What happened
Resurrection Mary is the most famous ghost of the Chicago area. In the popular version of the legend, a young Polish or Lithuanian woman was walking home in the 1930s from a dance hall on Archer Avenue when she was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was buried in her white dancing dress in Resurrection Cemetery. The first detailed account came in 1939 from Jerry Palus: at a dance he met a blonde girl with icy hands, and when he drove her home she asked him to stop by the cemetery and disappeared through the gates. In the following decades cab drivers told of passengers vanishing from the back seat, and motorists of a woman in white they had hit in front of the cemetery and who was then nowhere to be found. In 1976 there was a stir over bent bars in the cemetery gate that supposedly bore handprints.
Witnesses
Jerry Palus (1939), cab drivers and motorists on Archer Avenue, including those described by journalist Bill Geist in 1979; the story was popularized by researchers of local folklore such as Ursula Bielski.
Explanations and hypotheses
Resurrection Mary is a local version of the “vanishing hitchhiker” legend, known to folklorists (including Jan Harold Brunvand) from all over the world. Attempts to identify the real Mary fail: Mary Bregovy died in 1934 in a crash in downtown Chicago, not on Archer Avenue, and Anna Norkus, who died in 1927, was a twelve-year-old buried in a different cemetery. The cemetery management attributed the 1976 damage to the gate to a truck that had hit it, and found no trace of anything supernatural. The legend is now a fixture of Chicago Halloween tours.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- Peter Gorner, Some of Chicago's Favorite Haunts (Chicago Tribune, 13 maja 1974)
- Bill Geist, Cryptic rider leaves taxi driver with the willies (Suburban Tribune, 31 stycznia 1979) – przedruk: Ghost Research Society
- Kenan Heise, Resurrection Mary: A Ghost Story (Chicago Historical Bookworks, 1990)
- Ursula Bielski, Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City (Lake Claremont Press, 1997)
More: Wikipedia (en)