Bachelor's Grove

Just off of the highway I plunged into a thick fog that lay in wait to ambush the unwary. It was still dusk but the fog had long ago muffled the light of the sun. Streetlights glowed like beacons and the fog dared me not to cover the brakes as I carefully wound my way home.
 
Hit play and read on.
 
The morning found the fog still hovering, threatening rain and an afternoon of television. Rather than give in, Jennae and I decided that the weather was optimal for a photo shoot at a location we had stumbled upon last year. A location that would be embracing the fog like a second skin.
 
It was still early when we left. A bleak early spring Saturday left the roads fairly empty but even still it took us a good hour to reach the woods. The Tinley Creek area of the Cook County forest preserve is only a sliver of the largest forest preserve in northern Illinois. It is a strange mix of two-lane highways, aging picnic shelters, excellent trails, bands of bikers, rumors of satanic activity, diverse wildlife and fearless mountain bikers confronting the twisting dirt paths that run through the hills like ribbons.
 
If you were to intentionally seek out Bachelor’s Grove, you most likely would fail. It’s not on Bachelor’s Grove Road. It’s not accessible from the Bachelor’s Grove picnic area. Instead, we drove further eastward and parked in the lot for Rubio Woods. Donning coats we double checked the cameras. The still camera was all set but even with fresh batteries the video camera refused to power up.
 
We hiked back to the entrance of Rubio Woods and across the turnpike, trying to ignore the cold drizzle. A few yards down the road led us to a trail veering off from the roadside. Bare trees clutched at the sky on both sides of the path and the lingering mist limited our visibility. The trail was wide and consisted of patchy broken asphalt and concrete. This had once been a road. The forest has slowly been reclaiming this former stretch of the Midlothian Turnpike since sometime in the 60‘s.
The settlement at Bachelors Grove began as early as the late 1820s, with larger numbers of immigrants arriving in the 1830s and 1840s. The second wave of settlers arriving from Europe, primarily of Germanic origin, began in the late 1840s and became the predominate nationality for immigrants to the area for better than the next fifty years. The first legal record of the cemetery occurred when Edward M. Everden sold his property in the area to Frederick Schmidt in 1864, reserving and setting aside one acre of the land for use as a graveyard.
Even before the closing of the Midlothian Turnpike, the cemetery had become a favorite hangout for area youth as a lover's lane and for parties. Once the cemetery became further isolated with the closing of the road, vandalism of the cemetery accelerated. There has been evidence of rituals, attempts at grave openings and robbings from time to time, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. Desecration and vandalism of the cemetery reached a peak in the 1970s. Many stones were maliciously broken, defaced, spray painted, and stolen.
As we reached the fence surrounding the cemetery, we felt the same eerie chill that we had experienced last time we had visited. A sense that something was terribly wrong. The gate had been broken open and the sign above had gone missing since our last visit. It seemed that the last winter had not been kind to the dead here. Huge trees had fallen on both the South and West sides, crushing the cage like fence and, on the west side, pinning a headstone to the ground.
Bachelor’s Grove is small, no larger than a convenience store parking lot. There were 19 graves recorded in 1998 but it’s difficult to find all of them in the creeping undergrowth. Making it even more difficult is the fact that the headstones and markers tend to move about the grounds.
One grave features a modest headstone with a large oval depression in the earth before it. It only takes a moment to realize what the source of this sunken earth is. We kept our distance for fear of feeling the ground sink slightly beneath our feet or perhaps hearing a muffled creak or crunch emanating from below.
The cluster of markers for the Fulton family features perhaps the eeriest of all of the stones. A small marker bears the inscription “Infant Daughter” and no matter what time of year you visit, it is always surrounded by dolls, toys and other small trinkets.
The photograph below appeared in both the Chicago Sun-Times and the National Examiner. It was taken during an investigation in Batchelor's Grove Cemetery on August 10, 1991 with a group of Ghost Research Society members. The picture is an enlarged black and white infrared shot taken of an area where many of the group noticed something unusual with some of the equipment they used. It shows a young woman sitting on a tombstone with parts of her lower and upper body being somewhat semi-transparent. The dress she is wearing is also out-of-date.
It's difficult to describe the uneasiness that comes over one when wandering amongst this desecrated graveyard. There is so much plain vandalism but there is a feeling that crimes much worse have been committed here.
For more information see the Bachelor's Grove Cemetery Site or come visit yourself...