Publisher's Synopsis
Join Chicago Public Library Foundation award winner Ursula Bielski on a journey along one of the world's most haunted roads!
In this volume, native Chicago historian, folklorist and 35-year veteran paranormal researcher Ursula Bielski shares the word-of-mouth tales she first documented more than three decades ago, with shocking updates from her decades of research since. In its pages you'll ....- Meet the phantom friars of "Monk's Castle"--St. James at Sag Bridge--and discover its cemetery that BREATHES.
- Danceat the fabled Willowbrook Ballroom, and tip a glass across the road where Al Capone once supervised a hush hush basement dig.
- Learn about the phantom residue of the Grimes Sisters murders--and the death of Dianne Masters, found bound in her own car trunk in an area canal.
- Watch for the famous ghost light at Maple Lake, one of the world's most famous mysterious lights.
- Meet the terrifying "Demon of Lemont" who traumatized a local family in 1901 with letters from thin air.
- Wait in the moonlight for "Grey-Haired Baby," the werewolf of Sacred Heart Cemetery
- Return to the scene of Joliet Prison's enigmatic "singing ghost"
- Cruise the road in the wee hours in search of the vanishing hitchhiker, "Resurrection Mary"
- ....and much more!
FROM THE INTRODUCTION: Just southwest of Chicago, past the bend at Harlem Avenue, a street leaves the city to run through the outlying industrial towns of Bedford Park and Summit to villages further south and, ultimately, to the heavily forested Palos division of the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. It is an old road, originally an Indian trail with its origins on the shore of Lake Michigan, in Chicago's present-day Chinatown. The road takes its name from one of the most important events in American history and runs, too, through the imaginations of many, both skeptics and believers, for there is a magic along its path which generations have longed to hold-or tried to dispel. It's a highway populated with ghost lights and vanishing hitchhikers--and a road flooded with the tears of laborers, murder victims and the countless mourners who have carried their dead to the seven cemeteries which flank it. That ancient road, built up by Irish workers on the Illinois and Michigan Canal in the 1830s and '40s, has established itself as no less than the magnetic center of Chicago's supernatural forces and is known today as one of the most haunted roads on Earth. That road is Archer Avenue.
