Published by Haunted America
A Division of The History Press
Charleston, SC
www.historypress.net
Copyright 2016 by Ursula Bielski
All rights reserved
Front cover: Dilapidated but iconic headstone fragments stand sentinel over Bachelors Groves
dead. Karl K.
Page 10: The front gate to Bachelors Grove Cemetery, circa 1979, three years after the cemeterys condemnation. By 1982, the cemetery sign had been pushed to the ground by
vandals. Dale Kaczmarek.
First published 2016
e-book edition 2016
ISBN 978.1.43965.823.9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941436
print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.663.1
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For Clarence Fulton, who fought for it.
For Matt Allaway, who told me about it.
For Jim Houran. who took me to it.
For Wendy, Karl, Pete, John, Bill and Richie
Who, like me, cant keep it out of their heads.
And
For Gregory Holmes Singleton
Who taught me that history is what we experience.
In the woods.
Its where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow.
The woods is one boundless singularity.
Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other
Every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass.
For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle.
In a way, it would hardly matter.
Bill Bryson
Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you
Because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.
Roald Dahl
PREFACE
Step inside.
In 1996, writing the very first book of Chicago ghost lore, Chicago Haunts, I used those words as an invitation, as part of my first chapter. The chapter was about Bachelors Grove, the subject of this book. You could very definitely say that I felt compelled to write that first chapterthat I needed to write itand that Bachelors Grove, in fact, was responsible for my entire career as a chronicler of the Unknown. This will be important later, as youll see.
Step inside.
A lot of people remember reading those words when the book was released and, even then, through a page in a book a thousand miles away, feeling the pull of the enigmatic site, through space and through time pulling, pulling.
I wasnt surprised at this response. Id felt it, too, many years before, and I still feel it every daynine books, countless cases and nearly three decades later.
I first visited Bachelors Grove Cemetery in 1988 as a research assistant to parapsychologist Jim Houran (then an undergraduate in psychology), who was performing fieldwork in so-called spontaneous phenomena: the world of experiences including ghosts, hauntings and other anomalous out of the laboratory happenings. Over the course of about a decade, we conducted a series of photography experiments at Bachelors Grove, and it was here that I began my proper study of the paranormal and its often complex relationships with human history.
It was a sublime place to start. The isolated, one-acre enclosure had been famous for generations, and with good reason. Since at least the 1960s, whisperings had abounded of what went on at this worn, old ossuary, which lay down a broken path through the woods of a south-side forest preserve, in present-day Bremen Township, southwest of the Chicago city limits. Legends were told of a phantom farmhouse here, seen glimmering through the trees, and of ghost lights flashing blue, yellow and white, which would sometimes chase visitors through the woods. Visitors shared stories of a diaphanous woman in whitethe mysterious Madonna of Bachelors Grovewho was seen wandering through the woods on moonlit nights, reportedly in search of her baby.
I knew these stories and knew, too, the shadowy half-history of the place. There was the abandonment by its settlersa first wave of English-born people; a second wave of those of German stock who farmed here well into the twentieth century; the usurpation by the forest preserves; the eventual desecration and destruction; the theft of the crumbling stones; rumors of ritual activity, murder and madness.
As I grew in my studies, history and psychical research meshed ever further, and at some point I became a professional paranormal researcher and historian of the Unknown. The way that I wrote historyinterpreted through accounts of the wondrousgained its own name: ghost lore.
Twenty-six years after I first visited Bachelors Grove, Ive written nine books of ghost lore, founded a company that takes visitors to some of the regions most infamously haunted sites and continue to explore new avenues by which I might teach the dramatic history of ordinaryand extraordinarypeople through tales of their brushes with the supernatural.
Along the way, inexplicable things have happened to me, too. Of course, Ive seen, heard, felt and even smelled countless phantoms as Ive pursued my work, and Ive heard thousands of stories of the encounters of others. But it is something deeper than these thrilling (but, in the end, limited) experiences that has proven to me, suddenly and without question, that this is all real.
That something deeper came out of the forest at Bachelors Grove again four years ago, shook me hard and gave me a mission: to find and tell the stories of those buried there, and to find out what secrets the land really held. In essence, to drag the history of the cemetery out of the woods, where it has been lost for so long.
It was a dangerous quest, at best. Bachelors Grove is known among ghost hunters to have a strange relationship with its fans. Like a best friend, it can welcome one with warm sunshine and camaraderie, as with new friends met on a long Sunday among the broken stones, talking about the supernatural, about the fragments of history to be found there or about nothing at all. It can make you think youve found some sort of home. And then, it can turn on you in an instant, rendering everything as fleeting as mist on the Groves quarry pond or as twisted as the panels of its chain-link fence.
People change at Bachelors Grove, or perhaps their masks come off there. Whichever it is, the ones close to the Grove know that it is not a place where one should stay long or come often. To do so is to risk losing oneself to its infamous pull.
