“ON A WILD CHICAGO NIGHT”: The Search for Resurrection Mary, Chicago’s Most Cherished Ghost
When I first went in search of the backstory behind the legendary “deathly dancer” of Chicago’s Archer Avenue, it wasn’t easy going. It was the late 1980s. Not much had been written about this elusive phantom except for a few accounts shared by cab drivers or unwitting dance partners with newspaper columnists. Chicago’s now late “ghost hunter” Richard Crowe had taken the stories of her out of the corner taverns and put them on a bus. He told those tales each Saturday night to a rapt audience as they rumbled along through the city’s neighborhoods, but he didn’t commit those stories to paper. When I wrote him letters asking him to document the stories he’d collected, worried as an historian that they’d be lost, he declined, saying he had no interest in writing ghost stories. His passion, he said, was to hold audiences at attention with his booming voice, sharing in person the urban campfire tales he’d learned growing up on the South Side. He was very good at it.
But it was my love for Chicago’s undocumented ghost stories—and a sort of wild desire to protect them—that made me a writer, and with those first forays into folklore I spent long weeks, then months, then years, in those corner taverns, at church coffees and in South Side living rooms talking to the people who knew about Mary: those who had, they said, grown up with her, gone to school with her, dated her, danced with her.
And those who said they’d tried to drive her home.
Trying to figure out Mary’s story was a labor of love indeed. But all that work didn’t get me very far.Today, dozens of books and probably hundreds of articles and blogs have been written about Mary, and even a few movies have been made about her. Even Richard Crowe finally wrote her story down. Yet, so many years after I first went to find her, we still don’t know she who this exquisite apparition really might be.
And I think Mary would want it that way.
-Ursula
Chet's Melody Lounge sits bravely across the road from Resurrection Cemetery, drawing in a steady stream of locals to shoot the breeze and have a few. For years, regulars pretty much disregarded the Bloody Mary eternally perched at the end of the bar and "The Ballad of Resurrection Mary” once listed among the selections on the jukebox (now replaced by a digital jukebox) just as they have adopted Chicago's most famous phantom as an accepted fact of life. Certainly, the impact of phantom-related folklore on Southwest-side culture, well captured in Kenan Heise's novel, Resurrection Mary: A Ghost Story, is indeed most obvious in the cultural prominence of this persistent legend.
But while Mary’s legendary spirit has contented itself with the haunting of a brief stretch of Archer Avenue just south of Chicago proper, the image of this elusive personality has thumbed itself into the hearts and history of all Chicago. From the old-timers’ still-vibrant accounts of her to the young Chicago rap artists singing about "Rez Mary," this specter's appeal reaches every generation, and with good reason. For nearly a century, travelers along Archer have reported bizarre encounters with a single-minded young woman in a party dress and dancing shoes who seems as real as can be--until she proves herself decidedly otherwise.
Typical is the following incident: A young man, out for a night of dancing and drinking, meets an aloof but gorgeous young woman, with whom he dances and tries to socialize. She’s cold, both emotionally and physically; her hands are cold as ice. At the end of the evening, she asks for a ride home and slides into the front seat of the car next to the driver. After directing the driver to head north along Archer Avenue, she vanishes from the car just as it passes the gates of Resurrection Cemetery. After some deliberation, the young man, having earlier coaxed the girl's address out of her, decides to drive to her home in Chicago's Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood to see if she turned up all right. The young man is met by a sad looking mother or father at the door who informs him that the girl is dead. She was killed, you see, in an automobile accident some years before.
For many years now, researchers have claimed that the first run-in with Mary occurred in 1936, when the late Jerry Palus spent a whirlwind evening dancing with a lovely young woman at a place called the Liberty Grove and Hall. This was previously thought by researchers like myself to have been a tavern and “dime a dance” place in the South Side’s Brighton Park neighborhood, but more recent research by local historian Ray Johnson uncovered the fact that “Liberty Grove” was a name for the area surrounding the old Oh Henry Ballroom, later the Willowbrook, and which (as we’ve seen) became inextricably connected to the legend of Resurrection Mary. When Palus offered her a ride home with him and his brother she accepted, directing him to drive up Archer Avenue. In front of the gates of Resurrection Cemetery, the young woman said she had to leave him, and that he could not follow her. She left the car, disappearing at the main gate, leaving Jerry-–and his bewildered brother—speechless.
I recently discovered, however, an earlier account of a vanishing woman in this area while reading an academic article published in 1942, which in turn referenced a collection of first-hand accounts of “phantom hitchhikers” which had been recorded in Chicago by Professor Archer Taylor before 1933. Taylor is known as one of the most important researchers in folklore, and it was during his time as chair of Germanic Literature and Languages at the University of Chicago that he began to compile his phantom hitchhiker dossier. In fact, the 1942 article seems to have been the first published record of a number of accounts that have been told and retold countless times, not only in Chicago but around the country.
