THE BEACH PEOPLE: The Lost Graveyard of the Lady Elgin Dead
This photograph of the burial ground of the Lady Elgin accompanied a Chicago Tribune article in the spring of 1899 (Newspapers.com)
This piece was written for my book, More Chicago Haunts: Scenes from Myth and Memory, published in 1999. It is shared here with some later updates, though other research may have come to light since those were done.
In early September 1860, the steamer Lady Elgin headed out of the port of Milwaukee bound for Chicago. Most of the passengers were members of Wisconsin’s Union Guard, traveling to Chicago for a campaign rally featuring presidential hopeful Stephen Douglas. Though foul weather was forecasted, the short trip to Chicago passed without incident. On the return trip that same evening, however, just before midnight a fierce gale erupted, causing a nearby, diminutive schooner, the Augusta, to approach the Lady Elgin for assistance. Out of control, the Augusta collided with the steamer, driving a hole into the port side
Terrified, the crew of Augusta headed for the safety of Chicago, not realizing the damage that the Lady Elgin had suffered. On that steamboat, all hands rushed to throw cargo overboard to raise the gash above water level. Even live cattle were hurled into the lake in a panicked effort to save the ship and its passengers, the latter bound to the vessel—for better or worse—when the Lady Elgin’s lifeboat drifted away. Shockingly, within a half hour, the Lady Elgin had sunk. Her last moments were witnessed by many horrified bystanders who had gathered on shore.
A number brave and selfless souls sprung into action. A seminary student named Edward Spencer saved some 17 lives, pulling people out of the water after descending over the bluff on a rope tied to his waist. Another, Joseph Conrad, was credited with saving 28. Such scenes were repeated far north and south along the Lake Michigan coastline, for bodies and wreckage drifted huge distances.
A number of purportedly haunted buildings on the North Shore bear histories tethered to the tragedy of Lady Elgin. The Gage house and the Artemas Carter (515 Sheridan Road) were used as makeshift hospitals after the disaster, the Winnetka train depot as a morgue.
In the end, more than three hundred death certificates were issued to victims who either drowned in the wreck or died from Lady Elgin being hurled into a sandbar by near hurricane-force winds. The crew and passengers had been close enough to see the the rocky North Shore and safety, but crossing the breakers had proved impossible. The loss of the vessel would remain the second-deadliest disaster in Great Lakes history, second only to the horrific Eastland Disaster, which took more than 840 lives in 1915 on the Chicago River—in nineteen feet of water.
The site of the Lady Elgin wreck lies today under sixty feet of water, several miles offshore from Highland Park, along Chicago’s North Shore. For years after the tragedy, local children fished artifacts—including passenger and crew members’ clothing—from the waves and sands of the North Shore, employing them as often ghoulish playthings. Divers, too, have brought up more than two hundred artifacts have been brought up from the site. Most of those were recoverd by one man, Harry Zych, whom the Illinois Supreme Court declared owner of the wreckage after a long court case. Zych, who wanted no part of selling the Lady Elgin artifacts, instead seeks a museum willing to restore and display them in a full exhibit.
Meanwhile, generations have expressed disgust for the lack of honor given to the makeshift graveyard established for the dead after the night of horror so many years ago now. Today, its location remains a mystery, and even local historical societies claim to not know where the bodies are buried. But we do have clues.
In 1899, a Chicago Tribune reporter visited the graveyard, in a “remote corner of the little village of High-wood.” He put it “due east as the crow flies, within the half mile” of the old lighthouse, now gone. That would have been the old Port Clinton lighthouse, which lighthouse-crazy friends tell me was right near today’s Edgecliff Drive, east of Port Clinton Park. The reporter mourned the fact that not a dozen people were aware that the site was a graveyard “at this corner just beyond the Northwestern railroad viaduct.”
When I first started looking into this case—some thirty-five years ago now—, from these clues I tried to figure out where the cemetery might be. Local historical societies hadn’t been able to solve the mystery, and I thought I might try my hand at it. I wondered if it might be on the grounds of today’s Port Clinton Park or of a little park on Burtis in Highwood. It’s hard to tell if “just past the railroad viaduct” means east or west of it. But then, in the article, the reporter muses, while standing in the cemetery:
It is possible to stand at this point and without much exertion to throw a stone on the tracks of the Milwaukee division of the Northwestern railroad.
. . . and it is much more than probable that for years people passed this spot time after time upon trains wholly unconscious of the fact that almost jvlthin hand touch of their seats were the graves of mourned loved ones.
This seemed to almost certainly show that the graves would be located literally along the railroad tracks, just south of Bloom Street and just west of the bike path today. It’s also possible that they are a bit further east, just past Waukegan Road. And that would make them, yes, part of someone’s backyard today. But we have further reason to believe that’s not the case. You see, when someone first tried to build on the site, the construction site soon became known as haunted.
Our reporter went on to tell of the days when Highwood was a boomtown, and many homes and other structures were flying up around the area. Every inch of land, it seemed, was being snatched up by developers, including the land where the dead of the Lady Elgin slumbered:
One of the largest of these structures was projected for erection on a site close to the place where lay the Lady Elgin dead. The burial ground, of which now nothing remains to show its sacred nature save two wooden stakes which mark graves, was twenty-five years ago not as completely unknown as it is today. The result was that when the ambitious residence was about half completed storle3 began to be circulated that it was haunted. Teamsters whipped up their horses when they passed it and the children took other roads from their homes to their schools. A pet story of the apparition that appeared was that it was that of a beautiful woman gowned in black and wearing a gold chain with a heavy pendant about her neck, with diamonds in her ears and on her, fingers, and with the water dripping from her robes. It was declared that whenever this beautiful ghost showed herself she seemed to be waving her hands as If in the act of driving away those who were erecting the structure. .
