There's something that all of us want to know at some point in our lives: Do ghosts exist? If so, I'd have to see it to believe it. The only problem is that if I did end up seeing one, I'd most likely kill myself on the first rock I tripped over like in a bad horror flick. Seeing as how it wasn't a day I was working or doing my ten pounds of homework and Halloween was coming upon us, I decided to do some investigating of my own ... though not by myself, of course. So we went along, video camera in hand, to places that seemed mysterious or even slightly scary. Of course, when you're looking for ghosts, walking into a happy little daisy garden would have scared us.

Our first destination: a cemetery on the top of a hill. You wouldn't consider this a scary place seeing as how it's called Friend's Hill Cemetery. But something scared me even more relating the word "Friend" to hundreds of dead people around me. Anyhow, we continued to walk, occasionally screaming at the reflection our flashlights would make on the tombstones. We didn't experience anything there so we continued on.

The second destination was an abandoned house on the way to Commerce (the scariest town on the planet). Here, I was more afraid of a crazy lynch mob coming after us rather than ghosts. We made our way up to the porch and slowly to the back. The story of the house is that supposedly a man was found dead in the kitchen. But since I'd probably believe anything, they could have said that an ax murderer killed a family of clowns and I would have gone along with it. After my friend began running back to the car and I found myself standing next to the house by myself, I too decided to get my (expletive deleted) out of there. It turns out what we saw was another one of those deadly reflections.

Our final stops were the cemetery on the hill at Commerce and the strange rope that I want to rip down from the tree by the river. For anyone who has not been to the cemetery on the hill, it's like trying to drive on a one-way mud path in the jungle. So, of course, when we heard the footsteps of dead people coming down toward us, backing out was impossible. If there had been anything after us, they could have killed us 50 times. The rope was not scary at all and I was glad we left when we did since the only car we passed on the way out of town was a cop. He's probably reading this right now, sitting in his chair next to the one and only jail cell available saying in his gruff voice, "Those boys'll be sorry. Oh they'll be sorry all right."

In closing, we didn't find anything the whole night. So do ghosts exist? I still don't have an answer for you.

Just keep a heads up on those wandering spirits ... er, reflections.

Sam DeReign is a senior at Oran High School. Contact him by e-mail at sdereign@semissourian.com.