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The
streets are full of costumed tourists who have started to
celebrate a little early. Sasha adjusts her long, flowing black
dress. Later tonight she will be dancing her heart out at the
vampire’s ball, but for now, she is content to tour the city,
and considering the occasion, she decides to start at the old
cemetery.
In the heart of New Orleans lies the
crypt filled graveyards called, ‘the City of the Dead.’ Stone
pillars rear up menacingly against the dusky sky. In bright
daylight it was an eerie and impressive place, but now, as night
falls it begins to seem like the stuff of horror tales.
The guide turns to Sasha and with deadly seriousness
he tells her that they have to leave. The specters will grow restless in their
graves and rise out of their stony tombs to haunt the living. The man pauses at
a chalky tomb, the epitaph reads, “Here lays a woman who froze to death to prove
her love.” Legend claims that a poor young woman had fallen in love with a rich
and well bred man.
They soon became involved but the noble man thought
she was beneath him so he refused to marry her. The poor girl vowed to prove
that she was not beneath him and that she was worthy of his love.
She climbed up the steep stairs to the roof, all
alone, and held her arms open to the wind. A fierce wind whipped up but she
ignored it. A terrible storm rolled in and she was pelted with shards of icy and
heavy rain but still she would not move. If she survived the storm, she thought,
her noble love would be so impressed that he would propose at last.
Meanwhile in the warmth of his home, the noble
dismissed her threat as empty silliness. In the morning he regretted their
argument and tried to find her. His heart pounded when he remembered her silly
vow, and he raced up her stairs. She lay on the roof, soaking wet and deathly
pale with her hand outstretched as if to take his hand. The man fell to his
knees and wept, knowing that his vanity had killed her.
And now the legend claims that as soon as the
weather begins to turn, she rises from her grave and stalks through the empty
streets, forever trying to prove her love. Sasha doesn’t believe in ghost in the
reassuring light of day, but standing in the shadows of the crypts listening to
her guide’s cracked, dry voice a little shiver runs down
her arms. |