I Spent The Night In A Haunted Cemetery During A Full Moon On Friday The 13th (Collected Experiences At Bachelor’s Grove, One of The World’s Most Haunted Cemeteries)
I recently submitted, for the first time, a collection of my experiences at Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery, one of the world’s most haunted places. It was for Coast To Coast AM’s annual open lines, which they have aptly titled “Ghost to Ghost”. That would be on October 29th. I can presume if they haven’t contacted me by now, they’ve probably drawn their conclusions already. Below is an edit of what I initially sent them.
I’d like to share a number of little anecdotes from my dozens of times being at the notoriously haunted (and long abandoned) cemetery, Bachelor’s Grove. I think they rival a lot of the stories to come out in the last 20 years, about experiences in that cemetery.
For one, among the first times I went to the cemetery, which is situated in the middle of a forest preserve, it was with friends. We saw the notorious disappearing house (or at least one of them). We didn’t even know it wasn’t supposed to be there.
Once we had spent our time in the cemetery, we continued walking west, past a stream that ran through the area. We walked for some time, and I even took a photo inside of a nearby well where this house apparently was. not 100 yeard from view. This was in approximately 2001. The house that most people have reported is said to be white, but what we saw was brown. It did look like it had candles lit in the windows, and it had a sheltered porch area. In hindsight, it did have a sort of shimmering quality to it, but it was not so out of the ordinary that it would disturb us in any way. The more we walked towards it, the more it stayed the same distance from us.
We were so preoccupied with looking for ghosts that we did not even realize that the house wasn’t supposed to be there. We didn’t put it together for some years after, including several other visits without consequence, and one with an especially large amount of consequence, at least for me. After I heard about the disappearing house in 2004 or so, I brought multiple friends back to try to find it, and we never did. One time in around 2014, a friend and I walked for 5 hours in the thick of the woods, off the paths, past the cemetery, past the nearby stream. The more we walked, the more the view of the Midlothian Turnpike IE the end of the forest preserve stayed the same distance from us. Finally, we gave up and turned around, and we got back to the cemetery entrance within 20 minutes. That forest preserve is about a three block radius if you look at a map, there is no logical way we walked for that long without coming out the other side. It was a nerve-wracking experience, to say the least.
Between 1999 and 2017, I went to Bachelor’s Grove at least once per year, and sometimes four times, possibly more. Even before I believed in ghosts, it had a special allure to it, and I’d take the Metra train by myself on a whim, or talk my friends into a short road trip. On Friday, June 13 of 2003, I was still something of a skeptic. I went to spend the night at the cemetery by myself, because I thought I’d never see anything. By that time, I’d been enough times without seeing anything (or so I thought), that I guess I felt a “reckoning” of sorts was in order. I snuck into the forest preserve area past a small radio antenna/tower, because I knew there would be police stationed at the main entrance, to prevent trespassers (and there were).
By this time, I’d been there so many times, I knew the place by heart. I quietly snuck onto the main path just past the entrance. Once I’d walked through the woods for long enough, dressed in all black, and with a good deal of adrenaline, the cemetery welcomed me behind a chain-link fence with an aged, hand-painted sign. I didn’t even have a flashlight, but I’d found that I didn’t need one. The moon was so bright and full (yes, it was a full moon on Friday the 13th) that I felt as if there was an overhead light somewhere, but I don’t think there was. I walked around a fair amount. I was thankful that, for some reason, there was no mud and no mosquitos, and the weather was a bit brisk, but not too cold. The abandoned property was also known to have obscenely overgrown grass and weeds, but some kind soul had mowed it before too long.
I’m pretty sure that I arrived at the cemetery around 11pm, and not a thing happened until about 2am, but at that time, everything happened, and it was beautiful. I sat at a grave that had been dug up in the 60s, so it was a bit of a pothole. I believe it was the Newman grave. I tried to settle in, but I was on high alert for the entire time, until I did actually start seeing things.
A lot of people have horror stories of shadow figures and deep negativity, but what I saw was so blissful and warm, it made me really happy, and I’ve always associated that warm feeling with the place since then. It began with me seeing two people slow-dancing in a circle, patiently, gracefully, and almost menacingly. It was a bride and groom in old-fashioned regalia; the groom with a top hat and coat tails, and the bride with a white wreath on her head.
