Greenwood Cemetery

An 1857 Decatur cemetery built over Native American burial ground and a mass grave of Civil War prisoners who may have been buried alive. Ghost lights drift along the southeastern hills, a woman in a wedding dress searches for her murdered bootlegger fiance, and a confused Confederate soldier in a tattered uniform has been seen asking for directions before vanishing.

A visitor once encountered a man in a tattered military uniform near the War Memorial section, confused and asking for directions. Then he vanished. The visitor had been standing on top of a mass grave.

During the Civil War, prison trains carrying Confederate soldiers passed close to Greenwood Cemetery on their way to camps further north. One trainload arrived with more than 100 men, many dying from Yellow Fever contracted in southern swamps. The dead were unloaded and buried in an unmarked hillside grave. The concern at the time, noted by Troy Taylor in his research on the cemetery, was that some of the soldiers may not have been dead when they went into the ground. Years later, heavy rains collapsed part of the hill and mixed the remains together. The city repaired the slope and reburied the bodies, but the hill is now topped by a memorial to Union soldiers, not the Confederates buried underneath it.

Greenwood was incorporated in 1857, but burials on this land go back to the 1820s, and before that, it was Native American burial ground. The oldest surviving headstone dates to 1813. The cemetery sits at the dead end of Church Street in south Decatur, covering rolling hills with old-growth trees and deteriorating monuments. Between 1900 and 1926, this was the city's premier burial ground. By the 1930s, the cemetery association went broke. The city took over in 1957, and volunteers have been restoring the grounds since.

The ghost lights are the most frequently reported phenomenon. They flicker along the southeastern hills, small floating lights that move between the graves. The leading theory ties them to the flood: at some point, heavy rains washed bodies from their original plots, and the lights are said to be spirits searching for where they're now buried. The lights have been reported for decades, long enough that they've become a feature of the cemetery rather than a mystery anyone expects to solve.

The Greenwood Bride is the cemetery's most famous ghost. In the early 1930s, a young woman planned to elope with her fiance, a bootlegger making one last delivery before they left town. Her family disapproved of the match. She waited for him that night, but he didn't show. The next day, she learned a rival bootlegger had killed him and dumped his body in the Sangamon River near the cemetery. She walked into the river and drowned. Her parents buried her in her wedding dress. Visitors have reported seeing a woman in white drifting between headstones on moonlit nights, still looking.

On a slight hill on the western edge, five stone steps lead up to four gravestones belonging to the Barrackman family. A woman has been seen standing at the top of those stairs with her head bowed, crying. She only appears near sunset and vanishes once the light is gone. Nobody knows who she is or which Barrackman she's mourning.

A mausoleum that once stood on the grounds was torn down in 1967 after years of deterioration. Before the demolition, people reported screams and lights coming from inside. Even after it was gone, paranormal investigators detected continued activity at the location where it had stood.

Old mine shafts are said to run beneath the cemetery, adding a physical instability to match the supernatural one. The ground has shifted and settled over two centuries, pulling headstones crooked and opening small sinkholes. Greenwood is the sort of place where the earth doesn't stay still and, if the stories are right, neither do the people buried in it.