This is one of the stories Taylor recorded:
Summit, Illinois (before 1933) The narrator said that she could remember having heard a story before the World's Fair of a woman near the graveyard at Summit. She had stopped people and asked for a ride, had given them a Chicago address and disappeared. When the people called at the address, they learned that the woman had died some time before.
Summit is the village directly north of Justice, Illinois, where Resurrection Cemetery is located. The graveyard at Summit” is without any doubt Resurrection Cemetery. To be sure, I myself have collected first-hand accounts of a vanishing hitchhiker in which the experiencer told me he saw or picked up the girl in Summit, specifically.
As dance hall encounters with this phantom partner multiplied, they seemed to center on the Oh Henry, and it was here that Mary forged her reputation.
As any ghost hunter knows, the grand old ballroom that long stood across from the Oh Henry Roadhouse was nothing less than synonymous with the freewheeling phantom known as Resurrection Mary. In both histories and legends of young southside dancing girls, our beloved Mary had her last dance here, though more than one unwitting escort has claimed that those dances continued after death. Over the years, more witnesses than I can count have regaled me with their stories of these dances, and one high school couple even sent me a photograph of themselves on prom night on the Willowbrook dance floor.
The couple is young. They seem to be in love. They’re smiling. Behind them is a filmy figure of what looks like a woman, dancing alone.
The owners of the ballroom and their staff also reported run-ins with “something” in this legendary place, from shadowy figures to cold spots to voices in the night, long after the revelers were gone and every cocktail glass washed and put away.
It was John Verderbar, an Austrian immigrant, who purchased the five acres of wooded land here in 1921, intending to build a summer retreat for his family. His son, Rudy, a young man obsessed with dancing, would have other plans. After a weekend cutting up the floor at an outdoor dance pavilion in Michigan, he returned home full of ideas for the Archer Avenue property. By year's end, the Oh Henry Park--a wooden outdoor dance venue--was complete, named after the popular candy bar of the same name. The park was so busy that, just two years later, the Verderbars expanded the Park significantly.
When, in 1930, the park caught fire, Rudy hired hundreds of carpenters to rebuild it--in one week. By the following Saturday night, hundreds of dancers were back twirling under the stars.
The ever-increasing throngs inspired the Verderbars to take the park over the top and make it a four-season venue. In the spring of 1931, the Oh Henry Ballroom opened its doors, serendipitously poised for the advent of the Big Band era. Throughout the '30s and '40s 10,000 dancers a week poured onto the gleaming floor of the Oh Henry, thrilling to Ozzie Nelson and his orchestra, Harry James, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Guy Lombardo, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa and many other top headliners. Crowds filled the place, drawing dancers long after the 1950s saw the close of many ballrooms across the country. While they were shuttering their doors, Rudy was building a restaurant annex and banquet room, and in 1959 he renamed the beloved venue the Willowbrook Ballroom.
As the 1960s brought changes in the public taste, Vandervar smartly kept pace, filling the Willowbrook bill with acts like Chubby Checker, the Buckinghams and other rock and roll stars. In 1997 the Verderbar family sold the Ballroom to Birute and Gediminas Jodwalis, but the popularity of the ballroom continued, hosting salsa dancing, rock and roll shows, swing dance nights and--always--ballroom dancing on Sunday afternoons.
In 2005 our ghost tour company, Chicago Hauntings, held a Halloween ball in the old Bunkeris room downstairs. The main ballroom was hosting a costumed swing dance. It was an unforgettable, magical night. Then, in early October, 2016, a dream came true for me. For almost a decade I had wanted to host our annual Chicago paranormal conference—Chicago Ghost Con--at the Willowbrook, but it never panned out. I always forgot to book early enough or didn't have the funds for the downpayment to hold the date. That year, I snagged it.
It was a beautiful autumn weekend. Everyone who attended or spoke at the conference marveled at the historic and stunning venue. Our vendors set up in the areas ringing the dance floor. Our presenters took the same stage as those legendary acts of old. ” My buddy, Chris Halton, came from England to speak. And the Missing 411 researcher, David Paulides, and my friend Christopher (Lutz) Quartatino, one of the Amityville kids. Rich Koz, Chicago’s iconic “Svengoolie” made his annual visit, and called last minute and asked if he could come sign autographs; he’d been doing an event at Six Flags north of Chicago. He stayed with us all day, meeting everyone. He and my husband became fast friends. The afterparty was a costumed bash at Chet’s Melody Lounge. About twenty women came dressed as Resurrection Mary, and two guys as Mrs. O’Leary and her cow.
The whole thing was, as they say, “one for the books.
Then, just three weeks later, on October 28th, my friend Colleen texted me.
The Willowbrook is burning was all the message said.
I quickly opened my web browser, searching for information, praying it wasn’t true or at least wasn’t serious. The story was quickly spreading through social media and police and fire scanner feeds, and it was only seconds before I found it: A video feed of the Willowbrook, black smoke pouring from every crevice into the bright blue October sky. News agencies later said the roof had caught fire during repair work. As I watched, my heart sank. I knew from my husband's firefighting stories that the trussed roof of the ballroom meant an almost certain death sentence for the structure. Sadly, I was right. When the multi-alarm fire was over, the Willowbrook was in ruins.
