muffled scream from within the church, causing us to run even faster. “Go! Go! Go! Go!” We ran as fast as we could out of the cemetery, with me screaming at Siri to call Jared to pick us up. I ended up staying on the line with him as we ran until he found us running along the side of the road and we hopped in a few minutes later. Neither of us had ever run that fast or that long in our lives, and by the time we hopped into Jared’s truck, Yukiko was sobbing while I tried to comfort her and explain to him what had transpired.

…

After some analysis, we did not pick up any other EVPs from the second session. However, we did find another anomaly from the photos, this time within the photo I had taken of Yukiko, which showed her in a panicked state and also seemed to have a red shadow-like object behind her. However, there were no discernible features about the shape, not even after enhancement of the photo.

We believe that whatever had pulled Yukiko’s coat was the one in said photograph, and perhaps was the one who had replied to my earlier question about if the spirits remembered us.

This first investigation would come to define us, and soon, we would set our sights on another local haunt in Volendam. While Marie was initially apprehensive given what had happened to her at the church, after some thought, she told us she would be in for another investigation, making our team complete.

In total, we would have five members:

Me, investigator

Ashley, investigator

Marie, investigator

Jared, equipment tech

Yukiko, equipment tech

Jared and Yukiko, of course, did more than just haul equipment around for us. They would actively participate in investigating too, although usually in a support role. Perhaps one day, they could try their hands at lead investigating like me, Ashley, and Marie. In the meantime, we had another case on our hands.