Nothing is Scary Anymore Except Real Life Part 3: Resurrection Mary

Excellent Music, Fine Food, and Ghosts!

Here's the final installment in this series. I took you to W. Virginia to track down the Mothman. I travelled to the longest island in search of the Amityville Horror House. Now I bring it all home. Literally. Please enjoy Part 3: Resurrection Mary aka My Town is Haunted as F**K.

If you grow up near Chicago you know that nothing good happens in the woods. You grow up being told that if you hang out in the woods too long you’re either going to be chased by a child molester or become a sacrifice for a gaggle of heavy metal listening devil worshippers. You’re told those things and then you watch the first couple Friday the 13^th’s and you never want to see a green space ever again.

We were scared of the woods until we realized we could throw an awesome party in them and we learned to cope with the fear. Still, the fear is so ingrained that it lingers in the far reaches of your brain.

All that being said, I should be scared all the time. I live in a town called Willow Springs, about a half hour southwest of Chicago. My backyard is a forest and the rest of my town is surrounded by acres and acres of woods. Those woods are veined with trails full of mountain bikers on $2,000 bikes because those things are necessary to handle the treacherously mountainous terrain of the Midwest. You might even bump into equestrians. An equestrian is a person who enjoys watching a horse take a huge dump on a narrow trail and just leaving it there for hikers and families to stomp through.

It’s not just the woods that should scare me though. It’s not even the cemetery across the street.

It’s the ghosts.

I live in one of the most haunted towns in the world. Ghost monks that float through an old cemetery? We got them. Top secret nuclear laboratory? Of course. Mysterious orbs floating over the lake? We got a couple, two, tree. Add in notorious unsolved murders, mob ties, and ancient Native American burial grounds and you got yourself a paranormal smorgasbord.

While any of those things mentioned in the paragraph above would make for an excellent story that could be turned into a terrible Netflix series, there is one tale that rises to the top.

She the baddest.

She the raddest.

She is Resurrection Mary.

More about her in a bit.

 Since Autumn was upon us, I put together a Haunted Hike for some friends. These are the type of friends who live in the city and are mostly convinced that if they leave the 2 mile radius of their neighborhood that they will burst into flames. They arrived intact and were amazed by the free and ample parking options.

The route I had in mind originally had to be scrapped due to encroaching darkness so we split it into 2 smaller hikes. From my place we drove 5 minutes west on Archer to the Red Gate Woods aka the Willow Springs version of Stranger Things.

Red Gate Woods is the site of the original Argonne Laboratory. Enrico Fermi and a bunch of scientists working for the Manhattan project were originally set up at Chicago University in a top secret, underground lab. There they built Chicago Pile-1 which became the world’s first nuclear reactor. Pretty soon after they created the first man-made nuclear chain reaction they realized, “Oh shit. We’ve built this in the city close to thousands of people!”

Chicago Pile-1 was dismantled, moved to the Argonne Woods and rebuilt as Chicago Pile-2. The site was chosen because it was remote but not too far from the city. There weren’t that many people around and those who were knew how to keep their mouths shut. The mob had their hooks in Willow Springs for decades and the citizens knew the benefits of keeping their noses out of everyone else’s business.

To access the site we parked in the main forest preserve lot where a party was still raging in one of the pavilions. Traditional Polish techno music blared from a Bluetooth speaker and many a thick-necked Polish man looked at us curiously through the smoke of grilling meats as we entered the woods just before sundown.

A short, muddy path leads to the original road that snaked through the woods from Archer Ave to the lab aka Site A. It’s still used as a service road for the forest preserve so its kept up decently and makes for an easy hike. The conditions were perfect for getting spooked. The tinted yet dense foliage kept what little sun was left at bay and blocked the noise of passing cars while we made our first stop at the site of the old lab.

You might be asking yourself: What does one do with a nuclear reactor that has outlived its usefulness? You bury that shit in a bighole in the woods.

Perfect date spot

Though no structures survived, there is a map that shows you exactly how the lab was laid out. Further into the site we found a large stone engraved with a description about what the site was used for. It also Let’s you know that you are standing on the burial site of the reactor. The reactor was 2 stories tall so it was a big ol’ hole.