At first, I just thought it was a mirage, and I started drawing what I’d imagined the mirages to be under the moonlight. The more I continued to draw, the more these mirages sort of came to life, and then bizarre things started to happen, which certainly were not mirages. The couple were too far away to see many details, but the intensity with which they gazed into eachother’s eyes was not only implicit, but undeniable, so much so that I felt I could hear the music, although I knew I couldn’t.
It is natural for a skeptic to assume that this was some sort of “psychogenic” hysteria, the eyes playing tricks in the moonlight, but it’s hard to explain how bright everything was. The moon was not only luminescent, but everything had a slight glowing hue to it, which allowed me to make for certain about this couple in the distance. Dancing their mesmerizing dance near the entrance to the cemetery, these lovebirds were not my eyes making something out of nothing. The more clarity I felt, the more happiness I felt. I felt as if I was connected to all of the families who had come to have picnics and visit their loved ones, since this was, after all, referred to as “the cemetery in the park” at one point.
White orbs began to float around in the area, and they didn’t seem to be representative of bodies, but they were smaller. They looked like what Disney movies portray lightning bugs to be, basically clusters of white superballs floating in the air. There was not only a glow, but a sort of fog in the trees, as well as a thin layer lining the ground, and most of the orbs that I saw were up in the trees with what looked like light mists of glowing white smoke.
To my left, a large glowing red light crept up over the lagoon, and the nearby Midlothian turnpike. It looked like red spotlights were coming up out of the lagoon, lots of them. The side of the road next to the lagoon was immersed in red light going straight up to the sky. I kept waiting to hear an ambulance, but I heard nothing. I didn’t even hear crickets for a while. Combined with the moonlight, these new red lights gave me even more illumination so that I could inspect the things around me without getting up from my seat.
On the ground, I saw a broken carriage and a dead horse. I want to be clear that it was bright enough to make these things out clearly. The carriage was pretty smashed up, but it was still recognizable as a carriage. I did not know of any sort of history where a horse and carriage ran into the lagoon and both died for no apparent reason. I heard that years later. That particular anecdote isn’t in a lot of the books that cover this cemetery.
Another thing I will say- there are stories of a “yellow man”, which is to say, apparently some Dick Tracy type of character walks around in a yellow overcoat. I did not see that exactly, and I never heard of it until recently, but what I did see, was a glowing yellow humanoid figure that would walk for a few steps and then explode into pieces, then reform as a bunch of orbs that rapidly coagulated, walk a bit more, then explode. All of this happened in a manner as if it were indifferent to me. This stuff just continued to go on, uninterrupted, for at least 2 hours. I sat in the moonlight and sketched what I was seeing at one point, and that was just as things were beginning to develop. What I did sketch also were potential mirages, to be clear, but that was before the red light really kicked in. At one point, early on, I was satisfied to sketch the little mirages that I’d thought I saw, and I even made captions about it, but when the real action started, I stopped sketching altogether. It was absolutely mesmerizing.
Things were not all peachy keen throughout the night, though. I had heard of the shadow figures and hooded figures, and naturally I was worried about ritual abuse and devil worshippers that are rumored to be about the area. What I did see was hovering hooded figures moving back and forth about the fence area, paying particular attention to the entrance. They zoomed back and forth over and over, and that made me pretty nervous, but they seemed more like guardians than antagonists. They had a rapid, shimmering quality, as they moved briskly along the fences. The speed that they moved with betrayed the fact that their legs were not moving.
What made me more nervous was that I began hearing animals screaming. I specifically heard a dog screaming in pain, and it felt like it was very close to me, but I could not see it. The dog didn’t seem to want to hurt me, but I did not move from my spot at that gravestone until the sun began to come up. Just before that happened, it was as if a dimmer switch had turned everything down, and it all faded from view as the crack of dawn only slightly began to creep through the moonlight, at which point I walked to a nearby 24 hour diner, had breakfast, and came back to the cemetery to take pictures with a disposable camera. Naturally, not one photo came out. The photos were all completely black.
