Graceland Cemetery

At Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, there's a little girl sealed behind glass. She's a life-sized statue of a child in a summer dress, holding a parasol, sitting on a stone pedestal inside a glass case. The plaque reads "Inez Clarke 1873–1880." Visitors leave toys and coins and stuffed animals at her feet, and the story goes that on stormy nights the case turns up empty.

The legend says Inez was killed by lightning, locked outside by her parents when a storm broke, and that she still fears storms in death — so when the thunder comes, she leaves the glass. Security guards and tour drivers have told it that way since the 1980s: a watchman finds the case empty during a storm, and by morning the statue is back. No watchman is named. No date is on record. The story just gets passed along.

The historians get unsettled by a different part. When a researcher went looking for Inez Clarke, he couldn't find her. The cemetery's own records listed the plot's occupant as a boy, "Amos Briggs." Later genealogy turned up a real Inez Briggs in the 1880 census, living with grandparents whose graves sit right beside the statue — a girl who died of diphtheria, not lightning. The accounts agree the storm story is false. They can't agree on who is actually under the glass.

Inez isn't the only watcher here. On the Dexter Graves plot stands "Eternal Silence," a 10-foot hooded bronze cast by Lorado Taft in 1909, and the legend holds that looking into its shadowed face shows you a vision of your own death. And at Ludwig Wolff's tomb — sunk into a mound, stairs descending to a buried door — people in the apartments nearby say they've seen the phantom of his wolf-hound pacing the entrance on full-moon nights, its eyes burning a fluorescent green.

Three statues, three stories. Only one of them comes with a name on a plaque, and that name may be wrong.