Resurrection Mary

Archer Avenue runs south-west out of Chicago past a string of old cemeteries towards the Des Plaines River valley. Along it, since at least the 1930s, drivers have told of a young woman – blonde, blue-eyed, in a white party dress and dancing shoes – who appears at a dance hall or by the roadside, asks for a lift and directs the driver up Archer. As the car passes the gates of Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, she is suddenly gone.

The usual backstory sets her death in the late 1920s or early 1930s. After an argument with her date at the Oh Henry Ballroom in Willow Springs – later the Willowbrook Ballroom – she set out to walk home and was killed by a hit-and-run driver, or died in a car crash on her way to or from a dance, and was buried at Resurrection in her white gown. Researchers have tried to put a name to her. One candidate is Mary Bregovy, a young Polish-American woman killed in a 1934 car accident – though in downtown Chicago, not on Archer. Author Ursula Bielski has pointed to Ona (Anna) Norkus, who died in a 1927 crash on the way home from the Oh Henry, but she was only twelve and is buried elsewhere. As the Chicago History Museum notes, no identification has been conclusive.

The story is a local version of the “vanishing hitchhiker”, one of the most widespread ghost legends in the world, and its Chicago form owes much to collectors and tour guides. Chicago ghost hunter Richard Crowe collected some three dozen reports he considered substantiated, and the tale was retold on Unsolved Mysteries, in ballads and in low-budget films. One of the most famous incidents – the claim that in August 1976 Mary burned her handprints into the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence – was explained by cemetery officials as damage caused by a truck, with no evidence of a ghost.

The Oh Henry, opened as an open-air dance pavilion in 1921 and rebuilt as a ballroom in 1931, was gutted by fire in October 2016. Across from the cemetery, Chet’s Melody Lounge has long kept a Bloody Mary at the end of the bar for her on Sundays – still unclaimed.

Drivers report picking up a quiet young woman in a white dress who gives directions along Archer Avenue and disappears near the cemetery gates; others describe a girl dancing alone at a dance hall, and a figure in front of cars outside Resurrection Cemetery who vanishes by the time the driver gets out.

Archer Avenue between the former Willowbrook (Oh Henry) Ballroom in Willow Springs and Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, especially outside the cemetery’s main gates; the stories are almost always set at night.

Resurrection Mary is Chicago’s signature ghost, featured on Unsolved Mysteries, in songs, films and countless ghost-tour itineraries along Archer Avenue, and in books by Richard Crowe, Ursula Bielski and Troy Taylor. She belongs to the worldwide family of vanishing hitchhikers.