[This one actually worked out pretty well. It’s coincidence
that I’m posting this on Halloween. I almost sent it out yesterday, but things
got a bit crazy. I went out to all my favorite local haunts to describe each
one. And hey! I won a State of Illinois award for college journalism for this
piece. It was sponsored by the Chicago Tribune. I never thought I would win
anything for my journalism, but there you go. From the Elmhurst College Leader
October 25, 1999.]
Gather around the campfire, friends. The leaves are changing
colors and swirling in the wind. The air is starting to bite at the flesh. The
days are shorter, and the nights more fierce.
According to legend, around this time of year, the fabric
between our world and the world of the dead is thinner than ever. Occasionally,
the fabric may part, and a ghost might make it through for just a moment, long
enough to be seen, smelled, heard, or felt.
The Chicagoland area, with literally hundreds of haunted
places, is what ghost hunter Richard T. Crowe calls a “smorgasbord of psychic
possibilities.” From the drunken ghost of St. Andrew’s Inn to the ghosts of the
Excalibur nightclub to even a stop sign that bleeds ketchup on rainy nights
along the Des Plaines River, there are many
ghost stories, enough to fill months at a campfire.
Resurrection Mary
One of the most documented of these stories is the legend of
Resurrection Mary. As to her identity, people can only guess, but many have
seen her ghost since the first documented case in 1939, although people rarely
know she’s a ghost. According to legend, Mary is a blonde in her early twenties
who enjoys a good party. Mostly seen at the Willowbrook Ballroom, 8900 S.
Archer Av., in Willow Springs, she has been known to dance with many men over
the years, and she even made out with a few of them. She can be seen in other
places, and some have actually picked her up hitchhiking along Archer.
The end of the story has been immortalized by many variant
urban legends. She would ask for a ride home, and along the way, when she would
drive past Resurrection
Cemetery, 7600 S. Archer
Av., in Justice, with her man of the night, she would vanish from the car
without a trace.
According to one story, a taxi driver was going past the
gates to the cemetery when he saw a blonde-haired woman behind the bars,
holding them. Thinking that someone had been locked in the cemetery, he called
the police. When the police investigated, they found no one in the cemetery.
However, the bars the woman had been holding were bent out of shape, and
handprints had been scorched into them.
The cemetery told a story that a truck had backed into the
bars and that the handprints were just smears left by a workman’s hands.
However, Crowe thinks differently.
“A truck is not going to bend bars laterally like that and
leave the marks of hands,” he said. “Come on, that just doesn’t make any
sense.”
The cemetery tried to blowtorch the bars back into place,
but that didn’t work out. They ended up cutting them out and sending them off
to be repaired, and now there’s no trace of the handprints or the bending. The
replacements are obvious—whereas the original bars are weather-worn, the new
ones are solid and dark green, as if they were brand new. As Crowe remarks in
his video, The Ghosts of Chicago, the only evidence remaining are photographs
of the bent bars.
Resurrection
Cemetery is home to
130,000 graves (as of 1986), which makes it an easy place for Mary to hide.
People speculate that she is really Mary Bregovy, who died in the 1930s in a
car crash, supposedly on her way home from the Willowbrook Ballroom.
Cemetery officials refused to comment on the legends and the
location of her grave. “They get very nasty about it,” Crowe said.
However, they do admit that she is in an unmarked grave in
section MM. There is a grave marker in that section that belongs to Mary
Bregovy, but her dates would place her at 34 rather than her early twenties.
The grave also names her a mother. There is an empty plot next to hers, and
that, according to Crowe, is her daughter, also named Mary Bregovy.
Mary Alice Quinn
Resurrection Mary isn’t the only Mary haunting the
Chicagoland area. There is also Mary Alice Quinn, who is buried on the Reilly
plot in Holy Sepulcher Catholic Cemetery, 6001 W. 111th St., in Alsip. The grave is a huge block with a cross on its side
etched above the names Phillip Reilly (died 1925) and Mary Alice Quinn (died
1935). There is a bush on either side of the marker, and at its base are
flowers, candles, religious cards, statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus on the
Cross, rosary beads, and many other items. Occasionally there is the scent of
roses around that grave where no roses can be found.
