Chicago Hauntings: Resurrection Mary, Chicago's most famous ghost
CHICAGO (CBS) -- The story of Resurrection Mary is easily Chicago's most famous ghost story—dating back at least 85 years, and the subject of all manner of pop culture lore.
"The Ballad of Resurrection Mary" by Chicago artist Guy Gilbert, which dates back to 1977 and has an ominous psychedelic garage rock vibe, was reportedly once a jukebox favorite at Chet's Melody Lounge across the road from the center of action for this story. In 2022, the Las Vegas melodic punk rock band Suburban Resistance also put out a song called "The Ballad of Resurrection Mary"—not a cover of Gilbert's song, but a completely different song.
There are also countless songs just called "Resurrection Mary"—one from 1996, recorded by Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople fame and carrying a vibe suggesting Bruce Springsteen, one from 2017 by the Chicago Celtic punk band the Tossers, one even by a band that was also called Resurrection Mary.
All the songs are of different styles and were created independently of each other, but one way or another, they're all about the exact same story—complete with specific geographical references and place name-checks.
You are driving along a lonely stretch of Archer Road—the southwest suburban continuation of the Chicago northeast-southwest thoroughfare Archer Avenue (whether it's "avenue" or "road" seems to be ambiguous in some suburbs down southwest). It's a quiet and eerie night at the witching hour—the nondescript commercial buildings that house banquet halls, slot machine parlors, roofing contractors, and various other businesses are closed and dark. The wind howls.
Suddenly, you spot a young woman wearing a fancy white dress standing on the side of the road—or even in the middle of the road. Maybe the young woman is glowing, or maybe it's just the effect of the streetlights.
The young woman asks you for a ride and climbs in the back seat, but she has little else to say and has perhaps a subtly unsettling presence. You continue along Archer Road until you reach the vast Resurrection Cemetery—on a triangular plot bounded by Archer Road, Roberts Road, and 79th Street in Justice. The young woman suddenly wants to exit—leaving you perplexed, inasmuch as no one lives there. But as she insists, you pull over and she gets out.
But the second you have occasion to look at the gates to the cemetery, or just check and make sure she's OK, there's suddenly no sign of her at all. And your gut reaction is not to think to yourself: "Oh well, maybe she dropped something behind those bushes over there. Maybe she went back there to pee. Whatever. I'm going to get going."
Oh no.
The young woman is actually gone. Disappeared. Evanesced. The only sound around you is the chilly howl of the wind and the rustling of the leaves. Maybe you just turned to check and found she suddenly wasn't there, but you might even have seen her vanish before the cemetery gate. Maybe she even vanishes without ever even opening the back door of your car.
That's Resurrection Mary. And there are a lot of stories out there like that one.
As Tony Szabelski of Chicago Hauntings Tours pointed out, the Resurrection Mary story belongs to a genre of ghost stories called "the vanishing hitchhiker." The genre dates back centuries and is part of the folklore of cultures around the world.
In 1942 and 1943, California Folklore Quarterly put out a pair of issues chronicling vanishing hitchhiker stories from around the country. The very first story in an article in the journal by Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey, published in October 1942, sounds an awful lot like Resurrection Mary. It involved motorists discovering and offering a ride to a young woman out in the rain in a thin white evening gown—and the woman goes on to disappear and leave the back seat empty. But it takes place in San Francisco.
Beardsley and Hankey fond similar stories from around the U.S. that all fit the same theme, involving a driver on the road late at night, and a woman—in some instances an old woman, but in the majority of cases a young and attractive woman—in need of a ride.
Some—though not the Resurrection Mary story—even involve a visitor claiming to have come from an event like Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition of 1933-1934 and warning "that the Fair will sink under water or slide into Lake Michigan by a certain date."
Some stories also involve a man not seeing the young woman on the road from his car, but taking her home from a dance hall or a nightclub and likewise having her disappear. According to the journal, one such story involves a young woman who meets some guys at a dance in North Riverside—and then asks to be let out of the car not at Resurrection Cemetery, but at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Hillside.
