Ball

Creative Nonfiction by Zach Benak

The first night of August I sat in the back of my mom’s Honda, heading home from Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church. The setting sun reflected onto Papillion’s muddy creek and white stadium lights warmed the surrounding soccer and baseball fields busy with late-season games. I opened my phone and saw a text from Thomas.

Ball tonight? he asked.

Let’s do it, I replied.

Ball Cemetery was a magnet for local teens. Founded as a burial spot for the Ball family and other residents of Springfield, Nebraska, it holds graves dating back to 1869. This notably includes William H. Liddiard, better known as “Rattlesnake Pete” from his days of traveling with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Today, Ball Cemetery remains private and family-owned, looked after by a caretaker known to exercise his Second Amendment right to ward off trespassers. 

We consider Ball the most haunted place in metro Omaha. Rumors and tall tales about the cemetery swirl around us. One classmate told me her brother got locked out of his car on his first trip, though he swore he’d left it open. A girl from Westside High allegedly came out of the graveyard with scratches down her back. I’d seen pictures taken by friends, convinced they’d captured a floating specter on their iPhone 5. Never mind the real threat of getting shot by an irate caretaker. We feared—and hoped—to encounter a ghost or hear a dead woman’s sinister laughter. Everyone who visited Ball knew the stories, and like a rite of passage, hoped to come back with one of their own. 

This would be my second time going to Ball, but my first since the death of my uncle. Four days prior, Uncle Dennis had been found dead in his home. My week had been stained with tears and church incense, as I sorted through old vacation photos at my aunt’s house, and rehearsed my funeral reading from the Book of Wisdom. Baptized in the Catholic Church at birth, I’d begun questioning the faith while undergoing the Confirmation process in eighth grade, as I struggled to view the Bible and its teachings as anything but fictitious. These doubts persisted in high school, but I hadn’t yet told them to anyone, nor had I reckoned with what atheism meant for my view of death. Terror secretly compounded the sadness I felt over Dennis’s passing, as my belief in Heaven continued to wane. I felt the walls of Our Lady of Lourdes closing in on me at my uncle’s visitation, confronted by death and convinced now more than ever of its bleak finality. Needing time away from my family, from church, and from the grief that was consuming me, I went to the cemetery with my friends.

From Papillion to Springfield, I drove Thomas and two other guys in my rickety 2001 Ford Taurus. When I was learning to drive, my gruff, elderly instructor told me to think of the numbered streets in the Omaha area in relation to the Missouri River that divided Nebraska and Iowa. 

“On 50^th Street?” he said. “Then you’re 50 blocks west of the river.”

By this measure, Ball Cemetery was 176 blocks west of the Missouri, nestled into a bend of its tributary, the Platte. Once we’d gotten out of Papillion via Highways 370 and 50, we stopped at Runza. A Nebraska fast-food classic. We ordered onion rings and strawberry shakes, waiting out the transition from dusk to dark. Thomas pulled up his Instagram and showed us a picture of his first trip to Ball from just a few nights earlier.

“I got shit in the comments because it was still light outside,” he said, dipping a crinkle-cut fry into a container of homemade ranch. “So we gotta wait till it’s darker.”

“Are you nervous?” I asked Sam, a first-timer.

“Not really,” he said. “All my time watching the Wrong Turn franchise has prepared me for this moment.”

He was right. Our friend group sought out scares and the paranormal frequently. We might spend Friday night in someone’s basement, attempting séances with a glow-in-the-dark Ouija board from Toys “R” Us. We watched slasher films. And Ball Cemetery wasn’t the only place we trespassed—Hummel Park in North Omaha was another place wrought with horrific folklore, ranging from problematic urban legends (the ever-present ‘ancient burial grounds’ trope and colonies of cannibals, etc.) to real-life tragedies (the remains of missing child Amber Harris being discovered there in 2006). At seventeen, we were too naïve to register these things for what they really were: upsetting, bizarre and offensive. We were bored and unsatisfied teenagers, stuck in the state where Stephen King set Children of the Corn, desperate for thrills and life experience.

Runza closed at 10 pm and I had to wake early the next morning for my uncle’s funeral, so we took off. Highway 50 converged into 144th Street, meaning we still had about 30 blocks to go. We passed Springfield staples like Turtle Creek and Wild Willy’s fireworks store, entering an increasingly rural landscape. Thomas sat shotgun with his feet propped against my dashboard. I glanced over as each passing streetlight illuminated his bare thighs, which lengthened out of his khaki shorts. My friendship with Thomas was in recovery after I’d drunkenly cussed him out earlier that summer, an altercation I’d apologized for but never explained. It was not the first time I’d drunk alcohol and been overwhelmed with uncontainable feelings, triggered by the beauty of a lean male body with tan skin and a sharp jawline. The summer before, I confessed everything I wanted to an older boy while verging on a vodka blackout at a basement party. He let me down lovingly, but I was so humiliated that I cut off contact with that group soon afterward, and went back to dating girls. The friends I hung out with now saw my drunken vulnerability in a different configuration: intoxication now caused eruptions of anger, and my secret attraction to Thomas made him an easy target. He and I were getting back to normal, but I maintained a physical and emotional distance.

