Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery occupies a clearing deep within the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve, southwest of Chicago, where it has quietly deteriorated for the better part of a century. English settlers from New England established the burial ground in the 1830s; the earliest legal record dates to 1864, when the land was still worked farmland. For decades it served its small community faithfully, until the mid-twentieth century brought abandonment, overgrowth, and a severity of vandalism virtually unmatched among American burial grounds.

Headstones were shattered, stolen, or hurled into the adjacent pond—a body of water that Chicago Outfit members reportedly used, in darker decades, to dispose of evidence. What remained of the cemetery drew investigators rather than mourners, and it is the Ghost Research Society, under the direction of Dale Kaczmarek, that has logged more formal investigations here than at almost any other site in the country. Witnesses over the years have described a woman in white drifting along the cemetery’s border—a figure sometimes glimpsed holding an infant close, her expression fixed in an anguish that defies easy explanation.

The image that made Bachelor’s Grove famous beyond paranormal circles arrived in 1991, when a Ghost Research Society session yielded something no one present had seen. A photograph taken during the investigation, once developed, revealed a translucent female figure seated on a broken tombstone, dressed in period clothing, gazing at nothing. The woman was not there. She had not been there. The “Madonna of Bachelor’s Grove” has since become the most widely reproduced and debated ghost photograph in American paranormal literature. Today, a half-mile trail through Rubio Woods carries the public to the site during daylight hours, free of charge—though what one finds there depends, as it always has, on the light.

Story Source: TV episode titled “Bachelors Grove Cemetery and Waverly Hills Sanatorium” — Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks (Travel Channel, 2016)

Address: Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, 143rd Street, Midlothian, IL 60445

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