Creepy graveyard fire

We trained at the fire academy for hours doing RIT Training (read about it here) and got back into Lodi about 11:30 PM - exhausted. I fell asleep when the pager went off about 1 AM for a "Fire in St. Nick's Cemetary." I thought to myself "what the hell is there to burn in a cemetary" as I walked out of my house and immediately smelt smoke.

As we're driving on the engine to the cemetary we can see the smoke plume and thought a building was on fire, but pulling in gave us a clear view to about 15 or 20 separate brush fires all throughout the cemetary. It looked like a scene from a movie where people are holdling a seance in a graveyard with rings of fire. As I'm pulling our hoseline off the reels on the side of the engine, I was laughing with our chauffer about how creepy this all was.

Anyway, laughter turned to labor as we stretched and charged all 250 feet of our attack line (inch and 3/4 diameter) and began putting out the fires. They were spaced out enough that after hitting one fire, we had to lift and move the entire length of charged hoseline over and around tombstones and corners to reach the next fire. We did this about 5 times in total until the reach of the stream was far enough to hit the last, and furthest fire. Let's just say my shoulders got a good workout this night.

My guess is some punk was walking around with a box of matches and just went to town, since we saw a lot of tombstones knocked over as well (along side the few that our hoseline happened to shift or push.)