Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery

You reach it on foot.

There’s no road anymore. From a turnout on the busy Midlothian Turnpike, southwest of Chicago, a gated, overgrown gravel path leads into the woods, past a chain across the old road, between tall trees that close in overhead. After a few minutes’ walk, you come to a small clearing surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside it, scattered among the weeds and fallen leaves, are a few dozen broken and tilted gravestones.

This is Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery. It is less than an acre in size. It may be the most famous haunted cemetery in America.

The Settlers

In the 1830s and 1840s, settlers moved into the forests and prairies southwest of Chicago and began to farm. Many of them were immigrants from Germany, England, Scotland and Ireland. According to local history, so many of the early settlers in the area were unmarried men that the grove of trees where they lived came to be called Bachelor’s Grove. (Another theory says the name comes from a family named Batchelder.)

They needed a place to bury their dead. The first known burials in the little cemetery date to the 1840s. Over the following decades, the families of the area — farmers, laborers, quarry workers — laid their loved ones to rest there.

For nearly a century, it was a quiet country graveyard beside a small pond.

Abandoned

The trouble began in the 1920s, when the main road through the area — the old Midlothian Turnpike — was rerouted. The cemetery, which had stood beside a busy road, was suddenly isolated in the woods. Fewer people visited. Burials became rare.

By the 1960s, Bachelor’s Grove had become a hangout for teenagers. It was dark, secluded and spooky, which made it perfect for drinking, parties and dares. Then the vandals came. Gravestones were knocked over, smashed, spray-painted and stolen. Graves were dug up. Some reports from the period describe evidence of what looked like animal sacrifices and occult rituals. Police patrols increased. The forest preserve district eventually closed off the old road to cars.

By the time the vandalism was brought under control, much of the cemetery had been destroyed. Only a few dozen headstones remain of the estimated two hundred burials. In many cases, no one knows exactly who is buried where.

The Pond

At the edge of the cemetery is a small, murky pond, often called the lagoon.

According to local legend, during Prohibition, Chicago gangsters used the pond as a dumping ground for bodies. It would have been a convenient place: remote, close to the city, rarely visited. There is no evidence that this actually happened, but the story is told on every ghost tour.

Another legend says that a farmer was plowing a field near the pond in the 1870s when his horse suddenly bolted, dragging him and his plow into the water. All three — man, horse and plow — sank and drowned. Visitors claim to have seen the phantom figures of a man and a horse near the edge of the water.

The Madonna

The most famous image associated with Bachelor’s Grove was taken on August 10, 1991.

That day, members of the Ghost Research Society, a Chicago-area paranormal group led by an investigator named Dale Kaczmarek, visited the cemetery. One of them, Mari Huff, was taking infrared photographs. When the film was developed, one of the images appeared to show a translucent young woman in a white, old-fashioned dress, sitting on a broken tombstone, staring off into the distance. No one had seen her at the time.

The photograph was published in the Chicago Sun-Times the following year and became one of the most famous ghost photographs ever taken. It is often called the “Madonna of Bachelor’s Grove.” Skeptics have suggested that it might be a double exposure or a trick of the light. The Ghost Research Society has said the photo was examined and showed no signs of tampering.

Many visitors to the cemetery since then have reported seeing a woman in white, often carrying a baby. Some call her the White Lady.

The Phantom House

There’s one more legend about Bachelor’s Grove, and it’s my favorite.

Visitors over the years have reported seeing a farmhouse in the woods near the cemetery: an old white house with a porch swing and a soft yellow light glowing in the window. It sits in a clearing where there are only trees. As people walk toward it, it seems to shrink and recede, getting farther away, until it vanishes.

There is no record of a house in that location. But reports of it go back decades and come from people who say they didn’t know the story before they saw it.

The Living Visitors

Today, Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery is maintained by the Forest Preserves of Cook County, which has worked with local volunteers to clean up the site, repair damaged stones and protect what’s left. It is open during daylight hours, and police patrol the area at night.

It still draws a steady stream of visitors: ghost hunters, history buffs, photographers, and the merely curious. Some come at Halloween. Some come to look for the Madonna. Some leave coins or small trinkets on the old graves.

The descendants of some of the families buried there still visit too. They come to tend the graves of their great-great-grandparents in what was once a quiet country churchyard — and to remind people that, whatever stories are told about it, this is a cemetery, and the people buried in it deserve respect.