Resurrection Mary — Chicago Hitchhiker Returns to Cemetery After 90 Years

Resurrection Mary is Chicago's most famous ghost, a young woman in a white dress and dancing shoes who hitchhikes along Archer Avenue on the southwest side of the city and asks to be driven to Resurrection Cemetery—whereupon she vanishes. Reports of the phantom hitchhiker date to the 1930s but have continued consistently through the present day. The identity of Mary has been the subject of considerable research. The leading candidate is Mary Bregovy, a young Polish woman who died after an auto accident in 1934, though other women who died violently along the same stretch of road have been suggested. Her grave is in Resurrection Cemetery. In 1976, a driver reported that a girl fitting Mary's description grabbed the cemetery's iron gate bars as if trying to get in—and the bars were found bent and seared with handprint-shaped scorch marks. The cemetery had the bars repaired, but investigators documented the original damage extensively. Sightings of Resurrection Mary spiked in the 1980s and 1990s, including multiple independent reports of a woman in white being struck by vehicles on Archer Avenue, with no body found. She remains the most frequently and consistently reported apparition in American paranormal history.