But common themes notwithstanding, many to this day insist there are too many people who have told similar firsthand tales about seeing or interacting with Resurrection Mary for those tales to be so easily written off as just the Chicago local variation of a dime-a-dozen ghost story.
From a swing-era dance to all different sightings on the road
The original "Unsolved Mysteries" TV series, hosted by Robert Stack, was incredibly effective in telling ghost stories in just such a fashion that a kid who perhaps should not have been up that late watching to begin with would be guaranteed to be up all night. There was the story of the still, dead-eyed apparitions, menacing noises, and invisible children splashing in the pool on the RMS Queen Mary ocean liner in Long Beach, California. There was the hair-raising tale of the Tallmann family of Horicon, Wisconsin, who bought a bunk bed that had some bad energy and ended up more or less living in a real-life version of the movie "Poltergeist."
In 1994, "Unsolved Mysteries" tackled Chicago's Resurrection Mary story too. Jerry Palus, the man believed to be the first to have claimed an encounter with Resurrection Mary, had died a couple of years earlier. But Palus had described his encounter in a videotaped interview in 1986, and it ran in the "Unsolved Mysteries" episode.
One night in 1939, multiple accounts say, Palus and his friends were out at the Liberty Grove Hall and Ballroom—which little information is available about other than what's tied to Palus' Resurrection Mary story, but which these accounts place at 47th and Mozart streets in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood.
"Jerry described the woman as being blonde, about 5 foot 7. Her hair was about shoulder length. She had curls along either side of her head," the late historian and folklorist Richard T. Crowe, who founded Chicago's first ghost tour, told "Unsolved Mysteries" in 1994. "She was wearing… a very fancy-type party dress for the period—old-fashioned to today's terms."
Palus danced with the quiet, mysterious young woman as the band played at the dance hall—finding out little other than her name, Mary, and that she lived on South Damen Avenue—specifically in Back of the Yards. He also reported noticing that her hands were as cold as ice—though he reasoned that must mean she had a warm heart. Some reports say Palus kissed the young woman too.
Finally, Palus offered the young woman a ride home when it was time to go.
"As we walked along to the street, she says, 'Well, you might as well take me down to Archer Road. And I said, 'What for?' I said, 'You live here and here, where you told me,'" Palus said in the 1986 interview shown on "Unsolved Mysteries. "And she says, 'No,' she says, 'I want to go down to Archer Road.'"
So Palus did as Mary asked. When they got to Resurrection Cemetery—nowhere near where she said she lived—she demanded to get out, Palus' account recalls. Palus asked if he could walk Mary wherever she needed to go, only for Mary to tell him, "Where I'm going, you can't follow."
And then Mary turned, walked toward the cemetery, and vanished before Palus' very eyes, he claimed.
According to "Unsolved Mysteries" and other sources, Palus the next day went to the home on Damen Avenue where Mary had said she lived. A somewhat older woman answered the door, and when Palus said he was looking for Mary, the woman said no one by that name lived there.
But over the woman's shoulder, Palus saw Mary's image in a framed picture propped up in the living room—and pointed out that the picture was of the very woman he'd met. The older woman told Palus such a thing was not possible—as the girl in the picture was her daughter who had been dead for five years, according to "Unsolved Mysteries."
Palus then put two and two together, Crowe told "Unsolved Mysteries." Mary's hands were ice cold to the touch. Palus had worked at a funeral home for a while and realized it was the touch of a corpse, according to Crowe.
In other words, by Palus' account, he danced with a ghost. He talked to a ghost. He may even have kissed a ghost. This is many steps beyond just walking by some somber apparition in historical period attire that does nothing but stand still in a hallway.
There do not seem to be any other well-known Resurrection Mary stories with the level of intimacy involved in Palus'. But there are plenty of others—most involving running into Mary on Archer Road and seeing her vanish at the cemetery.
