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.He 'd been swimming there with friends, and earlier, they'd shared their first beerpisswarm Michelob, stolen from one of their older brothers.There were rumors that the old quarry was haunted; that the remains of a mining town still stood at the dark, murky bottom, and the spirits of the townspeople still lurked in the waters, waiting to drag unsuspecting swimmers beneath the surface.Will Marks, his voice slurred by the beer, had told them about how he 'd seen a figure under the water oncea boy their age, pale and bloated.George didn ' t believe the story, so when Will Marks dared him to dive down and see for himself, he did it, egged on by his friends and the warm, fuzzy feeling with which the beer had left him.He leapt from the tire swing and into the inky depths, unable to see anything, plummeting ten feet before striking his head on an old refrigerator that someone had thrown into the quarry.Even underwater, he heard his own neck snap.It was the last thing he heard.His friends pulled him out of the water, but he was already dead, and they never found out if George saw the ghostly aquatic townspeople or not.Cathy Luckenbaugh, a bright, cheerful twentyone year old who was loved by everyone who knew her, had spent the Christmas holidays with her family and was on her way back to the Penn State campus when a drunk driver crossed the yellow lines on Route 30 and hit her head on at seventy miles per hour.Part of her went through the windshield.The other half, everything from the abdomen down, remained inside the car.Her death was quick and relatively painless, despite the severe trauma.Cathy had been studying English literature, and hoped after college to get a job as a teacher, and to marry her boyfriend, Ken Bannister, whom she ' d met the previous semester.Her family buried her in the Golgotha Lutheran Church Cemetery, near her aunt and grandparents.Ken married another girl he met after college.Many years later, Cathy ' s image was used in a television commercial for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.Damon Bouchard started stealing when he was eight.His first heist was a pack of baseball cards from the Spring Grove newsstand.By the time he was twelve, he 'd been busted twice for shoplifting.Two times being caught versus the hundreds of times he'd done it? Damon was happy with those odds.He graduated to breaking and entering, did a brief stint in York County Prison, and died two nights after his release.He'd just come from a meeting with his parole officer, returned to his third floor apartment, passed his neighbors on the way up the stairs, watched them pull away from his kitchen window, and broke into their apartment.In the dark, he 'd tripped over the cat and fell face first into a glass coffee table, slicing his head and throat to shreds.He'd felt the blood gush from his wounds, as well as his mouth and ears, and his last impression was one of anger, wishing he'd had time to kill the stupid cat.Damon' s longsuffering parents buried him next to their plots.They rarely visited his grave.Britney Rodgers was five when her father started climbing into her bed at night, and seven when he smothered her with a pillow to keep his awful secret.Her mother had died while giving birth to her, and her only friend had been her stuffed rabbit, Mr.Bun.Her father said it was her duty.At night, while he grunted and sweated above her, reeking of booze and sour sweat, Britney would hide Mr.Bun 's face beneath the pillow so the rabbit wouldn't have to see.Britney' s father buried her body in the woods behind their house, and the police found her four days later.She was given a proper burial next to her mother.A police detective made sure that Mr.Bun accompanied her into the ground.Her father was killed during the Camp Hill prison riots, and was buried in a potter ' s field near Harrisburg.The detective who arrested him visited his grave every year on the anniversary of Britney 's deathand pissed on it.Raymond Burke lived a long, full life and died in his sleep at the ripe old age of eightyseven.His wife of sixtytwo years, Sally, had passed away three months earlier, and as Page 35far as Raymond was concerned, he died with her on that day.They 'd never had children, or even a pet, and he felt totally abandoned.He' d never been by himself, and didn 't know what to do.The house was too quiet, and the silence amplified his loneliness.After Sally's funeral, he' d gone home to wait to die, cursing each morning when he woke up alone instead of finding himself with her, until the morning when she finally was.They were buried side by side
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