Bachelor's Grove Cemetery

A 1991 infrared photograph taken by Ghost Research Society member Mari Huff captured a semi-transparent woman sitting on a tombstone that nobody present could see, and thirty years of forensic analysis has found no manipulation. This tiny 82-plot cemetery in the southwest Chicago suburbs has logged over 100 documented encounters since the 1950s, including the White Lady, a phantom Victorian farmhouse that vanishes when approached, and the ghosts of a farmer and horse who drowned in the bordering pond in 1870.

On August 10, 1991, Ghost Research Society member Mari Huff loaded infrared film into her camera and pointed it at an empty row of broken tombstones. When the film was developed, a semi-transparent woman in old-fashioned clothing sat on one of the stones, legs crossed, looking straight at the camera. No one in the group had seen her.

That photograph has been examined by professional photographers and digital forensics specialists for more than thirty years. No evidence of manipulation has ever been found in the original negative.

Bachelor's Grove Cemetery sits at the end of a gravel path off the Midlothian Turnpike in the southwest Chicago suburbs. Eighty-two plots. More than 200 burials between 1840 and the mid-1960s. The first recorded burial was Eliza Scott in November 1844. The last was Robert Shields in 1989. Few original markers remain. The rest were smashed, toppled, or dragged into the surrounding woods during decades of vandalism that began in the 1960s, when teenagers turned the isolated graveyard into a party spot after the turnpike was rerouted to 143rd Street.

The vandalism escalated. Headstones were defaced. Coffins were dug up. Local legend says occult groups held rituals among the graves. Whether or not that's true, the damage was real, and the stories that followed were relentless.

The earliest ghost reports date to the 1950s. By the 1970s, Bachelor's Grove had become one of the most investigated cemeteries in the Midwest, with more than 100 documented encounters on file.

The White Lady is the cemetery's signature ghost. She's been spotted since at least 1979, when investigators first photographed what appeared to be a hooded figure in a flowing white robe carrying a baby. Visitors who've seen her describe her wandering the grounds on full moon nights, searching through the headstones. Later sightings show her without the infant, just drifting between the graves.

Then there's the phantom farmhouse. Multiple witnesses over the years have described a white one-story Victorian with a porch swing and a picket fence, sitting in a clearing where no building exists. The house appears transparent, with a yellow-orange candlelight flickering in the windows. It shrinks and vanishes when you walk toward it.

The oldest ghost story ties to the pond bordering the cemetery. In 1870, a farmer was plowing a nearby field when his horse spooked and bolted. Tangled in the reins, both the farmer and the horse plunged into the water and drowned. People have reported seeing their ghostly forms rising from the pond's surface and drifting along 143rd Street.

Visitors describe blue and red orbs hovering above the graves, sometimes moving in deliberate patterns as if following someone. The first account of blue orbs dates to 1970, when a man saw a small light from a distance that grew to the size of a basketball as he watched. A large black-and-tan dog appears at the cemetery entrance, then fades before anyone can approach.

Brad Bettenhausen, president emeritus of the Tinley Park Historical Society, has a more grounded take. He's pointed out that many of these tales have been "told and retold by several generations of youths" and that "few of these tales have any apparent basis in fact." He's probably right about some of them.

But the Mari Huff photograph isn't a campfire story. It's a piece of infrared film with a figure on it that no one present could see, and no one since has been able to explain. The negative sits in the Ghost Research Society's archives, still unexplained after three decades.