The reason for the story of the ghost taking this form will appear somewhat later.' It is worthy of note, however, that the residence was never fully completed, and was subsequently torn down, and of It today not a vestige remains.
So was that land ever built upon? Was this first attempt at it so notorious that it kept anyone else from trying to develop it? Or did the march of progress go forward, despite the failed former attempt?
As I updated this piece recently since it was first published in 1999, I found that the Highwood Historical Society had also been investigating the location of the graveyard, coming to very similar conclusions as I had: that it was very near to the railroad viaduct on Bloom. The nearby Highland Park Historical Society has shared the testimony of a local woman named Emilia Nafe, who had this to say in the 1930s as part of a local history project:
About 50 bodies were washed ashore, and many of them were buried here, where the Miller house now stands on North Green Bay Road. Nafe said, adding that the remains of about 20 people were later moved when a house was built there.
And so that seems to put our burial ground on the other side of the railroad tracks, along Green Bay—a troubling realization, as this area is all quite developed, especially commercially, today.
At any rate, the disregard for their tragic end may be part of the reason why so many tales of the Lady Elgin dead still circulate. According to sailors, the vessel has sailed Lake Michigan each anniversary night since its demise. Though the ship is silent, its passengers are not. In fact, seamen have long told tales of picking up castaways from the autumn waters who claim to have abandoned a steamboat en route to Milwaukee. While crews search vainly for the distressed vessel, the rescued passengers vanish without a trace, further panicking the bewildered rescuers.
Strollers along the North Shore, too, have told of similar encounters with wild-eyed stragglers who have literally walked out of the lake in the wee hours, soaking wet and begging for help for their distraught vessel. Interestingly, passengers of the Lady Elgin who made it to shore had, in fact, been aided by just such strollers—predominantly students from the lakeshore campus of Northwestern University—whose efforts inspired the founding of the university’s student-run U.S. Life-Saving Station in 1876, the first installation of federal lifesaving resources on the Great Lakes, which has since orchestrated more than five hundred rescues.
Legend has it the hauntings at Whiting, Indiana’s Whihala Beach may be at least in part tied to that terrible night and a number of the Lady Elgin dead tho washed up on those far sands. Visitors there have reported seen men and women dressed in Victorian clothing who walk out of the lake, especially during stormy weather or on the anniversary of the tragedy.
Without a doubt, the most compelling story of a Lady Elgin haunting is the story told to reporters by a Highwood carpenter who lived near the beach when the steamer went down in 1860. The man told a reporter the tale of the ghost of “beautiful woman gowned in black and wearing a gold chain with a heavy pendant about her neck, with diamonds in her ears and on her fingers, and with the water dripping from her robes.”[i] He said the woman had first appeared when a housing developing began to go up in the area—which was the site of a makeshift cemetery for some of the Lady Elgin dead. He claimed that whenever this “beautiful ghost” came around, she seemed to be waving her hands as if to drive away the builders.
The carpenter knew well who the woman was, as he had made four coffins for the dead of the Lady Elgin, including the woman’s, and had helped to bury their caskets in a makeshift gravesite that still stands today, unmarked, between Highwood and the bluffs of Lake Michigan.
The man had been on the beach immediately before the wreck of the Lady Elgin occurred. He had seen the boat go by the old lighthouse (a long-vanished structure predating the Grosse Pointe Light house),[ii] as it was common for locals to go out in the evening to watch for the steamer to go by, the vessel being one of the most famous on the Great Lakes:
On that night it was brilliantly lighted, for it had many excursionists on board. After watching it pass. I went away from the bluffs but heard of the wreck a few hours afterward and went south to that point of the beach where the people were gathered. The sight was something awful. On what appeared to me to be the roof of the pilothouse there were floating certainly more than forty people. All at once a big wave engulfed them and they were all lost. For days afterward bodies continued to be washed up by the sea on the beach just below the lighthouse.
I’ll tell you of one specific case which to me was at once the most pathetic and the most horrible of all. A woman clad in black silk and showing, despite the fact that she had been wave-tossed and beach beaten for several days, that she had been a woman of beauty, was finally thrown up by a wave of sufficient strength to give her body lodgement on the sands below the bluff on which stands the old lighthouse. We found her there and carried her to a building some distance from the water. An examination showed that on the body was a handsome gold watch, a thing somewhat rarer than it is now. While about the neck was a fine gold chain, to which was attached a gold piece of the value of $2.50. On the fingers were several rings, two of them containing large solitaire diamonds. The effects were left upon the body and the proper officials were notified. They arrived, but as it was late in the evening they ordered that the remains be left where they were until the next day. The jewelry was left upon the body. I locked the door myself as the party left. The next morning when the officials arrived the door was opened, but there was neither ring, watch, nor necklace upon the body of the woman. They had been stolen in the night.
Now I know what I am talking about, and I have the courage of my convictions. I saw the chain with its gold piece pendant hanging from the neck of the wife of a prominent Lake County official not six weeks afterward.
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[i]. This and the following quote from “Ghosts of the Lady Elgin Dead Desecrated,” Chicago Tribune, March 26, 1899, 29.
[ii]. Don Terras, maritime historian and director of the Grosse Point Lighthouse National Landmark, related to me that the only lighthouses standing in the area of and at the time of the Lady Elgin disaster would have been those built in 1855 in Port Clinton (Highland Park) and Taylorsport (Glencoe), both of which went out of service in 1859. The lighthouse mentioned in the Tribune article was most certainly that at Port Clinton.