Bachelor's Grove Cemetery

Burials ran from the 1840s to 1965, with a last cremation burial in 1989, but the small, overgrown plot is best known for the "Madonna of Bachelor's Grove," a photograph taken by the Ghost Research Society on August 10, 1991, that appears to show a translucent woman seated among the headstones. Visitors have also reported a phantom farmhouse that appears and vanishes, glowing orbs over the old quarry pond, where by one rumour gangsters dumped bodies during Prohibition, and a spectral car with no driver seen barreling down the access road late at night.

Bachelor's Grove is a small cemetery in Bremen Township, Cook County, Illinois, in Chicago's south-western suburbs between Midlothian and Oak Forest. Its legal description is one acre in Section 8, Township 36 North, Range 13 East of the Third Principal Meridian; it lies across from the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve on 143rd Street, just east of Ridgeland Avenue, down a trail that was once part of the old Midlothian Turnpike. The settlement it served goes back to the late 1820s. The second edition of J. M. Peck's Gazetteer of Illinois, of 1837, already lists "Bachelder's Grove, in Cook County, eighteen miles southwest of Chicago", with "a large settlement". The settler Stephen Rexford said the name came from four single men, himself among them; Brad Bettenhausen, president of the Tinley Park Historical Society, thinks it more likely comes from the Batchelder family, recorded in the area by 1845, because the name was in use before Rexford arrived. Ferdinand Schapper's manuscript of 1917 gives the first burial as that of Eliza Scott in November 1844, and an article in the Blue Island Sun-Standard of 16 August 1935 records an earlier death date, that of William B. Nobles in 1838. The first legal record of the ground is a sale of 1864 in which Edward M. Everden set aside one acre for a graveyard. An estimated 200 people are buried there. The last burials are believed to be those of Laura M. McGhee in 1965 and of Robert E. Shields, cremated and buried in the family plot, in 1989. Some families moved their dead to other cemeteries from the late 1880s onwards, and the isolation and the vandalism of later years led others to do the same. The site was already a lovers' lane and a place for drinking parties before the road changed. In the 1960s the stretch of the old Midlothian Turnpike in front of the cemetery was closed to vehicle traffic; a drawing kept by the Fulton family shows a plan for a new entrance from 143rd Street that was never built, presumably because no easement could be had through the surrounding forest preserve. Once the road was closed, the historical society's account says, vandalism accelerated, with evidence of satanic rituals and attempts to open graves particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, and a peak in the 1970s. Stones were broken, spray-painted and stolen; Clarence Fulton, the last independent trustee, said markers turned up at the Cook County Sheriff's Police headquarters in Maywood, in Evergreen Park and at Chicago Police headquarters. Fulton asked Bremen Township for help with the upkeep in 1967 and was turned down. In the autumn of 1975 he asked the Cook County Board, and after clearing the title through condemnation proceedings the county took responsibility for the cemetery in about 1976. Its maintenance is now shared with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County.

The cemetery lies on 143rd Street in Bremen Township, Cook County, Illinois. Brad L. Bettenhausen of the Tinley Park Historical Society, whose history of the settlement is published by the Bachelors Grove Cemetery & Settlement Research Center, places it "across from what is now called the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve on 143rd Street just east of Ridgeland Avenue". The Forest Preserves of Cook County apply the name Bachelors Grove to their own holding at "143rd Street and Justamere Road". The burial ground itself is tiny: Bettenhausen gives it as "1 acre in the East 1/2 of the Northwest 1/4 of Section 8, Township 36 North, Range 13". Arrival is on foot because the roads were taken away. The trail that now reaches the cemetery "has been closed to vehicle traffic since the 1960s", and "the last remaining section of roadway known as Bachelors Grove Road" was "closed in December 1994". What is left of the old Midlothian Turnpike alignment is a broken asphalt path through trees, and the surface itself is among the more striking things on the site. The condition of the stones is the record of what was done to them. Through the peak years of the 1960s and 1970s, Bettenhausen writes, "many stones were maliciously broken, defaced, spray painted, and stolen". Markers taken from the site turned up later in Maywood and in Evergreen Park, and one was recovered at Chicago Police Headquarters. The distances are the measure of how far the traffic in them reached. People are buried here, and the graves are those of the settler families of the grove; the burial ground is the one their descendants can still name, and the stones standing today are the survivors of that campaign of breakage and theft rather than a set dressed for the legend. Bettenhausen's history, which is the fullest account of the settlement and of what happened to its cemetery, is published in full and free on the research centre's site; it was consulted on 9 September 2026.