Quinn was doomed from birth to die at an early age; she was
what people of the time called a “blue baby,” meaning that she had congenital
cyanosis. Her blood couldn’t oxygenate properly. She was a very religious
child, and could supposedly heal people. She died at the age of 14, and when
the story of the scent of roses got around, people started making pilgrimages
to the grave, hoping to make contact with Quinn. Some have even seen her ghost
at the grave, dressed in white, as the story goes.
Some have been healed at the grave, according to legend.
Others merely take a pinch of dirt, which is an Irish custom. However, more
than just the Irish do this as more of an attempt to get in touch with Quinn’s
healing abilities.
Julia Buccola Petta
Other ghosts may not have Quinn’s healing ability, but
others don’t decompose once in the ground. Julie Buccola Petta died in
childbirth and was buried at Mt. Carmel Cemetery,
1400 S. Wolf Rd.,
in Hillside in 1921 with her child. According
to legend, her mother started having bad dreams about Petta begging her to dig
up the grave. It took six years to convince officials to exhume the body, and
when they did, witnesses discovered that while the child had crumbled to dust,
Petta was in perfect condition, not a trace of decomposition.
People viewed her as a saint and had a life-sized statue
built over her grave. Not only that, but a picture of what she looked like
after she was dug up is now on the base of that stone. People have been known
to see her ghost dressed in white wandering the cemetery just behind the fence,
but those instances are not nearly as much as the Resurrection Mary
occurrences.
The Black Phantom Car
Ladies in white are apparently very common ghosts in the
Chicagoland area. Another common ghost is the black phantom car. On the
Midlothian Turnpike, witnesses have seen a black car charging at them head-on.
When they collide, and they do feel the collision, they get out of the car to
examine the damage. Not only is there no damage, but there is no car, either.
No explanation is readily available for this.
More common is the black phantom car of the White Cemetery,
just east of Old Barrington Road
on Cuba Road.
According to legend, a black limousine or sedan speeds to the gates, screeches
to a stop, and the doors open for a moment. They slam shut, and the car peels
down the road and vanishes.
A phantom house also appears at the White Cemetery,
where there used to be a house before it burned down sometime in either the
late ‘Eighties or early ‘Nineties. According to witnesses, the house would appear
briefly, like a desert mirage, and then would disappear after a mere few
seconds.
There are also ghost lights that will show up near the fence
or above the road. There’s no story behind it, just ghostly effects.
Inez Clarke
Graceland Cemetery, 4001 N. Clark St.,
in Chicago,
however, is filled with stories, most notably that of Inez Clarke. This is
Crowe’s version of the story.
Allan Pinkerton, who started the first private
investigations firm in America,
is buried in Graceland. He made many enemies
in his lifetime, and when he died, he wanted guards on his grave to make sure
none of his enemies came by to desecrate his grave. These guards walk the
cemetery at night to keep an eye on things.
Inez Clarke is also buried in Graceland.
She was struck by lightning while at a picnic a month shy of her second
birthday. Her grief-stricken parents had a sculpture made above her grave of a
girl with an umbrella sitting on a makeshift wooden chair, wearing
old-fashioned clothes and her hair long. It is highly detailed and very
realistic. The statue has been there since 1881.
Occasionally, when Pinkerton’s guards walked the cemetery,
the statue over Clarke’s grave would vanish, most notably on rainy nights. In
the morning, however, it is always back in place. The problem got so bad that a
glass case was placed over the statute, caulked shut to prevent the statue from
disappearing. There would be no way anyone could get into the case (or out of
it) without breaking it.
The glass case did not stop the statue from disappearing
once in a while. Cemetery officials vehemently deny that the statue moves
around, but offers no explanation for the glass case.