One such story was given by a cab driver named Ralph to columnist Bill Geist of the Suburban Trib (and later of CBS News) for a column published Jan. 31, 1979. Resurrection Mary stories were old hat by then, but Ralph did not seem to know about the legend.
Ralph said two weeks earlier—and one night before the Blizzard of '79 dumped 20.3 inches of snow on Chicago—he had just dropped off a passenger "way the hell down in Palos Heights or Hills or someplace like that," and was headed up Archer Road on his way back to the Tri-State Tollway. The cabbie said he came across a young woman wearing a fancy white dress and "those new kind of disco type shoes"—but no coat.
"She was a looker. A blond. I didn't have any ideas or like that; she was young enough to be my daughter—21 tops. I asked her where she was going and she said she had to get home," the cabbie told Geist. "I asked what was wrong, if she had car trouble or what, but she didn't really answer me. She was fuzzy. Maybe she'd had a couple drinks or something or just was tired. I don't know."
The woman only said, "The snow came earlier this year," and otherwise just stared out the window, according to Ralph.
And then suddenly, the woman demanded to be let out at a certain point on Archer Road where the cabbie couldn't see any houses. He looked away, and the woman was gone—despite the car door never having been opened, the cabbie told Geist.
The cabbie was spooked, and wouldn't give his name out of fear that telling such a story and having it published in the newspaper would make him sound like "a maniac or an idiot." But Geist wrote that based on some information he'd learned, it sure sounded like the cabbie had given Resurrection Mary a lift.
There are several other Resurrection Mary stories—with most dating from the 70s and 80s.
Clare Lopez-Rudnicki and her husband, Mark, said they had a run-in with Resurrection Mary in 1980. They were driving down Archer Road along the front of Resurrection Cemetery, and Lopez-Rudnicki was looking out the window.
"On the right-hand side of the road, there was a girl walking. She was bright, very bright, like illuminating. She was just walking very slow," she told "Unsolved Mysteries." "I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, it's Resurrection Mary, and I can feel my stomach starting to turn."
Lopez-Rudnicki wanted to hightail it out of there, while her husband wanted to go back for a closer look, the couple told "Unsolved Mysteries." Mark Rudnick said he noticed looking at the ghost's face and observed: "There was like a black void. There was really nothing there. There were no facial features."
When they doubled back, Resurrection Mary was gone.
In October 1989, Janet Kalal was driving along down Archer Avenue outside Resurrection Cemetery with a friend, when Kalal slammed on the brakes as she plowed into a young woman who ran out in front of the car—or at least she thought she did.
"There was no impact. There was no bump to say that, you know, I had hit something. But I know she ran out—the young woman ran out in front of my car—and I hit her," Kalal told "Unsolved Mysteries." "And yet, nothing. No impact, no sound, nothing."
Kalal's friend, Pamela Turlow-Wilson, told "Unsolved Mysteries" her father had read a news story about Resurrection Mary in 1939—perhaps the Palus story—but she had never thought she'd be an eyewitness to the famous ghost half a century later.
These stories are far from all.
Bob Main, the night manager of a long-gone nightclub called Harlow's at 8058 S. Cicero Ave., told the Chicago Tribune in 1992 that he saw Resurrection Mary at his club twice. He described her as having blonde hair in "big spooly curls," a very pale complexion, and an old dress that he compared to "a wedding dress left in the sun."
"She sat right next to the dance floor and she wouldn't talk to anyone. She danced all by herself, this pirouette-type dance. People were saying, 'Who is this most bizarre chick?'" Main told the Tribune in 1992. He added that the woman "seemed to look through" people, and up close, looked like she was bleeding from the eye. And nobody ever saw her enter or leave, Main told the paper.