Almost immediately, organizations and individuals vowed to rebuild, though the owners decided to call it a day. A nonprofit called Dance of Life Foundation announced in 2017 that it had raised nearly two million dollars to bring the ballroom back, and rumors swirled about the building of a combination retirement complex and arts center to include a new ballroom.
It wasn't meant to be. In early 2019, Westpoint Builders purchased half of the site for 1.25 million dollars. Their plan to build 168 condominiums and 42 townhouses is, as of this writing in the spring of 2023, almost complete. But every one of them, I can guarantee, is haunted: with the last hopes of generations--and the ghosts of our good times.
After the Willowbrook burned to the ground, many jokingly wondered where Resurrection Mary would dance, or if she would be seen again at all. But it was on the iconic road itself, Archer Avenue, in the wee hours of many a dark morning, where Resurrection Mary has made her biggest impact—and where she would surely remain. She has, after all, taken her place as one of the world’s most famous “vanishing hitchhikers.”
Resurrection Mary first established herself as a “vanishing hitchhiker” around the same time that Palus first encountered her, when late-night revelers complained to the police that a woman had tried to jump on the running boards of their automobiles as they made their way home along Archer after a night of dancing at the Oh Henry. Other drivers over these many years have been surprised by a beautiful young woman who simply opens the car door and climbs in, directing the driver to proceed up the road and disappearing in the usual way, at the cemetery gates. Some unwitting escorts have even watched her run right through the locked gates and into the darkness beyond. At other times, drivers have watched a woman in a flowing white dress walk along the roadside and then vanish, as if switched off like a light. In some of the most harrowing incidents of all, the woman has been struck while bolting or appearing in front of moving cars. Many drivers and passengers feel the impact of the car hitting the figure, but no body is ever found.
Some researchers speculate that this mystery woman heads for one grave among thousands at the 475-acre burial ground known as Resurrection Cemetery: site number 9819, section MM, that of a young Polish woman, Mary Bregovy. Records indicate that Bregovy was killed in a car accident in 1934, allegedly on her way home from a dance at the Oh Henry. Attempts to link this Mary with the Resurrection legend, however, have yielded far less than satisfactory results.
The evidence begins with the following report, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune on March 11, 1934:
Girl Killed in Crash. Miss Marie [sic] Bregovy, 21 years old, 4611 S. Darnen Avenue, was killed last night when the auto in which she was riding cracked up at [word missing] Street and Wacker Drive. John Reiker, 23, of 15 N. Knight Street, Park N. e, suffered a possible skull fracture and is in the county hospital. John Thoe, 25, 5216 S. Loomis, driver of the car, and Miss Virginia Rozanski, 22, of 4849 S. Lincoln [now Wolcott] were shaken up and scratched. The scene of the accident is known to police as a danger spot. (Thoe) told police he did not see the El substructure.[i]
A close friend of Bregovy’s discovered in the mid-l 980s that her late girlfriend's name was being connected with the famous phantom. She went on to describe the fateful day of the accident to an understandably eager reporter. According to Vern Rutkowski, who was interviewed by the Southtown Economist on January 22, 1984, the two young women had planned to go shopping on March 10, 1934, near 47th Street and Ashland Avenue. The girls accepted a ride to the popular shopping district from two young men who Bregovy had met, but Rutkowski became irritated with the young men, who she remembered as "wild boys." [ii]The girls left the men's car while still some distance from their destination, but not before Bregovy made a date for that night. On their way home, Bregovy criticized Rutkowski's unfriendliness and her disapproval of Bregovy's taste in men. Nonetheless, Rutkowski continued to express her dislike of their latest escorts and cautioned Bregovy about her plans for that night. Determined to keep her date, Bregovy left her girlfriend for the day and went home to 4611 S. Damen Avenue.
Rutkowski stayed home that Saturday night. She was awakened the next morning by her mother, who informed Rutkowski that Bregovy had been killed in a car accident in the Loop sometime during the evening. Bregovy’s parents would learn that, although their daughter had been sitting in the back seat before the time of the accident, she was persuaded by her girlfriend to switch seats, since the latter was not getting along with the driver. Described by Rutkowski as an agreeable and personable young woman, Bregovy was happy to oblige. Because of that congeniality, she was thrown through the passenger window when their car struck one of the I-beams of the elevated structure at Lake Street and Wacker Drive. Three days later, Mary's Polish and Czechoslovakian parents buried their daughter at Resurrection Cemetery.
Since Bregovy was killed in downtown Chicago, it is highly doubtful that this Mary was on her way home from any Southwest-side ballroom and most definitely not on the road outside the legendary cemetery. This Mary, according to the records of the Satala Funeral Home from which Bregovy was buried, was a young factory worker who died in the ambulance on the way to Iroquois Hospital, then on North Wacker Drive.
