In Brief
Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois is the reputed resting place of Resurrection Mary — a young blonde in a white party dress who climbs into cars along Archer Avenue, then vanishes the moment the road reaches the gates.
The Full Story
At Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, the ghost gets in your car. Since the 1930s, drivers along Archer Avenue — the road that runs southwest from the old ballrooms to the cemetery gates — have reported the same young blonde woman in a white party dress. She rides with them a while, and she's gone before they reach the gates.
The best-known witness is a Chicago southsider named Jerry Palus. In 1939 he met a blonde at the Liberty Grove ballroom, danced with her, kissed her, and noticed her hands were ice-cold. He offered her a ride home. She gave an address on South Damen Avenue but had him turn toward Archer Road instead, and when the car neared Resurrection Cemetery she asked him to stop, got out, and disappeared at the gates. "Where I'm going, you can't follow," she'd told him. The next day he went to the address she'd named. An older woman said no one by that name lived there — then he saw a photo on the wall of the same girl, dead five years.
Drivers kept reporting her for decades after. So did Chet's Melody Lounge, directly across Archer Road, which to this day leaves a Bloody Mary on the bar for her.
In 1976 a driver said he saw a girl gripping the iron bars of the cemetery gate. Police found two bars bent apart, with what looked like handprints pressed into the metal and scorch marks seared across it. The cemetery's explanation was a work truck that backed into the gate, and a blow-torch used to straighten the bars. Investigators who came out said the marks didn't match.
Who Mary actually was, no one can settle. One candidate died in a 1934 wreck but was a brunette. Another was blonde but only 12, and buried somewhere else. A vanishing hitchhiker was being told about this stretch of Archer as early as 1932 — before either of them died.