In 1973, according to the Epitaph podcast, a cab driver walked into another bar—the aforementioned Chet's Melody Lounge on Archer Road right across from Resurrection Cemetery—and demanded to know where the girl in the white dress had gone because she had disappeared without paying. On a sidenote, Chet's Melody Lounge has been known for playing up the Resurrection Mary legend—even leaving a barstool open, and a Bloody Mary in front of it on Sundays, just in case Mary shows up.
And then back at the cemetery, Resurrection Mary is blamed for bending the bars of the main gate. Resurrection Mary is not a new subject at CBS Chicago either—on Halloween 1984, exactly 40 years before the publication of this story, ghost hunter Dale Kaczmarek took our late reporter Bob Wallace out to Resurrection Cemetery for Channel 2 News and showed him what had happened to the later-repaired bars.
In 1976, Kaczmarek said, two of the high metal bars were discovered bent apart, with "impressions of skin texture marks, fingerprints, and scorch marks" around them, Kaczmarek said.
"This was reported back in August of 1976 by a man that was traveling down Archer Avenue and saw a girl currently locked in the cemetery after hours," Kaczmarek told Wallace in the 1984 report. "When a police officer responded to the call, he found the bars pulled apart and bent at a weird angle."
The Ghost Research Society website documents several more Resurrection Mary sightings. "Dozens of people" apparently saw her the last weekend of August 1980. Less than a week later, a man named Tony picked up a young woman near the Red Barrel Restaurant on Archer Avenue near Kolmar Avenue on Chicago's Southwest Side—and even told the young woman, "You look like Resurrection Mary, but I know there's no such thing as Resurrection Mary," the society reported. The young woman did not address this remark, and vanished as Tony went past Resurrection Cemetery at 45 mph, according to the society.
Reports of sightings of Resurrection Mary seemed to drop off in the 1990s, but they didn't stop. Author Lyn Gibson recounts a story from the early 2000s about a cabbie picking up a young woman in a white gown on a snowy day and hearing her say, "The snow came early this year"—which may just be Cabbie Ralph's story from '79 with the wrong era attached to it.
Or maybe more than one cab driver has heard Resurrection Mary say, "The snow came early this year." Who knows?
Who was Resurrection Mary? Was she Mary Bregovy?
While there's no conclusive record that this chain of events ever really happened to anyone, there is a generally accepted backstory for what happened to Resurrection Mary in the hours leading up to her death—which is by most accounts believed to have been caused by injuries from a car accident.
The action begins at the Oh Henry Ballroom at 8900 Archer Ave. in Willow Springs—founded as an outdoor dance pavilion in 1921 by Austrian immigrant John Verderbar, and apparently named for the candy bar that decades later would become an element in the plot of a "Seinfeld" episode. The original facility was destroyed by fire in 1930, but was rebuilt as an indoor ballroom and became a destination at the height of the swing and big band era.
Mary and her friends purportedly regularly went to dance at the Oh Henry—later called the Willowbrook Ballroom. Some legends say the night she died, she got into a heated quarrel with her boyfriend and decided to storm off in the rain—walking along Archer Avenue in her white dress—when she was struck and killed by a car in a presumed hit-and-run.
Another legend has the fatal car accident happening in a different place altogether—and attaches itself to one specific real woman, Mary Bregovy—a factory worker whose parents were immigrants from what was then Czechoslovakia. Bregovy indeed died in a car accident in 1934.
On March 11 of that year, the Chicago Tribune reported that a 21-year-old woman named Marie Bregovy—Marie, not Mary, though few seem to make much of this discrepancy—had been killed when the car in which she was riding "cracked up" at Wacker Drive and an unspecified street downtown. The account goes on to say the site of the accident was "known to police as a dangerous spot," and the driver had said he did not see the 'L' trestle and crashed into it.
This has led to the conclusion that the site of the crash was North Wacker Drive and Lake Street.