About a half mile away from the lab site is Site M, a clearing off the main trail that is easily missed if you aren’t looking for it. Tucked back into the tall grasses was another large stone. This marker was kind enough to inform us that we were standing on top of a nuclear waste site. It says, “THERE IS NO DANGER TO HUMANS” but they seem a little too eager blurting it out like that.

I would love to tell you that we saw some of the orbs that have been reported in the area or that my buddy Todd picked up anything on his film but no dice. I’d love to tell you that we came across a cryptid endowed with radioactive powers trampling through the woods but we found only ticks. The only freaky thing we saw was a guy walking his dog who my buddy Paul noticed looked like John Wayne Gacy and that dude did.

We were 0 for 1. It was time to cut the shit and start the pit: It was Resurrection Mary time.

We dropped the cars off at my place and after a quick hike up to the clocktower of Fairmount Cemetery that rests atop a tombstone pocked hill overlooking Archer Ave, we trecked down to the Willowbrook Ballroom. The Ballroom itself is no longer standing. It burned down to the foundation in 2016 but the sign and its brick wall along the street still remain.

There are many versions of the Resurrection Mary story with slight variations but in almost all of the tales, the Willowbrook Ballroom aka Oh Henry Ballroom plays a major role. Here’s the gist:

Back in the late 1930s a dude was at a dance in the Willowbrook Ballroom. Going to the Willowbrook back in the day was the equivalent of going to the club today. Homeboy sees a pretty girl in a blue dress dancing by herself and he does the Charleston or whatever over to her. They dance together and he offers to give her a ride home. She tells him to go down Archer Ave.

Dude is trying to chat her up but getting short replies. Somewhere along the way he asks her name and she says Mary. He’s still chatting away and when his car is driving past Resurrection Cemetery, he turns to look at her and she gone. Homey is shook. He looks up and can see her running through the closed gates into Resurrection Cemetery before evaporating.

You thought it was bad when that woman you took out for sushi pretended to get a phone call from her dying grandmother so she could ditch your ass? This is the OG ghosting.

Stories like this accumulated through the 70’s. Sometimes she was hitchhiking. Sometimes she had long hair, other times short. One dude claimed to have run her over.

It was a common past time (probably still is) for high school kids to trace her route from the ballroom to the cemetery in hopes of catching a glimpse of Mary floating down Archer Ave. Famed ghost hunter RichardCrowe made Resurrection Mary and Willow Springs a staple of his haunted Chicago tours.

 I told the stories to my friends gathered under the Willowbrook marquee. All of these stories were second or third-hand and not too scary when you have dozens of cars flying by. I had driven up and down this strip thousands of times but I couldn’t come up with anything scary I experienced first-hand. The scariest thing that happened to me at the Ballroom was getting married there, developing the film from a disposable camera, and seeing my friends used an entire roll on pics of their balls and dongs. Unfortunately, unsolicited dick pics don’t have a paranormal classification.

We walked back to my house and my friends, though not entirely spooked, were sufficiently entertained. The scariest moment was when my friend Chelsie hid next to a bush in the cemetery and jumped out at the unsuspecting fools in the back. Also my friend Sandra was concerned a demon would attach itself to her fiancé before they could get married. I’m still 50/50 and whether one did or not.

 Gathered in the safety of my abode, we ate some food, swapped stories, and hung out the way friends do. Todd began scrolling through the pics he took. Hidden in a burst of photos he took by the Ballroom was an image with some unexplained abnormalities. Was it dust? Was it a bug? Was it the spirit of Resurrection Mary trying to holler at Todd? You be the judge!

Spooky Pic by Todd Diederich

 Even with the photographic evidence, I gotta say that my skepticism is firmly in place. I didn’t feel anything, I didn’t see anything, and I didn’t hear anything in the woods. I was mostly scared about getting locked in the Forest Preserve parking lot or explaining to a cop why my 40 year old self was leading a dozen 30+ year olds through a closed cemetery.

Maybe I don’t want to believe. If I did, I’d have to accept that I am surrounded by it all day. Is my skepticism a coping mechanism? Perhaps it is. Perhaps I’m really good at making rational explanations for irrational occurrences. Until proven otherwise I will sleep easy knowing that the scuttling in the woods is just a raccoon, the growling just beyond the tree line is just a coyote, and the voice that keeps telling me, “KILL, KILL, KILL” endlessly, night after night is just the wind.