Resurrection Mary

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The main gate of Resurrection Cemetery on Archer Avenue

Resurrection Mary is likely the Chicago area's best-known ghost story. Of the "vanishing hitchhiker" type, the story takes place outside Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, a few miles west of Chicago.

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The story of Resurrection Mary

Since the 1930s, several men driving northeast along Archer Avenue between the Willowbrook Ballroom and Resurrection Cemetery have reported picking up a young female hitchhiker. This young woman is dressed somewhat formally. The girl was said to have light blond hair, blue eyes and was wearing a white party dress. Some more attentive drivers would sometimes add that she wore a thin shawl, or dancing shoes, and that she had a small clutch purse, and is very quiet. When the driver nears the Resurrection Cemetery, the young woman asks to be let out, whereupon she disappears into the cemetery.

The story explains that Mary is the ghost of a girl. She had spent the evening dancing with a boyfriend at the O Henry Ballroom. At some point, they got into an argument and Mary (as she has come to be called) stormed out of the place. Even though it was a cold winter’s night, she thought, she would rather face a cold walk home than another minute with her boorish lover.

She left the ballroom and started walking up Archer Avenue. She had not gotten very far when she was struck and killed by a passing automobile. The driver fled the scene and Mary was left there to die. In a variation of the story, several men have reported dancing with Mary at the ballroom, and later dropping her off outside Resurrection Cemetery, where she disappears.

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The Willowbrook Ballroom in Willow Springs, Illinois.

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The historical record

One of the many legends of Resurrection Mary is that she was a young Polish girl, perhaps named Mary Bregovy. Even though Bregovy was killed in an auto accident in 1934, it is unlikely that she was returning home from the Oh Henry Ballroom/Willowbrook Ballroom, as some have claimed. The accident in which she was killed took place on Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. The car that she was riding in collided with an elevated train support and she was thrown through the windshield (Chicago Tribune, March 1934).


Other theories suggest that Resurrection Mary is the ghost of a twelve-year-old Polish girl named Anna Norkus, who called herself Marija (Mary) in devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Marija loved dancing and persuaded her father to take her to the Oh Henry Ballroom/Willowbrook Ballroom as a birthday present. However, they were both in a car accident on the way home, an accident which killed Marija. (Ursula Bielski, "Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City." Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 1997). This leads some to claim that Resurrection Mary is really Anna Marija Norkus. However, Resurrection Mary's dance partners have said that their spectral date was closer to eighteen or twenty than to twelve or thirteen years old.

Other researchers have turned up stories of girls named Mary who died on or near Archer Avenue, but none of them precede the first sightings in the 1930s.

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Recent reports

Reports of Mary seem to have stopped around the early 1980s when Archer Avenue underwent reconstruction. The original road that Mary is said to have walked down has since been raised and changed and believers suggest that this may have stopped the walking of her spirit. Despite this reports still show up occasionally from people seen the apparition walking from time to time.

She has also reportedly burned her handprints into the gate at the cemetery. These prints apparently could not be painted over until the fence was removed. Officials at the cemetery have stated that a truck had damaged the fence and that there is no evidence of this ghost.

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Burned section of the front gate bars.

Legacy

Resurrection Mary's story may have inspired similar legends in other cities. One such story, written in 1965 by fifteen-year-old Cathie Harmon for a Memphis, Tennessee newspaper, was picked up by psychologist-songwriter Milton Addington, who used it as the basis for Dickey Lee's song Laurie (Strange Things Happen In This World).