The Tribune account reported Bregovy lived at 4611 S. Damen Ave. in Back of the Yards. With her in the car were Virginia Rozanski, 22, who lived on Lincoln Street—now Wolcott Avenue—in Back of the Yards; John Reiker, 23, who lived on Knight Street in northwest suburban Park Ridge; and John Thoel, 25, who lived on Loomis Street in Back of the Yards and was driving.
The news article does not say anything about what happened leading up to the crash. But a narrative has come together since—in part thanks to a 1984 Southtown Economist interview with Bregovy's friend, LaVern "Vern" Rutkowski. According to supernatural historian Troy Taylor, Rutkowski spoke of spending time earlier in the day shopping with Bregovy at 47th Street and Ashland Avenue, and meeting two young men—of whom Rutkowski said, "They looked like wild boys, and for some reason, I just didn't like them."
Rutkowski told the newspaper the young men drove recklessly around the neighborhood, and she finally demanded to be let out of the car, Taylor wrote. Bregovy, meanwhile, said she planned to go out with the young men that night—over Rutkowski's objections that she did not like the young men, and that Bregovy's parents had said she couldn't go out, Taylor wrote. Rutkowski said Bregovy told her, "You never like anyone I introduce you to."
Legend has it that Bregovy loved ballroom dancing and went down to the Oh Henry Ballroom in Willow Springs that night with friends—including these two young men who may or may not have been the John Reiker and John Thoel from the news story. As to what they were doing later at Lake Street and Wacker Drive downtown—overshooting their homes in Back of the Yards by several miles when they were supposed to be traveling from the southwest suburbs—the story is that they came downtown to go to dance halls that would be open later after the Oh Henry closed.
The story also goes that Rozanski had asked Bregovy to switch places with her, as Rozanski was not a fan of driver Thoel and did not want to be sitting next to him in the front passenger seat—right before the crash that took Bregovy's life.
It is not really known if Bregovy or anyone else in that group really went to the Oh Henry Ballroom that night, or ever even planned to do so.
It is known that Bregovy's body was taken for her wake to the Satala Funeral Home at 4744 S. Damen Ave. Owner John Satala said many years later in the 1980s that he remembered Satala as a "hell of a nice girl" who was buried in an orchid dress—and he was also quoted as remembering "having to sew up the side of her face," Taylor wrote.
The story goes on to say Bregovy was buried at Resurrection Cemetery. There is a headstone for a Mary Bregovy at the cemetery, but this is a different Mary Bregovy—born in 1888 and having died in 1922 at the age of 33 or 34, Taylor wrote. Family members of the Mary Bregovy relevant to this story indicated that she was buried in a temporary grave elsewhere at Resurrection Cemetery and left there, Taylor wrote.
Taylor writes there were reports as early as April 1934 of seeing a young woman walking around Resurrection Cemetery with light brown hair and an orchid-colored dress—and when the caretaker told Satala about the sighting, he said it matched Bregovy's description. Other reports indicated a woman fitting the same description jumping on running boards of cars passing near the cemetery.
Meanwhile, Bregovy lived on Damen Avenue, just like that attractive young ghost with whom Jerry Palus danced in 1939 said she did. Was it Bregovy's house that Palus visited—only for Bregovy's mother to tell him her daughter was five years dead?
Was Resurrection Mary somebody else? Or is there more than one ghost?
While Bregovy's name has received the most attention as Resurrection Mary's possible identity, there have long been doubts. The ghost in most of the Resurrection Mary stories is a blonde, while Bregovy was a brunette. The car accident having happened in the Loop rather than anywhere near Archer Road—and details that seem to shoehorn a visit to the Oh Henry Ballroom into the narrative of the night—also cast doubts on Bregovy as a candidate for Chicago's most famous ghost.
Another oft-mentioned name is Anna "Marija" Norkus, the daughter of Polish immigrants, who lived on Neva Avenue on the western edge of the Southwest Side's Garfield Ridge neighborhood. On July 21, 1927, as reported by the Chicago Tribune, Anna was in a car with five others when it went off the road and flipped over in a ditch on Harlem Avenue at 66th Street.
