Skeleton in the Tattered Gown

The Skeleton in the Tattered Gown</b>

The man saw her every night, walking amongst the graves.  He lived beside the cemetery as a gravedigger, so he could hardly ignore it.  It never failed.  When the day was done and the sun began its slumber beyond the hills, the moon would rise and light up the sky.  It’s light would glint off of those porcelain bones.  They would illuminate the curves of her shapely skull.  Did she not know she was dead?
The skeleton with the tattered gown, walking amongst the graves - creaking and cracking, her hollow sockets searching blindly about. Or perhaps not so blindly, for she had made it a habit of gazing up at his window, somehow able to wake him with a silent nudge, as he would turn to his window and see her.
She never knocked, never attempted to open the door or break a window.  She just watched with her skeleton grin.  Perhaps just a fascination with the living?  The man was unsure.  He just knew that he was wasting his nights awake with a skeleton for company at his window.  He finally decided to put an end to it all.
The next morning, when the skeleton in the tattered gown was bound to her grave by daylight, he marched into the graveyard with his shovel and dug furiously in front of her headstone.  When he found her coffin, she was in it, seemingly in a slumber.  The gravedigger pulled a knife from his pocket, and sawed off the frail bones of her feet, leaving her with only legs.
“Let us see you walk now.”
He then tossed the skeleton feet into the river behind the cemetery, buried her coffin, and went home with a satisfied feeling as he imagined an uninterrupted night of sleep.
That night he awoke again, not to a silent nudge, but to a scratching. A furious digging sound.  He jumped up from his bed to see the cold dead fingers of the skeleton with the tattered gown, digging under the frame of his home and beginning to protrude from the dirt floor in a frenzied attempt to gain entrance.  The man was frightened, watching those bony fingers mercilessly claw into the ground.  
He risked peering out the window, and saw her laying on what would have been her stomach, had she not been only bones and that lovely tattered gown.  He saw the markings on the ground outside, and saw she had crawled the whole way to his home without her feet.  But the sun was rising now, and she soon disappeared.
A friend of the gravedigger passed by that day, and was invited in.  The gravedigger told his friend of his troubles with the skeleton in the tattered gown who walked amongst the headstones and now sought him in a violent manner for the loss of her bony feet.
His friend put his hand on his chin and thought good and hard before coming up with a solution for the gravedigger, who feared he may not live through the next night.  The two walked into the graveyard when dusk was nigh, and they dug up that grave, finding the skeleton in the tattered gown asleep and lifeless once more.  They carried it to the edge of the river, and heaved it into the water, preventing her return.
That night, the gravedigger could not sleep, anticipating what would happen.  But nothing did.  The skeleton in the tattered gown did not return, and he thanked his friend doubly for the help.  His friend wished him the best and returned to his own town down the river.  But that night, the friend of the gravedigger was awakened by a scratching beneath his door, and saw the bony hands of the skeleton in the tattered gown digging furiously.