It’s an unusual place for a cemetery. In fact, driving by, you wouldn’t believe that there’s a boneyard at the corner of Irving Park and Clark. The walls are high, so unless you’re in an SUV, you won’t be able to see any of the towering graves within.
But Graceland Cemetery is there, and it is the grandest graveyard you are ever likely to see. The people who are buried here have no interest in plain stones, and they would never settle for a mere plaque in the ground. No, these are probably the richest corpses you will have ever heard of.
Grecian pillars reach for the sky. Gray pyramids stand as the opening to mausoleums. Some graves are so elaborate that they have benches for weary wanders to rest upon. Life-sized statues, some who look suspiciously like Caesar, rest in positions of thought as grave markers. There are even crypts leading down into the ground. It’s easy to think you’ve entered another world upon driving through the gates to this place. In fact, if you stand on the island with the mausoleum on it and peer out over the pond, you can see what looks like ancient Greek ruins poking out from between the strands of a willow tree.
It isn’t hard to see why so many horror stories have come from this place. There are rumors of a green-eyed monster who stalks the graveyard on full-mooned nights. There is the requisite lady in white, in addition to a large grim-reaper-type statue; the rumor is, if you stare into his face under the hood, you will see how you’re supposed to die.
The most well-known story, though, is about the statue over the grave of a little girl. On rainy nights, the statue has been known to move around the graveyard of its own free will. It became such a common occurrence that the caretaker took it upon himself to put a glass case over the statue in the hopes that it would wander no longer. This plan did not work, and it is still common to find the glass case empty on wet evenings.
Who is buried here? The richest people in Chicago, of course. Some of the pioneers who helped found the city. Notably, Allan Pinkerton, the very first private detective in history. He died of an infection he received when he stubbed his toe on the way to his outhouse one morning. His grave now resides in Graceland, a triangular testament to his life.
Other “residents” of this graveyard include Augustus Dickens (brother of Charles), controversial boxing champ Jack Johnson, George Pullman (the inventor of the Pullman Car), Phillip Armour (of Armour Hot Dog fame), Edith Rockefeller McCormick (daughter of John D.), Charles Wacker (you’ve probably driven on the street named after him), John Jones (the first African American to hold an elected office—County Commissioner), and John Kinzie (the first permanent white settler of what would come to be known as the city of Chicago).
If you’re free for an afternoon and don’t mind a trip into the city, you might want to consider wandering the grounds of this cemetery. Death has never looked quite so beautiful, and you will while away the hours in the presence of gravestones that were meant to be more than just a place to mark where a corpse resides.
They were meant to be art, and nothing less.
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