I walked a fair distance at sunrise, with only a small amount of dirt on my jeans, and finished the final touches of my sketch on the bus with a sense of elation that I’d never had before or since. I would like to add that this experience was so profound to me that it slowly became the impetus for me to become a psychic as well as a certified hypnotherapist, essentially because the trance state that was involved on this night was so extraordinary and undeniable. I’d also postulate that the “ultraterrestrial” hypothesis seems accurate to me, because there are other elements of “high strangeness” associated with valid UFO sightings, as well as occult rituals.
There are other odd little moments from my visits. It became harder and harder to be alone there, because teenagers from the suburbs were always trotting around and being loud. This can be the case in the dead of winter, although there is generally less traffic at the cemetery around then. On one occasion, an older man was startled by me as I sat by my favorite gravestone, thinking that I was a ghost. We’d talked at length. He’d quizzed me about the disappearing house, and without asking any leading questions I told him and addressed the common claims that it was white. I did not see a white house, and he’d suggested that there was some sort of misinformation going on, because we’d both seen a house that was brown, or dark red. We’d both agreed on the general location we’d seen it, and sadly, we both agreed that we’ve never been able to find it again.
There was one time during the day that I saw something that resembled a bobcat, but what it really looked like was a huge version of a Norwegian longhair cat. The creature was about 3 feet tall, grey fur. I saw it walking down the path to the cemetery, and continued past it, off into the woods. I had plenty of time to get a good look at it, too. It was unlike any animal I’ve seen, but it isn’t really compelling compared to the aforementioned anecdotes, so I don’t tell it often.
Friends and I have walked for hours on numerous occasions. Once it was in the rain, and we kept walking for quite a bit, to no avail. My friend Edgar said he saw a shadow figure when he was with me, but I missed it. He claimed it swirled into the ground once it he laid eyes on it. On a couple of occasions, I’ve visited Bachelor’s Grove with paranormal investigator friends. I set my digital recorder on a tree stump and turned it on. Aside from about 30 seconds of rustling sounds, the 40 minute recording was totally silent, and that particular recorder would continue to give me trouble for over ten years. It would go silent for no reason, or record something at inaudible volumes. The friends that had analog cassette recorders tended to have better results, and plenty of electronic voice phenomena.
I make experimental music, and at one point, I’d decided to release a cassette that came in little bags that included dirt from the cemetery. I actually took dirt from just outside the cemetery gates, out of respect for the dead, and I’d left flowers on each of the graves before I’d collected the dirt. On that night, I had a dream that I was sleeping in that aforementioned grave that’d been dug up in the 60s, except I was surrounded by a coven of black-clad witches, and while I don’t remember details, I remember that their enchantment was not entirely benevolent. I’d learned some protective exercises before I visited again after that point.
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know what it’s about. Maybe it has to do with electromagnetism, ionization of the air, satanic rituals, Native American burial grounds, ley lines, or maybe it is collective hallucination (or toxic waste). All I know is, this is my story, and I’m sticking to it.
ADDENDUM:
My advice to someone who wants to visit Bachelor’s Grove:
I’d go during the day. If you go at night, you have to park far away or they will ticket/tow you, and you have to sneak in, because police are around the main entrance. And I would not advise going without a flashlight like I did, that was lucky that I wasn’t scared out of my wits by screaming animals.
I know someone who was threatened by police there. They said they will plant drugs on them and arrest them. Really important not to mess with them! Hopefully they’d just tell you to leave and worst case give you a ticket, but I feel obligated to say that things might get worse than that. You know the location of the actual cemetery, right?
I remember one of the last times I went, they renamed the park across the street to confuse newcomers. I haven’t been there in a while, but October was always not the best time to go, because you can be certain there will be more cops there, and there was much more traffic from tourists at all times. And your flashlights will make you more obvious to the police… There have been animals found tortured for scumbag/devil-worshipping/ritual purposes, so if you’re going to go in October, make sure you’re made of tuff stuff…
ALSO:
This Paranormal Youtube Channel included the above story within their video below. Thanks Paranormal M!
The Bachelor’s Grove Story was also featured in a new podcast called Tea Tales. It comes in around the 25 minute mark.