According to Rutkowski, Bregovy loved to dance. But she also had short, dark hair, a far cry from the flaxen-headed fantasy described through the years by Mary's various escorts. In addition, the late John Satala, the undertaker who prepared Bregovy's body (and who once described Mary as "a hell of a nice girl"),[iii] remembered that the eternal attire was, in fact, an orchid-colored dress, not a white one.
Old newspaper interviews with Satala suggest one obvious reason why Bregovy was pegged as the famous phantom, despite having the "wrong" hair color and style, the wrong clothes, and regardless of her dying in the wrong place. Nearly 50 years ago, a caretaker at Resurrection phoned Satala and told him about a "ghost" that had been walking the cemetery grounds. In the caretaker’s opinion, the ghost was Bregovy's.[iv]
Ultimately, the musing of that one man may have been responsible for the permanent matching of the two Marys in local memory. Yet the transformation of the Bregovy ghost into a "vanishing hitchhiker" did not gain regional cultural prominence until much later. A general feeling exists that neighborhood old-timers knew of a phantom Bregovy long before the folklore grew to match universal vanishing hitchhiker legends. And so some skeptics believe it probable that Mary's peers picked up adults' talk about the ghost of Bregovy in Resurrection Cemetery and began to elaborate upon the tale during their drives to and from the old Oh Henry Ballroom, encouraged of course by gin and Saturday night fever. The seemingly countless encounters of generations of witnesses—many not from the area or familiar with Bregovy or even the legend--invalidate this theory.
Far more compelling is the connection solidified through the rigorous research of the late Frank Andrejasich of Summit, Illinois, which matches the legendary lady to a wholly different entity. In August 1994, Andrejasich' s brother mailed him an article which mentioned the Southwest Side’s most famous phantom. Already familiar with the story, Frank became swiftly smitten with the tale, finding that a number of his fellow parishioners at Summit's St. Joseph Catholic Church had more than a nodding acquaintance with the local legend.
In assembling his impressive dossier on the elusive Mary, Andrejasich accumulated many opinions on the phantom's earthly identity. Relying heavily on the recollections of his cousin, Mary Nagode, and the keen memory of John Poljack, Sr., a Slovenian emigrant, retired Prudential insurance manager and St. Joseph parishioner, Frank waded through a variety of first and second-hand accounts, newspaper articles, burial records and photographs. He was astounded by the prominence of the legend in local lore and fascinated by the ability of so many individuals, including a number of his fellow parishioners, to place Mary in their own experience.
One of these, the late Chester “Jake” Palus, turned out to be the younger brother of our Jerry Palus, supposed to have been Mary's first dance partner in 1936. According to Jake, Jerry had been the passenger in his friend's car when the pair took "Mary" home that remarkable night, and she disappeared en route to the address she had given as her home. Though he recites the story with ease, Jake himself has no comment on his brother's tale, refusing to express either credulity or disbelief.
Claire and Mark Rudnicki-friends, neighbors, and former St. Joseph parishioners-told Andrejasich that Resurrection Mary could be traced to the 1940s, when a young Polish girl crashed near Resurrection Cemetery at around 1 :20 a.m., after she took the family car to visit her boyfriend in Willow Springs. According to this version of the story, the girl was buried in a term grave at Resurrection. Appropriately, Andrejasich wonders why a couple that well off enough to own a car in the 1940s would need to bury their daughter in a term grave. Adding to the explanations is another parishioner, Ray VanOrt, who tells how he and his bride-to-be were the first witnesses at the scene of an accident on Archer in 1936, when a black Model A sedan collided with a wide-bed farm truck at 1:30 a.m. According to VanOrt, of the two couples in the car, only one person survived, a girl who was badly hurt. Both men and another girl perished. Today, VanOrt is convinced that this was the accident that killed our would-be Resurrection Mary. Still another parishioner, claims that the wayward wraith was, in life, Mary Miskowski of the southside Chicago neighborhood of Bridgeport. In this narrative, Miskowski was killed crossing the street in late October in the 1930s, on her way to a Halloween party.
After pondering the variety of accounts, combing early editions of the local papers, and checking with funeral directors and cemetery managers, Andrejasich came to believe that the ghost known as Resurrection Mary is the spiritual counterpart of the youngest of all the candidates: a12-year-old girl named, surprisingly, Anna Norkus.
