Bachelor's Grove Cemetery
Midlothian, Illinois, United States
An abandoned 1880s cemetery in a Cook County forest preserve, the Midwests most visited haunted site and a real archive of immigrant gravestones, vandalism, and decades of visitation culture.
Bachelor's Grove is a one-acre rural cemetery southwest of Chicago, in use from the 1880s and abandoned by mid-century, and it has become the most-visited haunted site in the American Midwest. The reality underneath the reputation is substantial: a burial ground for German and Swedish farming families whose stones record infant mortality and short lives; decades of vandalism and stolen stones; and a documented folklore archive, with collections in university folklore archives and a WBEZ Curious City history of the place.
Visitors have been leaving tokens, taking photographs, and reporting apparitions, most famously the "lady in white" and the phantom farmhouse, since the 1970s, and the practice shows no sign of stopping. The site asks for honest framing: it is an old family burial ground that the city forgot and the region's imagination refused to.
Visiting
Reached on foot from the Pfleger Road entrance in the Forest Preserves of Cook County; the path is unpaved and the preserve closes at dusk. See fpcc.com. Stay on the path, take nothing, and treat the stones as what they are: graves.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bachelors_Grove_2008_entrance.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories