🎃Happy Halloween!🎃

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Evergreen Cemetery: My Inspiration for The Missing Novella

Dr. John Reizer

As a young boy growing up in Lakewood, New Jersey, in the 1960s and 1970s, I had a pretty amazing childhood. I was fortunate to have picked some great parents for this incarnation.

I grew up in a town filled with pine trees, a community where the wealthy elites like Rockefeller and Gould held estates.

My grandmother used to take me regularly to play on the Rockefeller property, which was converted into Ocean County Park years later. She would tell me how great a man John D. Rockefeller was.

Well, NANA, as it turns out, old Rocky might have been part lizard and not such a great role model after all. 🤣 But I did enjoy my time there with you, swinging on the swings and feeding bread to all the ducks.

What frightened me the most in my early childhood was the cemetery that loomed at the end of the dead-end street I grew up on.

I remember it well. I often rode my bike up there with my three closest early childhood friends, the Auerbach girls: Ginny, Donna, and Dee. We lived on Spruce Street, a long, wooded stretch of asphalt that led to the entranceway of Evergreen Cemetery.

I convinced those three girls on many occasions to play endless hours of baseball, basketball, football, and kickball games with me. When you’re a young boy growing up on a street where the only kids your age are girls, your best friends become girls. And make no mistake about it, they were my best friends.

We also liked to ride our bicycles up to the creepy iron gates that led into Evergreen Cemetery.


Evergreen Cemetery


I can’t remember how often we went to that cemetery during my childhood, sometimes on bikes and sometimes on foot, but I know it was often.

Many times, we would walk into the woods to bypass the iron gates at the property’s entrance and venture up the long, stony hill leading to the gravesites.

From the highest point of the cemetery, you could see for many miles. And if you stood on one of the tallest gravestones at the back of the property, you could see the Atlantic Ocean. At least, that’s what the neighborhood kids believed.

I spent many days in my early childhood thinking about that cemetery property and have fond memories growing up there on Spruce Street.

Looking back on it all brings a smile to my face. It was a special time when electronic devices were not around distracting you from the more important things in your life, like breaking into a private cemetery.

My latest novella, THE MISSING, is partly inspired by those amazing times in my early childhood. I spent more than a few Halloween evenings inside Evergreen Cemetery looking for ghosts and other strange phenomena with those Auerbach girls. I miss them and all the great times we shared.

After returning home from winning the 1975 Little League Baseball World Series, the neighbors on Spruce Street hung a sign and posed for a picture with me. Donna and Dee are just to my right, and Ginny Auerbach is pictured crouching on the left in front.

A New Novella

From the author of The Target List novel

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The Missing

By John Reizer

Where death is just the beginning.

In the heart of a quiet town lies Evergreen Cemetery—an eerie resting place where no bodies are buried, only empty caskets, each holding a dark secret.

Beneath the surface of this unassuming plot of land is a twisted conspiracy engineered by Trucient Industries, a powerful biomedical corporation with a terrifying agenda.

Trucient’s public mission statement is simple enough: freeze the dead and revive them in the future through cryonics. But the truth is far different. Behind the benevolent façade of preserving life, Trucient is secretly harvesting organs from the homeless, the forgotten, and society’s outcasts, selling them to the highest bidder. But that’s only the beginning. Their true, audacious goal is to map the human brain, digitize it, and create a fully conscious artificial intelligence that could reshape humanity.

When a young private investigator named Jessica Harris meets Billy Hayes, a groundskeeper at Evergreen who has witnessed mysterious happenings on the property, the two team up and discover a hidden operation; they soon become entangled in a web of lies and danger. Will they expose the truth—or become just another pair of missing souls claimed by Trucient’s vision for the future?

The Missing is a chilling tale of power, technology, and the price of immortality. Secrets lurk in the shadows, and no one is truly safe. Not even the dead!


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6 thoughts on “🎃Happy Halloween!🎃

  1. NoFakeNews's avatar NoFakeNews November 1, 2025 / 10:39 am

    👍🤣

  2. Kenneth T.'s avatar Kenneth T. November 1, 2025 / 9:56 am

    John! It looked like you turned into the undead when you walked into the sunlight. Might I suggest you put any pieces of eight you have in the nearest treasure chest?
    It’s cursed gold you know.

  3. lhakes12's avatar lhakes12 November 1, 2025 / 12:23 am

    Eek!!! ☠️🦇🎃🦇☠️

    A ghoul is on the loose! 🤣

    Lisa

  4. NoFakeNews's avatar NoFakeNews October 31, 2025 / 8:42 pm

    👍🎃

  5. NoFakeNews's avatar NoFakeNews October 31, 2025 / 9:48 am

    Happy Halloween to you and everyone else, Lisa. 🎃

    They’re hosting a Halloween party, hay rides, a parade, and a bonfire in our neighborhood this evening.

    When we first moved into our subdivision 27 years ago, there weren’t many children in the wooded community, but that has changed drastically over the last ten years.

    The Halloween festivities are presently a big deal for the younger folks with kids where we live.

    Thanks for taking the time to read and review The Missing. I hope you enjoyed the story. I always value your feedback. 😃👍

    Tonight, I’ll be at home, watching a movie, not creeping around in a cemetery, searching for The Missing. 🤣

    John

  6. lhakes12's avatar lhakes12 October 31, 2025 / 9:32 am

    🎃🦇Happy Halloween, John! 🎃🦇

    And to all! 🎃🦇☠️

    You have talented Jack O’ Lantern artists in your family.

    My family had carved pumpkins for many years, but we have discontinued that business some time back. Although we have a lot of great pictures to show for it.

    And some of us had liked to use those carving kits to help bring out more detail and perfection. They are a lot of work. But my daughter always insisted on creating her own masterpiece.

    And of course we always took the kids trick or treating. But they are grown now.

    Halloween now is more about spooky decorations and giving out treats to the trick or treaters. We had our trick or treating last Saturday. I had made up 75 bags of candy, because typically we get around 60 kids. But the bags were all gone in just about one hour. I had to pull out the couple of extra bags of candy, and start giving out one piece. We had over twice as many kids this year.

    It’s fun! I love seeing all the cool costumes!

    I also loved dressing up and trick or treating as a kid. But, John, I can’t say that I ever hung out in any cemeteries. It must have brought an eerie feel to the neighborhood. Especially being in Rockefeller territory. Who knows what kind of spirits and ghosts lurked the grounds. ☠️

    I can understand the inspiration for your new novel “The Missing.”

    I sent in my five star ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ rating with a review this morning. So, now it’s just a matter of how long it takes Amazon to put it out. But so far I haven’t even received an email stating that they received it.

    Lisa

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