Born in Cicero, Illinois in 1914, Norkus was given the name of Ona, Lithuanian for Anne. In that era, it was not the custom for Lithuanian immigrants to christen infants with two names. But after 1918, children were baptized with a Christian name and an historic name to further pride in their main country. As a young girl, Anna’s devotion to the Blessed Mother led her to begin using the name Marija, Mary, as her middle name. By the time she neared her teenage years, Anna had grown into a vivacious girl. Blonde and slim, she loved to dance, and it was her relentless begging that convinced her father, August, Sr., to take her to a dancehall for her 13th birthday. On the evening of July 20, 1927, father and daughter set out from their Chicago home at 5421 S. Neva for the famous Oh Henry Ballroom, accompanied by August’s friend, William Weisner, and Weisner’s date. I won’t go into everything that happened that night (which apparently included the revelers leaving the ballroom to bail someone out of jail), but at approximately 1 :30 a.m., the travelers passed Resurrection Cemetery via Archer Avenue, turning east on 71st Street and then north on Harlem to 67th Street. There, the car careened and dropped into an unseen, 25-foot-deep railroad cut.
Anna was killed instantly.
After the accident, her father, August Norkus was subject to devastating verbal abuse, even being told that Anna's death had been God's punishment for allowing the girl to go dancing at such a young age. In reality, the blame rested with the Streets Department, who had failed to post warning signs at the site of the cut. In fact, another death, that of Adam Levinsky, occurred at the same site the night after Anna's demise.
Between July 28th and September 29th, an inquest was held at Sobiesk’s Mortuary in adjacent Argo. Heading up the five sessions was Deputy Coroner Dedrich, the case reviewed by six jurors. The Des Plaines Valley News carried the story of the inquest. Mary Nagode described the sad procession that left the Norkus home on a certain Friday morning.
First in line was Anna's older sister Sophie, followed by her older brother August, Jr. The pastor, altar boys, and a four-piece brass band preceded the casket, borne on a flatbed wagon with pallbearers on each side. Relatives and friends followed the grim parade for three blocks to the doors of St. Joseph's in Summit, where Anna had made her first communion only a year before. Between the band and the priest walked a terrified Mary Nagode, a friend of Anna's who had been pressed into service as a wreath-bearer. On summer vacation, Nagode was weeding on an asparagus farm in Willow Springs when she had a visitor. It was Gus Norkus, Anna's father or brother, asking her to participate in the funeral, since Mary had made her first communion with Anna and owned a white dress. When Mary returned home that evening, her mother informed her that she had accepted the request on her behalf. The girl was deeply dismayed at the proposition. Mrs. Nagode reminded her daughter that refusal of such a request would be a sin against Roman Catholic moral living, which dictates that one must attend to the burial of the dead. Anna was scheduled for burial in one of three newly-purchased family lots at St. Casimir Cemetery, and it is here where Andrejasich found the "if' that may have led to an infamous afterlife for Anna as Resurrection Mary, or as Anna called herself, Marija.
Andrejasich discovered that at the time of Anna’s death a man named Al Churas Jr., brother-in-law to Mary Nagode, lived across the road from the gates of Resurrection Cemetery, in a large brick bungalow that still stands today. Al’s father was in charge of the gravediggers and was given the house to live in as part of his pay. In the mid-1920s, gravedigging was hard, manual labor, rewarded with low pay. Strikes were common. As Resurrection was one of the main Chicago cemeteries, the elder Churas was often sent to the cemeteries of striking gravediggers to secure the bodies of the unburied. Returning to Resurrection with a corpse in a wooden box, Churas’ duty was to bury it temporarily until the strike ended and the body could be permanently interred in the proper lot. Because of poor coffin construction and the lack of refrigeration, a body could not be kept long, except in the ground. If the strike dragged on, identification at the time of relocation could be gruesomely difficult. Thus, reasoned Andrejasich, if the workers at St. Casimir were striking on that July morning in 1927, it is quite possible that young Anna Norkus was silently whisked to a temporary interment at Resurrection, and that a rapid decomposition rendered her unidentifiable at the time of exhumation. The result? A mislaid corpse and a most restless eternity, if only one is willing to believe.
Those not quite convinced may be persuaded otherwise by a further bit of Frank's musing, this time connecting the otherworldly Anna to the sneering specter seen on the road outside of her alleged resting place. The elder August Norkus followed his youngest child to St. Casimir 30 years after her death, a broken man besieged by alcohol and blamed to his grave for his daughter's demise. As Andrejasich reasons, it wouldn’t take much else to make a ghost out of this ill-fated character. And yet, how much more there is (again, if only one believes in ghosts) if Anna was mistakenly buried away from her family. Has Resurrection Marija been combing the southwest suburbs for her father, this poor soul watching and waiting for his lost, beloved girl?
Just a handful of years ago, I received a Facebook message from a man who had recently moved to the Chicago area. He was a truck driver and had secured a job in the western suburbs where he could be home every night, as opposed to the long distance hauls of which he had grown tired. He found a house off of Harlem Avenue, just before Archer Avenue turns into Archer Road, immediately north of the village of Summit. His commute each day began at 4am and took him south on Archer to his place of employment, and then back home in the early afternoon.
One morning, while making his way through Summit in the early morning darkness, he saw someone at the corner of a downtown intersection. As he neared the spot, he saw that it was a girl, blonde and fair, of what he thought to be about fourteen years old. She was dressed all in white—a white party dress, stockings and dress shoes—, and she wore a white headpiece of some sort with a veil attached. As he passed her, she looked at him and smiled. He told me he got the impression from her that she was a lot of fun to be around, that she would be a happy and uplifting presence in her family and to her friends.
