The rain continues to pelt down as you scurry to the side door and unlock it. You turn on every light in the house while the storm thunders outside.

Coming to the front door, you open it just in time to see the blue flash of lightning reflect off the monuments in the graveyard in front of you.

It sounds like a scene out of a cheap horror flick.

That's what I thought two months ago as I moved into my new off-campus house right across from West State Cemetery.

I guess the fact that my new house used to be an old funeral home, and that my bedroom was once a viewing room, didn't help put me at ease, either. So, that night I decided it would be a good idea to sleep with all the lights on because my nearest neighbors were dead people.

I don't mean to be blunt. It's just a natural reaction. You live 10 feet from a graveyard, you sleep with your lights on, right? It only makes sense, because West State Cemetery at 11 p.m. looks like just about every other shadowy old cemetery - pretty damn scary. But looks are deceiving.

Over the past two years, I've come to see the old cemetery as more than a backdrop to a good campfire ghost story, more than just a meaningless collection of broken stones with faded inscriptions. I've gone there for escape.

I escape from school and Uptown, taking time to read the stories on gravestones the same way a person loses himself in a good book. West State Cemetery is full of stories.

I hoped that the caretaker could tell me more of them. So this week, I only had to walk as far as my front yard to find my next column.

But I couldn't find the caretaker. The cemetery doesn't have one. But after an hour of calls I found the closest person to it - Terry Gilkey, the man in charge of renovating the graveyard for the city.

I'm sure Gilkey wouldn't have been scared by the scene that welcomed me to my new home two months ago.

You see, he doesn't get the creeps when he goes into a cemetery. He LIKES going into cemeteries. It's his hobby. As Gilkey sees it, there's nothing morbid or weird about reading gravestone inscriptions. He's just a guy looking for interesting stories. What better place to find them than in a graveyard?

So, that's where I found him, on the hunt for a good story. As he pulled up in a white Athens Public Works pickup truck, I didn't even have to ask him for a story. He simply strutted out of the truck and on up the path, to a collection of graves.

One of the first graves we stopped at was that of a man Gilkey said used to be his barber. It didn't seem to bother Gilkey to stand above the grave of the man who used to give him trims behind the ears. Actually one of the reasons he loves his job is so he can find people he knows in the cemetery. He wants to find the graves of his three uncles who are buried there.

Another man's tombstone, hidden in a shrub, states the man was with George Washington at the time he crossed the Potomac. Another marker says a man was hanged in Cleveland for killing his "sweetheart." There are dozens of interesting graves to see in this cemetery. Every one of them has its own story.

But many of those stories are being lost to vandalism, weather and time, which have damaged or destroyed many of the stones.

Gilkey refers to vandals simply as "idiots." But, he says there's really nothing that can be done to stop it. He's right. If there's any average drunk pumped full of Budweisers who decides to take a baseball bat, come in the cemetery and play "ghost in the graveyard," he's going to do it. Stuff like that happens all the time because you are always going to have "idiots."

But Gilkey is here to fix what vandals and the weather have destroyed. He plans to fix as many stones as he can and determine where everybody's grave is.

He's already fixed a number of the stones, straightened others that were slanting and is ordering military stones for veterans. Some of the stones already show the benefits of the work he's done. Towards the end of the tour, he stopped to bend down, and picked up a small crumpled American flag that was laying on the ground and propped it back up.

As my tour ended, I felt more at ease seeing that someone is assigned to the task of fixing the place up. Knowing that allows me to rest a little easier at night. Maybe I'll even get the courage to turn out the lights.

Gorman is a senior journalism major who walks among the dead.