Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery

Bachelor’s Grove is a one-acre graveyard hidden in the Rubio Woods forest preserve near Midlothian, at the end of a walking trail that was once the Midlothian Turnpike. Settlers from New York and New England began farming the area after the Black Hawk War of 1832, and German immigrants followed. The name most likely comes from the Batchelder family, who lived there by 1845, rather than the popular story of four bachelor settlers. When Edward Everden sold his land in 1864 he reserved an acre for a burying ground; the earliest recorded burials date from 1838 and 1844, and the last were in 1965 and 1989.

The railroad bypassed the settlement in the 1850s, families moved away, and some took their dead with them. Once the turnpike closed to traffic in the 1960s, the secluded cemetery became a lovers’ lane and a place to drink. Vandalism followed: by the 1970s headstones had been toppled, stolen and thrown into the nearby quarry pond, graves disturbed and rituals reportedly held there. Cook County took over the cemetery in the mid-1970s, and today it is maintained with the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Of more than 200 burials, few original markers remain.

The ghost stories grew in the same years. Teenagers and legend-trippers traded tales of floating blue and red lights, phantom cars on the old road, a farmhouse that appears and vanishes among the trees, figures among the graves, and even a rumour that Chicago gangsters dumped bodies in the pond. Local historian Brad Bettenhausen of the Tinley Park Historical Society has said these stories were told and retold by generations of young people, with little basis in fact – and that the ghost lore itself has invited vandals.

The cemetery’s fame rests above all on one photograph. On 10 August 1991 members of Dale Kaczmarek’s Ghost Research Society, using an infrared camera, photographed a woman in an old-fashioned dress with long dark hair sitting on a broken gravestone, parts of her apparently translucent. Published in the Chicago papers and on television, the “Madonna of Bachelor’s Grove” drew ghost hunters from across the country. Bettenhausen and others now urge visitors to treat the grove as what it is: the final resting place of real pioneer families who deserve respect.

Reports include a floating blue light and a red light among the graves, phantom cars and a vanishing farmhouse along the old turnpike, a woman in white sitting on a stone (the 1991 photograph), a figure apparently holding a baby near an “Infant Daughter” headstone, orbs and mist in photographs.

Throughout the small fenced cemetery and along the old Midlothian Turnpike trail and the quarry pond, reached by a short walk from 143rd Street opposite Rubio Woods.

Bachelor’s Grove features in countless Chicago ghost books and tours, on Most Terrifying Places in America and other TV programmes, and the 1991 “Madonna” photograph is one of the most reproduced ghost photos in the world.