Statue of Death
Graceland is also home to
another odd story. On the Graves plot (and what an appropriate name for the
location of such a story) is the bronze sculpture made by Loredo Taft in 1909
called “Eternal Silence,” more commonly known as “death.” Erected in honor of
Dexter Graves, one of the founders of Chicago,
“Death” is aptly named. He towers over visitors, a cloaked figure that has
greened over the years. Only under the hood, he has not greened. Under the
hood, his face is completely black (except for the nose, which is green). His
eyes are closed, but one gets the impression that they might open at any
moment. According to legend, those who look into the hood have visions of what
is to come in their own lives. Not everyone has had these visions, but all
agree that “Death” is very eerie.
There is also a green-eyed ghoul that howls at the full moon
in Graceland, but that seems to be merely a
folk tale and nothing more. There is no story to it.
The Country House
A restaurant in Clarendon Hills, the Country House, 241
W. 55th St.,
is home to a plethora of ghosts. It was a bar before David Regnery and his
brother Patrick bought it in 1974. When they opened the Country House in 1975,
strange things started happening.
David Regnery explained his first experience. The Country
House is a darkly lit restaurant, so it was very noticeable when the shutters,
which were closed, suddenly and without provocation opened.
That wasn’t his only experience. More than once, he was
alone working late when he heard people come in the front door and start making
noises. Upon investigation, he found that no one was there.
There’s also a baby and a child crying on the upper floor
when there’s no one up there, ghostly footsteps, and even a loud knock that
caused a piece of paneling to fall from the wall.
Regnery relates a story that happened to an independent
handyman who sometimes did jobs for the Country House at all three of its
locations. He had to replace the tiles in the men’s room late at night at the
Clarendon Hills store when, at 4 am, he heard music coming from the bar area.
He was supposed to be alone, so he investigated. He saw there was a woman at
the bar by the juke box. She looked at him, but she didn’t seem “focused,” and
she had a skirt but no legs. He ran to a pay phone and called his sister to
tell her about it. She accused him of getting into the alcohol. Regnery admits
that sometimes, there’s a strong scent of perfume around that corner of the bar
when no one’s around it.
There was another time when a customer entering the Country
House asked Regnery, “What kind of place are you running here, a bordello?” The
man went on to explain that he had seen a woman beckoning to him and his family
from an upper window. Not only was the area she was supposed to be in locked,
but no one should have been able to see through the glass in the daytime like
the man had. It’s one-way glass, which only reflects the outside in the day.
Only at night can anyone see through it, and even that requires a light to be
on inside.
Crowe, who was a regular customer at the Country House,
investigated the haunting with the aid of a psychic friend, who discovered the
origins of one ghost.
She said that in 1957, a local woman had killed herself
within a half-mile of the Country House, then a bar. She died of some kind of
abdominal pains.
Regnery got in contact with the former owner, Richard
Montanelli, who explained that not in 1957, but in 1958, a woman walked into
the bar and asked the bartender if she could leave her child there while she
went shopping. The bartender got Montanelli, who refused her, explaining that
they weren’t babysitters. She walked out in a huff and purposely drove her car
into either a tree or a telephone pole within a half-mile of the bar.
Strange things happen so much at the Country House that
they’re almost unnoticeable. “I really don’t pay much attention to it anymore,”
Regnery said.
Home Haunts
Some ghosts are difficult to ignore. Frank Sirmarco lived at
221 W. North Av. From Feb. 1995 to Feb. 1996, and during that year, he noticed
some strange things.
His first experience at the house was when he was painting his
bedroom by himself. He could hear something walking up and down the hallway.
On a few occasions, he would be washing the dishes when out
of the corner of his eye, he saw someone standing in the doorway—an old lady in
her nightgown. She disappeared when he looked directly at her.
A waft of air would sometimes pass him near the garage,
leaving in its wake a vivid smell like body odor. It would come and go quickly,
but the smell would linger in his nose. There was also a terrible stench in his
bedroom.