Anna was crushed under the car. She was only 12 years old—her 13th birthday had been coming up.
A man, 58-year-old Adam Lipinski or Levinsky (the spelling of his last name is inconsistent) also later died of his injuries in the crash. Two other men—William Weisner, 32, and Anna's father August Norkus, 42—and two teenage girls—Loretta Gwozdz, 14, and Anna's sister Sophie Norkus, 16—were injured in the wreck.
Ghost hunter Ursula Bielski writes that August Norkus had agreed to take his daughter to a ballroom for her 13th birthday—and they went to the Oh Henry along with Weisner, August's friend. At 1:30 a.m., their car went plunging 25 feet down a railroad cut, Bielski wrote.
Following the crash, August Norkus was the subject of personal attacks—with some saying the crash had been God's punishment for allowing his daughter to go dancing when she was so young, Bielski wrote.
Anna was not to be buried at Resurrection Cemetery—she was set to be buried at a plot at St. Casimir Catholic Cemetery in Chicago's Mount Greenwood neighborhood. But there are claims that her remains might have been temporarily interred at Resurrection Cemetery during a gravediggers' strike, and later mislaid away from her family, Bielski wrote.
Like Resurrection Mary, and unlike Mary or Marie Bregovy, Anna Norkus had blonde hair. But Anna was only 12 when she died, while sightings of Resurrection Mary have virtually all described a young woman in her late teens or early 20s who seems to have been going out dancing alone.
Nevertheless, some find Anna Norkus a more credible candidate for Resurrection Mary than Mary Bregovy.
There are other candidates for Resurrection Mary, as well as suggestions from some experts—including the venerable Richard T. Crowe—that there is more than one ghost whom people have experienced as Resurrection Mary.
Another candidate is Mary Miskowski, who was reported to have lived on Damen Avenue in Back of the Yards like Mary Bregovy. Miskowski, according to stories from those connected to her collected by ghost hunters, had blonde hair and regularly went dancing in local ballrooms.
Miskowski was alleged to have been struck and killed in a hit-and-run driver along 47th Street around Halloween 1930, at the age of 18 or 19. She was purported to be wearing her mother's old wedding dress.
But ghost hunter Adam Selzer notes that there is no record of anyone named Mary Miskowski, or Miskowsky, dying in Illinois in 1930. There was a woman named Mary Miskowsky listed in Census records as having lived at 4924 S. Damen Ave., but this Mary Miskowsky married, had three children, and died in 1956, Selzer wrote.
A fourth candidate, who also lived on Damen Avenue in Back of the Yards, is Mary Kovac. The Epitaph podcast notes that she Kovac fits the description of Resurrection Mary—blonde, fashionable, a regular at the ballrooms. Kovac died in 1932, but of tuberculosis rather than a car accident.
Still, the Epitaph podcast suspects it might have been Kovac's ghost whom Palus met at the ballroom.
Several other candidates' names have also been floated. And of course, the mystery about who Resurrection Mary may be is just part of the fun of the ghost story.
"On a wild Chicago night with a wind howling white…"
The Willowbrook Ballroom—formerly the Oh Henry—burned down on Friday, Oct. 28, 2016. Willow Springs Mayor Alan Nowaczyk said a jewel of the village had been lost.
Only a week earlier, the Daily Southtown published a feature on the ballroom, where crowds—by then mostly of advanced ages—were still coming out to swing dance to a live orchestra. Over the years, everyone from Count Basie and Guy Lombardo to the Village People had performed at the Willowbrook Ballroom, the newspaper reported.
The ballroom seemed to have picked Anna Norkus as the most likely candidate for Resurrection Mary—and owner Birute Jodwalis kept a copy of Anna's death certificate on the wall of her office, the Southtown reported.