It wasn’t until he was some blocks further down Archer and passing Resurrection Cemetery that he realized it was a weekday morning and around 4 am. Yet he had seen this young girl, all alone, on a deserted street corner, and dressed as if ready for to make her First Communion. He mentioned that she had short, bobbed blonde hair and looked “like a young Gwyneth Paltrow.”
He went back to see if she was ok, but by the time he arrived at the spot, she was gone.
When he contacted me, he knew nothing about Chicago history, let alone Chicago ghostlore, and he asked me, “Has anyone reported seeing a girl in a while dress there on Archer Avenue?”
I laughed and said,” Oh, yeah.”
I sent him the photograph of Anna Norkus that Frank Andrejasich and given me so many years before. I told him about the legend of Resurrection Mary. And I told him about Anna’s Communion dress.
Despite seemingly innumerable similar scenarios and the untiring work of devoted researchers like Frank Andrejasich, specialists in modem folklore have utterly disregarded local attempts to trace Resurrection Mary to any earthly counterpart. Instead, many scholars explain Mary as merely a localized version of the widespread vanishing hitchhiker legend. These legends have passed from generation to generation throughout history, but the 20th century versions always follow a strikingly similar pattern. A hitchhiker, usually a young woman, is either picked up along a dark road or met at a dance, from where she is given a ride home. In the latter situation, her would-be suitor may report having danced with the young woman, finding her somewhat cold. In both situations, she gives her escort vague directions to her house, but along the way she suddenly vanishes from the car. Sometimes, the driver will have procured her address and proceeds to the house to ask whether the girl has returned safely home. Upon his arrival, he is told that the girl, whom he recognizes in a photograph displayed in the home, was previously killed in a car accident on the road or near the dance hall where she met her unfortunate escort.
The Resurrection Mary stories do bear an uncanny resemblance to these widespread tales. In fact, accounts of Mary by eyewitnesses have conformed to the universal model even more perfectly than do most second-hand legends, suggesting that it may likely have been this enigma that inspired that inspired what is now a universal “campfire tale” or “urban legend.” Indeed, the existence of so many first-hand reports raises questions about the assertions that Mary is mere folklore.
Reports of Resurrection Mary increased significantly during renovations of the cemetery in the mid- l 970s. It was also around this time that the phantom began to become more animated. and adventuresome. In 1973, Mary is believed to have shown up at least twice in one month at a far Southwest-side dance club called Harlow’s, 8058 S. Cicero Avenue, wearing a dress that looked like a faded wedding gown. A Harlow's manager described her as having "big spooly [sic] curls coming down from a high forehead. She was really pale, like she had powdered her face and body." Dancing alone in an off-the-wall fashion, she was as obvious as could be, yet, despite bouncers at the door who carded all guests, no one ever saw her come in or leave.[v] That same year, at Chet's Melody Lounge, an annoyed cab driver bounded in asking about his fare, a young blonde woman. The manager gave him the only answer he had: "A blonde woman never came in here.”[vi]
A number of years later, a driver happened to be passing the cemetery when he glimpsed a young woman standing on the other side of the gates, clutching the bars. Worried that someone had been locked inside after closing, he hurried to report the incident to the local police, who hastened to rescue the reluctant prisoner. Upon their arrival, they found the cemetery deserted, but their inspection of the gates revealed a chilling spectacle: not only had two of the bars been pried apart, but the impressions of a pair of delicate hands remained, bearing witness to the feminine touch that had accomplished the task.
When cemetery management saw the state of the bars, they reportedly called in officials from the Archdiocese of Chicago, who allegedly removed the imprinted bars and whisked them away. Akin to stories of aliens in warehouses are local whisperings about the mysterious bars sitting today in some secret Archdiocesan storehouse. Not long after the removal of the damaged bars, embarrassed cemetery officials installed what they called "repaired" bars, insisting that the bent bars had been welded back to normal and not, as many asserted, replaced with new ones. Still, some cemetery workers maintain that the bars were bent by a crew member's truck backing into the gate; the handprints were left by a worker's glove when he attempted to heat the bars with a blowtorch and bend them back into shape. In response to that claim, local believers say: Yes, the cemetery tried to blowtorch and restore the bars, to eradicate evidence of the spectral handprints, which witnesses continue to describe as the well-defined fingers of a frail female.
Whatever the claims, the tale's undeniable fascination lies in viewing the cemetery gates even to this day. For years, two strips of discolored metal remained in the exact spot which once bore the mysterious handprints. In fact, and there seems to be no reason to doubt the rumor, it is said that this part of the gate refuses to "take" either primer or paint. The result? An embarrassing but apparently ineradicable scar on the face of the cemetery and its management. About a decade ago, the cemetery painted the entire front gate gold, giving the illusion that a new gate had been installed. Upon closer inspection, however, I found that it bore the original repairs done after Mary’s visit. Then, during the pandemic, one of the bars vanished—either removed or stolen—and then the other. Today, as of this writing in 2024, a gaping hole in the gate evidences something just “not quite right” about this legendary place.
