The entrance to the Pleasant Valley Cemetery in Vernon is pictured in this undated photo from Google Street View.
Image Credit: GOOGLE STREET VIEW
January 15, 2019 - 11:29 AM
VERNON - While cemeteries can usually sombre places for quiet relaxation, they're certainly not somewhere you'd want to spend a night. Unfortunately for Melanie Mae, that's a prospect she faced last weekend.
On Jan. 13, Mae visited the Pleasant Valley Cemetery in Vernon around dusk. She drove into the graveyard and placed a bundle of flowers on a resting place to pay respect. As she drove to the exit, she found one major problem: The gates were locked.
"I got frantic," she said.
Mae said she called the City of Vernon for assistance but she got no response.
She claims she eventually got ahold of a non-emergency RCMP line, who told her to clear the fence and leave her car behind. Mae didn't want to make the trek back home without her vehicle, nor did she want to spend the night huddled in a car in the middle of a graveyard, so she took to social media for a solution.
Mae posted in the Vernon Rant and Rave Facebook group that she was stuck in the cemetery.
She received dozens of responses and comments from residents, which started a chain of calls. People in the group contacted other people until word eventually reached a city official who unlocked the cemetery so Mae could leave after roughly one hour among the tombstones.
"It was pretty cool," Mae said, referring to the social media response.
Mae said plenty of people have reached out to her about the incident, including the man who locked the gate, who apologized.
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