This article also documented a relatively latter-day Resurrection Mary sighting, which Willowbrook Ballroom staffer Rasa Miliauskas said had been documented in 2005 in a Lithuanian-language newspaper. The account in the Vakarai newspaper indicated that Mary in ghost form was back at the Willowbrook Ballroom again, at least 70 years after she had been there in life.
In December of that year, according to the newspaper account, a wedding guest at the ballroom met a girl and danced with her—and she said her name was Mary. He offered to take her home, and she disappeared just as they were getting to Resurrection Cemetery.
That particular Resurrection Mary story doesn't really stand out. But Jodwalis further suggested to the Southtown, albeit perhaps in jest, that perhaps Mary haunted the ballroom too—"If we lose power for no reason or the doors slam, we say it's Mary."
Meanwhile, it's worth revisiting the fact that the Resurrection Mary story fits right into that "vanishing hitchhiker" genre of ghost stories that cross cultures and date back centuries. Again, even a lot of the American stories gathered by Beardsley and Hankey in California Folklore Quarterly sound awfully similar:
"It seems that a friend of a friend whom none of us ever actually met had gone to a dance and after taking his girl home, he started for his home which was out in a suburb called Frankford. It was raining and misty and as he was passing a cemetery (I have forgotten the name of it) he saw a girl in a white satin evening dress standing by the road. He asked if he could help her as it was quite late and she said she wanted to go to her home and gave him the address. She insisted upon getting into the back of the car alone. The boy claims to have taken her to the address she mentioned, but upon arriving there, discovered that she had vanished. His car was a two-door sedan and he couldn't figure out how she had gotten out without his seeing her. He went up and knocked on the door of her house; her mother answered the door and said that he must have picked up her daughter. The daughter had been killed in an automobile accident just at the spot where he had picked her up and she had been wearing the clothes he had described. Her mother told the boy to forget about it as it happened every few months and that it wasn't anything unusual to her."
Does that sound just like the Resurrection Mary story to you? Well, it's not. It's from Philadelphia.
What about the young woman who was sometimes spotted at the Melody Mill Ballroom in North Riverside back in the 1930s? She would ask suitors for a ride home and then request to be dropped off at Waldheim Cemetery in west suburban Forest Park, where she would vanish. She has also been purported to try to hitch rides along Des Plaines Avenue, and one report says a family even saw her appear in broad daylight in 1973—only to vanish into a mausoleum.
That's not Resurrection Mary either. That's the Flapper Ghost. Instead of a white dress, she wears a Roaring 20s flapper costume and keeps her brown hair in a bob. And her territory is only eight miles or so to the north of Resurrection Mary's.
Documenting just how far stories of this genre go back, multiple sources point to a vanishing hitchhiker story that appears in a 400-year-old manuscript by Swedish priest and collector of omens Joen Petri Klint. A mysterious maid appears before a priest and a pair of farmers on their way home from a market in Västergötland, Sweden, and asks to join them on their journey. They go to an inn the maid wants a jug of beer, so the innkeeper brings a jug of malt the first time, acorns the second, and blood the third, the story goes.
The maid tells the shocked group that the year will bring an abundance of grain and fruit—but also pestilence and war. She then disappears into the ether.
So the bottom line is that the Resurrection Mary story is a ghost story—the kind of story for which definitive answers are impossible. Her story fits a genre that's not remotely unique—not even to the Chicago area—but there have been people who have insisted they've interacted with her for real.
Whatever the case may be, the Ghost Research Society says the best time to spot Resurrection Mary down on Archer Road is after 1:30 a.m. on the night before a full moon. Meanwhile, in that "Unsolved Mysteries" episode about Resurrection Mary, Robert Stack intones, "Should you find yourself driving in the city late one night, and you spot a wistful young woman in a flowing gown, you might think twice about offering a ride."
Indeed. Try something new instead. Tell Resurrection Mary that Boris sent you, and ask her to do the "Monster Mash" with you.