Years after I learned of the burned bars at Resurrection, I would discover an entire museum of artifacts burned by the hands of ghosts: Rome’s Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. And I would realize that we have another of these charred and otherworldly handprints right in Chicago’s history: the “hand of death” of firefighter Frank Leavy which, was burned into the bay window of the firehouse on Good Friday 1924, an hour before Frank’s death at an office building fire.
It was also around the time of the gate incident that Mary began to experiment with new methods. Folklorists have described a certain model of the phantom hitchhiker which is best termed the "spectral jaywalker," that is, the ghostly vision that walks or simply appears in front of a moving vehicle. One such story tells of a Justice police officer who called an ambulance after hitting a woman in a bloody white dress who was wandering the road in front of the cemetery. When the paramedics arrived on the scene, there was no trace of the distressed woman. According to legend, the officer in question went on the nationally-syndicated paranormal-themed television show, "That's Incredible!" and told of his experience. Before doing so, he was warned that he would be fired if he did. Notwithstanding the alleged threats, the officer told his story to network audiences and was, at least by local accounts, relieved of his duties.
After a bizarre decade that seemed to mark the climax of her restlessness, Mary was back to her old tricks. Yet she didn’t seem quite her old self. In 1989, on a blustery January night, a cab driver picked up a desolate young woman outside the Old Willow Shopping Center. Despite the inclement weather, she wore a beautiful white party dress and patent leather dancing shoes. Climbing in the front seat, she made it clear that she needed to get home, motioning the driver up old Archer Avenue. But this time she behaved differently. She seemed confused, unable to give lucid answers to the cabby's polite questions. Finally, with all the clarity she could muster, the girl remarked, "The snow came early this year." Then, in front of a time-worn shack across the road from Resurrection, the disoriented passenger ordered, "Here!" and disappearing without another sound.
Also in the late 1980s, two teen-aged boys were driving along Archer A venue at Christmastime when they saw a strange woman dancing down the road outside the cemetery fence. They noted that other passers-by seemed totally unaware of her antics; in fact, they didn't seem to see her at all. The teens reported the bizarre scene to their parents, who at once related the famous tale of Resurrection Mary. Never having heard the story before, the boys must have questioned whether the off-the-wall vision they had seen was really the same as the legendary hitchhiker, whose aloof sophistication seemed wholly unbefitting the wacky wayfarer of their own experience.
What has happened to Mary in these past decades? A ghost hunter' s classic summation would point to the disruption of the Bregovy grave during cemetery renovations. Investigators might theorize that this disruption could have caused Mary's apparent disorientation. Possibly. For, although the site of the grave was finally disclosed to the public after many years of secrecy, the plot turned out to be unmarked. Mary Bregovy’s was a "term grave,” a plot that was sold on 25-year terms during the ‘20s and ‘30s, in a section of Resurrection that was renovated during the '60s and '70s. It is therefore possible that the girl's family either did not repurchase the grave, resulting in the filling-in of the plot, or that they or the cemetery administration moved the grave to discourage the curious.
There is one other peculiarity worth noting. Resurrection Mary has traditionally been connected with the former Oh Henry (Willowbrook) Ballroom, where she is alleged to have danced during her lifetime, and where she is guessed to have danced her last. Some accounts, however, specify that on the night of her death, Mary was at a dance for Christmas or even Advent, the Christian season preceding Christmas. The fact that so many Resurrection Mary encounters have occured in December might seem to render this obscure lore somewhat more credible, although the timing would also undermine the connection to Mary Bregovy, who was killed on March 10th. Dealing only with conjecture about the behavior of ghosts, researchers continue to seek the Bregovy grave at Resurrection Cemetery in hopes of finding some end to a grueling but engaging search.
Whoever Resurrection Mary is, and whenever she may materialize, the apparent changes in this legend's "personality" continue to present a nagging appeal to the folklorists who have denied that Mary has any psychic reality, and who have accordingly classified her with other bizarre by-products of the oral tradition. Although I believe the 20th century tales of the Archer Avenue hitchhiker, I have long pointed out the similarities between these and the incident that occurred to musicians Looney and Kelly back at St. James Sag churchyard in the late 19th Century: a ghost story I discovered while working on my first book, Chicago Haunts, back in the late 1980s. The two ghost stories share a great number of specific elements, including the singular image of a woman in white, a cemetery, a vehicle, a dance hall and Archer Avenue itself.
