Hello Everyone,

To start things off I hope everyone is having a wonderful New Year and look forward to trying to better themselves not just every year but every day. Many people feel that New Year represents the start of a new life. A resurrection, or one’s ability to recondition themselves for a better outcome on life, a new start. So fitting that I chose to do this week’s blog on Resurrection Cemetery then, right?

Resurrection Cemetery:

Obviously there is a reasonable choice behind this particular cemetery and that is because it has a substantial amount of hauntings reported. The cemetery is located in Justice, Illinois. It holds over 152,000 graves and more crypts to add to that number of those buried there. It began as a place to bury the dead in 1904 and was officially opened in 1912. Although the cemetery has a lot of reason to have the substantial reported hauntings, it is one particular haunting that stands out above the rest.

Resurrection Mary:

At least that is who people think she is. By people, I mean the high amount of reported cases since the 1930s that have similar reports of this alleged ghost.

The story goes that sometime in the 1930s there was a dance going on at a local ballroom that Mary attended. During the course of the night, for whatever reasons, her and her boyfriend had gotten into a fight. She left the ballroom without him and decided to hitchhike her way home.

Along the way, somewhere just around the cemetery, or several miles from the ballroom, she was struck by a vehicle. The driver left her to die on the side of the road. Ever since, reports have popped up from many passersby about a mysterious hitchhiking women.

If that isn’t enough:

Not only to they see this women that usually is wearing the same of two types of outfits but they……wait for it……pick her up.

Yes, they give her a ride. She never speaks but casts an eerie glare back at you the whole time as if she is reading your soul. Deciding what she might do to you. As the drivers approach Resurrection Cemetery she is then asked to be let out. Whether she speak at this point or not, I am not sure, once again reports to vary a little bit. Some say she suddenly asks to be let out or “here, here!’ she yells startling the drivers.

As the drivers oblige and let her out she walks into the cemetery and suddenly vanishes. Those who have followed her say that she seems to vanish by a particular grave.

Not everyone picks her up, some simply see her making a mad dash across the road and hit their brakes in the fear of striking her. Some do hit the apparition, but it simply dissipates into a blur along the side of the road as if the car passed through them.

More Recent:

More recent reports around the same area carry the same eeriness of a haunting that has managed to somehow lurk beyond the gates of the cemetery. Maybe the bent bars of the cemetery gate that still carry the impressions of hand prints embedded into the steel as if something’s otherworldly grip pulled them apart has something to do with that.

The reports have strayed away from the original haunting stories that started in the 1930s but they still carry similar qualities.

Makes you wonder sometimes driving around late at night when you think your eyes are playing tricks on you form the lights of other traffic or the moonlight. Maybe you aren’t’ just tired and seeing a blur. Maybe that lonely road has more of a story behind it. Maybe it’s just someone needing a lift home. But in this case it’s not the home we think it is. It is back home to Resurrection Cemetery. Or even another place of rest for those who have passed on from this world.

Thanks for Reading,

Joshua Crane Dowidat