Some people talk of whistling past the graveyard and mean it figuratively. Not Tony Fernandez. The other day, he walks among the headstones outside St. John’s Church, Greenmount Avenue and 30th Street in Waverly, and by the time he reaches the sanctity of the church basement and runs into Gail Kreusinger, the two of them are recalling ghosts and goblins and haunted, happy moments from half a century ago.

“As a kid,” says Fernandez, who grew up and still lives in the neighborhood, “I’d walk past this graveyard every day on the way to school. But I’d always cross over to the other side of the street, so the ghosts couldn’t get me. That’s how scary it was. Remember?”