Ultimately, regardless of the temptation to give in to folkloric categorization of Mary, the primary difficulty remains: a good number of first-hand accounts of these encounters have been recorded. In the case of urban legends like that of the vanishing hitchhiker, the incidents are supposed to have occurred to "a friend of a friend" or someone's "boyfriend's mother's friend" and so on. If we accept the first-hand accounts of this hitchhiker at face value, the phenomenon of Resurrection Mary continues to challenge the most skeptical observers, and to lure the most hopeful believers to her stomping grounds.
Susan Stursberg was one of the latter who decided to try her luck at spotting the famed and filmy form. Her account is unique in this author's experience, and deserves retelling:
I was out with a friend one night who had just bought a new car. I had not been to Archer Avenue and was itching to go, so we decided to take a drive. First, we stopped to see her boyfriend who was playing in a band at a nearby suburban bar. We said hi, told him we were going for a drive but did not tell him where. So we proceeded to Chet's Melody Lounge, talked to the regulars, played "The Ballad of Resurrection Mary" on the jukebox and some pool. We left in a couple of hours when 2 a.m. rolled around, drove to the cemetery gates, parked and peered in, seeing the repaired gates and getting a good case of the creeps. On the way home we joked about giving Mary a ride in the new car. Later that night my friend, Kristin, dropped me off at my apartment and went home to hers.
As her boyfriend, Mike, heard the car pull up he peeked out the window, then not wanting to appear worried and waiting up he dropped the shade. Kristin let herself in and closed the door. Mike asked, "Where's Susan?" Kristen told him that she dropped me off first. He asked, "Well, who was in the car with you?" To this day he swears that when he looked out the window, he saw a pale face look back at him from the passenger's side of the front seat.
Despite such compelling accounts as this and those others detailed in these pages, the doubters stand fast. Among them are those extreme locals like Gail Ziemba, who lives across the road from Resurrection Cemetery. Easily summing up her 20 years' experience with the legendary ghost, Ziemba maintains: "I've never seen anything." In response, believers would remind her that only men are privileged to see Resurrection Mary, although there have been cases in which a man and a woman traveling together have both reported a glimpse or two of something.
And while neighbors like Ziemba continue to shake their heads at the legend, other neighbors of the cemetery have been pushed to reconsider their doubt. Early one morning in late summer of 1996, Chet Prusinski himself, owner of Chet’s Melody Lounge, was backing out of his driveway when a man came rushing across the road, yelling that he needed a phone. He had hit a woman on Archer Avenue and couldn’t find the body. Attesting to his claim was a truck driver who had been driving behind him. He, too, had witnessed the grisly incident and remained at the scene to testify on the woman's behalf. Prusinski agreed to call the police, but hastened to disengage himself from the whole affair, fearing that he would be accused of staging a publicity stunt for his bar. The "accident” was quietly resolved and little was made of the event. However, those who always take note, took note. And, of course, those who always laugh, laughed.
Yet even those Southwest-siders who discredit Resurrection Mary know that much of what makes their culture special is wrapped up in the folds of her legendary white dress. And because of this, she is, even to nonbelievers, a priceless treasure, just as she was to a fictionalized witness in Kenan Heise's novel, “something precious, whoever or whatever she is. To her, I say, 'God bless you.'"[vii]
I was driving my Stutz Black Hawk through Justice in the dark
When suddenly the blood froze in my veins
She was standing by the road in an incandescent glow
My heart stood still, my foot slammed on the brakes
She said, "Please, please would you dignify my wish?
I'm trying to get to Heaven, could you tell me where that is?"
On a wild Chicago night, with a wind howling white
I caught my first sign of Resurrection Mary
I was trembling like a leaf, I was scared beyond belief
After all my conscience ain't that clear
I used to work for Mickey Finn, I did the numbers for Big Jim
Perhaps my day of reckoning lies here
I said, "Please, please, I would dignify your wish
But when it comes to Heaven, I'm just a little bit amateurish
On a wild Chicago night, with a wind howling white
I cheated time with Resurrection Mary
And I felt tears form in my eyes for the first time, I felt something
Deep inside and the first time I saw angels high in the air
For the first time in my life, and I said, "Mary, go to the light
It's gonna be alright"
I got down on my knees, I said, "Sweet Mary, please dignify
These wishes before you run", will you tell him I've reformed?
Will you tell him I'm reborn? She closed her eyes
And then she spoke in tongues
I said, "Please, please, tell me what he said", she said
"You must die the day before the devil knows you're dead"
On a wild Chicago night with a wind howling white
I waved goodbye on a wild Chicago night
-Ian Hunter, “Resurrection Mary”
Notes in progress. check back soon!
[i] “Girl killed in crash,”
[ii] Vern Rutkowski “wild boys”
[iii] John Satala, “hell of a nice girl”
[iv] Ibid
[v] Chicago Tribune Oct 25, 1992
[vi] Cab driver. “a young woman never came in here.”
[vii] “to her I say, god bless you”
CHECK OUT MY DOCUMENTARY ON MARY AND THE GHOSTS OF ARCHER AVENUE BELOW:
video of Resurrection Mary and Archer Avenue Ghosts
