Gothic Graveyard Novels & Stories

so long as my death came after I’d achieved my goals. Highgate was truly beautiful this time of year, its frosted trees and shrubbery intermingling with the snowy graves. Foxes crept among the tombstones. Spiders wove glistening webs. Angel statues cried ice tears. Loretta and I wandered it aimlessly until we reached a section devoted to immortals. The graves here were all from the past year or two. Loretta stopped before one. “I knew him,” she said. The grave belonged to Billy Portbelly, a “devoted husband” who had perished a few months before.

"Yeah but my dead girlfriend is buried here too. And so is my mom. Foster Mom. This is literally the worst–" "Robert Barrison. I've had just enough with you" the voice thundered up in Robert's head, making him groan in discomfort, holding his ears to try and numb the pain. "Did you know that there are about seventeen different ways to kill a person in a graveyard? Now if you don't shut up, and let me do everything from now on, I swear on the supreme ones, I'm going to take you through every single one of them." After hearing nothing but the night calls of owls, and a submissive man in his early twenties, it continued.

He has finally made sense of the vapid description on Wikipedia. Because burial is more land-consuming than cremation, almost every foot of space is maximized. On their way to Lor, Nate was careful to avoid stepping on any gravestones, kicking any candles or trampling any flowers. It was like tightrope-walking though because some graves were on the footpaths themselves. A certain OC-ness was triggered in Ecto because there seemed to be no layout-planning whatsoever.

“Stay close. We can’t afford to be separated.” We pressed on, careful with every step. Then, the air around us shifted. A cold gust of wind blew through the trees, carrying a strange scent, something old, something rotten. Zane stiffened. “Do you smell that?” I swallowed hard. “Yeah. Death.” As we stepped forward, the ground beneath us changed. The lush forest floor gave way to something unnatural, a graveyard. But this wasn’t just any graveyard. Broken weapons lay scattered among the graves, burnt stakes sticking out of the earth like forgotten warnings.

“You let me come with you in this old cemetery to visit a tomb, yet it has been so many years now and you still haven’t told me who is lying in it.” A lush forest of green surrounded them, but they weren’t lost. On their way was a stone path going to an abandoned cemetery styled in the Victorian Age. Statues of angels and cherubs stood sentry on each tombstone, but there was one that didn’t have any. The one that both of them were going.

In Harford City, the sky was overcast—a dull, heavy gray that mirrored the solemnity of the day. The air carried the scent of incense and fresh flowers, clinging to everything like a memory refusing to fade. The Moore family stood before the twin graves of Benjamin and Vivianne Moore. The marble headstones were tall, pristine, unyielding. Their names carved into stone remained untouched by time, yet they had shaped every second of Grayson’s life.

Like the campus had taken a breath and hadn’t exhaled. Past the bell tower with its silent chimes. Past the conservatory where shadows clung to the glass. Past the enchanted hedge maze, whispering secrets only madmen or moths would chase. And then I found it. A graveyard. Because of course the school for the damned came with its own necropolis.

The houses, the huts, everything already fallen into the ruins. I passed the countless barren houses till I lost the number and finally found myself in front of the large graveyard located at the outskirts of the city. The gate was locked, the lock was rusted as if it wasn’t touched in decades. I trailed the rusty chains with my fingers and it fall down in the next second. The gate opened itself. I closed and open my eyes and take a deep breath. I walked through the graves. Each name was printed inside my head already. I didn’t have to glance to look at the graves to read the names on the tombstones.

The evening sky was covered with thick gray clouds, as if the sky itself were holding its breath. A heavy silence hung in the air, occasionally broken by the rustling of the wind through the old trees on the hillside cemetery. Before me, the mound of earth was still damp, the soil soft and clinging to the fingers of the gravediggers who had just stepped back a few paces. A black stone tombstone stood there, simple, without excessive ornamentation—only a name carved with a code that only we could decipher.