Bachelor's Grove Cemetery — Illinois's Most Haunted Burial Ground Yields Iconic Ghost Photo

Bachelor's Grove Cemetery is a small, abandoned cemetery south of Chicago, Illinois that has accumulated one of the largest bodies of paranormal reports per square foot of any location in the United States. Sealed to the public since 1965, the cemetery has been the site of UFO sightings, apparitions, ghost lights, and one of the most discussed ghost photographs in American paranormal research. The cemetery was established in the 1840s and fell out of use in the early 20th century. Vandalism and desecration of graves in the 1960s-80s is believed by some to have disturbed the site. Witnesses have reported a two-headed phantom, a glowing farmhouse that disappears when approached, a mysterious black car, strange orbs of light over the lagoon, and the apparition of a woman in white sitting on a grave. The most famous piece of evidence is a 1991 photograph taken by the Ghost Research Society during an investigation. The photograph, taken by Mari Huff, appeared on developed film to show a translucent woman in a white dress sitting alone on a tombstone — a figure that was not visible to investigators at the time. The image was analyzed extensively and no darkroom fraud was detected. The inaccessibility of the cemetery and its history of desecration makes investigation difficult, but it remains one of the most persistently active sites in midwestern paranormal lore.