He relates a time when his mother, a nonbeliever, was
visiting. They locked the front door and went to bed, but the next morning, the
door was not only unlocked but also was wide open.
Elmhurst
College student Brian
Dag, 27, relates the time that he had to take care of Sirmarco’s cat. He turned
on a light and went into the basement to check on his bass guitar, and when he
came back up, he found that every light was on, including a pinball machine
which was very difficult to turn on. He went around turning all the lights off
before finding the cat. Behind him, the door opened. Thinking it was a friend,
he started to greet the newcomer as he turned around. He stopped, realizing
that no one was there. He quickly fed the cat before leaving the house. As he
got into his car, he noticed that the lights were all on again, and the garage
door opened all by itself.
Dag also mentions that even in the summer, it’s cold in the
house. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, “but there’s something weird with
that house.”
As Sirmarco moved out of the house, he was talking with the
owner, who told him that an old woman had died in his bedroom. Her daughter had
then gone to the garage, where she hanged herself.
The current owner was not available for comment.
Sirmarco says that nothing bad ever came of the haunts. “If something spends a lot of its time somewhere,” he said, “maybe there’s some kind of energy that human beings have that sometimes can linger in a place after they’re gone.”
Munger Road
If that’s true, then there’s possibly a lot of energy along Munger Road in Bartlett. While in the
daytime, it is a beautiful landscape, at night, it’s like something out of an
HP Lovecraft story. Dead trees line the side of the unpaved road, frogs by the
hundreds hopping across the potholes, it’s just downright creepy—a breeding
ground for ghost stories.
According to legend, a man named Munger lived in the house
just south of the Illinois Central railroad tracks (the time is not known). As
the story goes, Munger killed children and buried them in his fields. On
particularly misty nights, children can be seen walking in the fog.
There are no records of the killing of children in Bartlett, and no record
exists of a man named Munger living in the house south of the tracks. However,
in 1904, OH Munger lived on the opposite side of the road. Still, according to
records, he was not a child killer, nor was he ever accused of being so.
Another story about Munger Road finds a little more
credibility. According to legend, a man was upset when another man stole his
girlfriend. He and a few friends went out to this guy’s house and trashed his
car, egging it, breaking glass, and so on. They sped away in their own car, and
turned onto Munger Road,
still driving quickly. Given that Munger
Road isn’t paved and is filled with potholes,
driving fast was a bad idea. The car eventually stalled on the Illinois Central
tracks. Unfortunately for them, a train came barreling through, killing all
occupants of the car.
A train was not supposed to be coming through there at that
time. In fact, no one knows what train did it; no one has been able to track
it. It wasn’t long before people started calling it a ghost train and started
spreading stories about how if you stop on the tracks at night, turn off the headlights,
and roll down the windows, you can hear the sounds of an oncoming train.
There actually have been accidents where Illinois Central
intersects with Munger Road, but the authorities did not comment on whether or
not this story is true.
Bachelor
Grove Cemetery
No matter how spooky Munger Road is in the night, Bachelor Grove
Cemetery, off the Midlothian Turnpike
in Midlothian, is always spooky. While the
cemetery is no longer used, there have been hundreds of reports of the
supernatural from the place. It’s a place notorious for not only causing
malfunctions in cameras, but also for getting pictures of ghosts.
“My computer man made the discovery about catching things on
film out there,” Crowe said. The two of them captured 200 ghostly images in the
mid-‘Seventies, according to Crowe.
To get to the cemetery, not only would you have to park your
car in the Rubio Forest Preserve, you would also have to walk across the
turnpike before following a path through the woods. Originally, cars had access
to the cemetery, but recently a curb was placed in front of the entrance. Some
aren’t deterred by this, though, as is evidenced in tire marks on the curb.
The path through the woods is the origin for two famous
urban legends, according to Crowe in his video. There’s the tale of the couple
who drove down to the cemetery and parked so they could make out. The radio is
on, and they hear over it that a patient with a hook for a hand has recently
escaped from the mental hospital. The woman demands the man drive her home
immediately. When he gets her home and goes to open her car door for her, he
finds, hanging on the handle, a hook.