Streetlights disappeared once we turned onto Buffalo Road. We’d officially arrived to the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields, unmarked gravel roads, and decrepit silos. This is where Lady Gaga filmed the music video for “You and I” in 2011. Dedicated to her “cool Nebraska guy,” the video takes place on a dirt road like the ones we turned onto, and inside an abandoned barn like the ones we passed. My dad had been a county narcotics officer for most of my life, so I assumed most of these barns were used as crystal meth labs, responsible for increasing substance use and overdoses that’d plagued Nebraska and Iowa in recent years. Lady Gaga gave the locale a new connotation, bringing Springfield and its humble residents proximity to fame. As I searched my music app to play “You and I” for the drive, I realized that my phone no longer had service. 

You can circle Ball Cemetery and not even know it. If you’ve never been, you might miss it altogether. It’s not until you’ve turned off your headlights, passed the caretaker’s house (including the Private Property: We have guns! sign), descended into a blinding thicket of cedar trees, and taken a sharp left turn that you’ll see the title letters held up by two decaying pillars of wood, with a black iron gate beneath. You’ll want to take a picture in front of the sign for bragging purposes, but don’t crop out the No Trespassing posts. You’ll then have to decide if this is plenty, that you’re ready to get out of dodge and take no more risks—legal, paranormal, or otherwise—or if you are daring enough to go inside.

That night, we went inside. The gate was ajar, inviting us to enter. Stepping through, we pulled up the flashlights on our phones to look around. We nodded at a few other trespassers, all silently agreeing to do our best to avoid getting caught. Thomas and the other guys pushed deep into the cemetery as if the ghosts only roamed where it was harder to escape. 

“I wanna find Mary’s grave,” said our friend Avery. He meant Mary Munford, a woman who’d been buried at Ball since 1885. Her ghost is said to haunt the cemetery, spotted in the trees by some, heard cackling in the wind by others. 

While my friends walked deeper into the graveyard, I stayed near the first few rows. I saw headstones tipped over and defiled, perhaps disrupted by vengeful spirits, but more likely subject to human vandalism. Other graves were covered with grit and moss, acknowledged only by the sands of time. There were a few graves decorated with flowers, alive and blooming through what had been a hot summer. One was surrounded by carefully planted foliage, armoring it from the debris and empty beer bottles left behind by trespassing teens. It seemed like the caretaker, whom I always thought of as cruel and threatening, was actually doing his job, and tenderly at that. 

I felt fine wandering on my own until I passed one grave in particular—not Rattlesnake Pete’s or Mary Munford’s, but someone else’s. Only four digits were etched into the headstone, marking the remains of an infant who’d lived and died in a single year. I felt no rush of adrenaline or sense of rebellion or paranormal furor, just the same sadness that had enveloped me all week. Something about a dead baby, one who likely hadn’t been baptized, brought me back to Dennis and the burial I’d be attending the next day. I felt my two secrets colliding, without realizing that they’d been chained together all along. Death was forcing me to face my queer longings, my unspoken atheism and how deeply the two were connected. Just as the Catholic Church so openly rejected an identity I always knew was my own, I felt compelled to reject the institution in return. I wanted to untether myself from it completely, discarding it along with the fear and drunken rage that sat heavy in my chest. And while I knew a Catholic funeral would not be the appropriate occasion to rebuke my religion, this cemetery, so dignified and quiet and cared for, was suddenly the right place to unfurl all the truths about myself I’d been avoiding. 

Heading back toward the entrance, I heard voices, but only those of my friends still yards away. It was silent otherwise, dark and placid under the cedar trees. Nebraska’s standard humidity had mostly dried up that night. Away from everyone else and ignoring the threat of the caretaker, Ball Cemetery seemed like a good place to rest. Whatever existed around me—ghosts, energies, or just skeletal remains—deserved just that. And despite what I’d hear the next morning about God, deliverance, and eternal salvation, I felt assured that everything Dennis had left behind was exchanged for some version of gentle repose.

“Creepy as hell,” the guys agreed when we met back at my car. They didn’t elaborate.

“You okay?” Thomas asked.

“I’m good,” I said, starting the ignition. We drove back up the winding dirt path and skirted past the caretaker’s house. Not too far down the road, we ran into a small cluster of houses, hidden in the groves, but easily spotted by their decorative mailboxes and strings of lights hanging across their porches. Did these Springfield residents, living modestly in their quaint homes, subscribe to the mythology of Ball Cemetery? Or did they mostly wish it didn’t exist, so that kids like us would fuck off and leave them alone?

We turned back onto Buffalo Road. The car picked up speed and I thought about what it was that we looked for on these trips to Ball, knowing I’d found something else completely, and now had no reason to ever return.

---

Zach Benak