In the other story, a couple drove down halfway to the
cemetery so they could make out. The man says he’ll be right back and tells the
woman to wait for him. The hours pass by, and she starts hearing a scratching
sound on the roof of the car. Police eventually show up, and they coax her out
of the car, telling her not to look behind her. Naturally, she looks, and
there, hanging from a tree branch, is her dead boyfriend, his fingernails
scratching the roof of the car.
These stories aren’t Bachelor Grove’s only claim to fame.
There’s also the requisite lady in white, who people call Mrs. Rogers. She’s
only seen at night. There are ghost lights, also only seen at night. One of the
gravestones, which weighs 700 lbs., has been known to move around the cemetery.
It’s ripe ground for stories. No one mows the grass, which
grows wildly. The ground is so soft that the graves are actually shifting. Some
graves have been knocked over by vandals (who had also spray-painted “Capone”
on some of the graves, but they were recently cleaned). Dead trees dot the
cemetery. There’s even a chain link fence with barbed wire over the top to
deter nightly visitors.
The fence originally separated the cemetery from a scummed
over lagoon, but someone had cut the fencing out and rolled it aside. Upon
closer examination, it looks more like a bog than anything else. The two most
notable hauntings occur around this lagoon.
In the 1870s, a farmer was plowing the area with his horse
when something spooked the horse, which suddenly ran at the lagoon, dragging
the farmer and plow with it. The horse drowned with its owner. Both are still
seen working around the lagoon.
In the 1920s, the lagoon was a favorite dumping spot for
Chicago mobsters. People have made a connection between this body dumping and
the two-headed ghost that roams around the area, although no evidence exists
for making such a connection.
There’s another story about Bachelor Grove, this one
involving a phantom house. There are a lot of phantom houses in the Chicagoland
area, but this one is different from any other. Usually, they actually existed
at some point, but not this one. This one never existed.
Crowe ran an experiment in 1986 for his video in which he
brought together two women who had never met before, who had both experienced
the phantom house (they thought, in fact, that it had been real, and they
didn’t know otherwise until years later). They each drew what they saw, and
when Crowe compared them, he noticed that while they weren’t identical, they
were very similar. The only real difference was the angle from which they each
drew the house, and how they drew the roof.
Bachelor Grove is also known for the people who sacrifice
animals in rituals by the lagoon.
Eldridge
Park
Another place known for animal sacrifices (ducks, in
particular) is the woods in Eldridge
Park at the corner of Butterfield Rd. and
Spring Rd. At one point there was a circle of stones just inside the woods,
where bones and feathers (both covered in blood) of ducks could be found.
Recently, someone separated the circle, but there’s still the smell of smoke
and the ashes of a fire remain.
Even further back into the woods is a burned out, crumbling
cabin. The land used to be a farm, owned first by Edward Eldridge, one of the
first settlers of Elmhurst,
then later by the Hammers. It wasn’t until 1962 that the City of Elmhurst acquired the
land, so whatever happened to the cabin must have happened around that time.
However, no records exist dealing with the cabin. There are only stories.
Inside the cabin are two rows of cages, which continue just
outside each end of the cabin. It’s speculated that the cabin was once a dog
kennel, or maybe a chicken coop. Some of the more cynical believe that the
cages were once used to house slaves, but one way or the other, whether the
cages were used for humans or farm animals, there is no evidence or records
dealing with the cabin.
Some say they’ve heard strange noises from the cabin, and
some say that there’s just something sinister about the place and the mystery
that surrounds it. The cabin is simply proof that sometimes, no one has any
answers.
The night is wearing thin, and the campfire is down to embers.
The time for storytelling is over for now, but don’t let the rising sun fool
you. The ghosts don’t come out only at night, you know. Have a ghoulish
Halloween, fiends.
