Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery is a cemetery in (Tinley Park, IL) Bremen Township, Cook County, Illinois, in Chicago’s southwest suburbs that is famous for purported ghost sightings. The cemetery has also been known as Bachelor Grove, Batchelder’s Grove, and Everden Grove (or Everdon). Bachelors Grove Cemetery is located in the southwest Chicago suburbs, approximately northwest of Midlothian and Oak Forest, near the Rubio Woods Forest Preserve on the Midlothian Turnpike. The land around Bachelors Grove Cemetery was first occupied by English landowners who moved to the region from New England in 1833, including Stephen Rexford, possibly the most well-known of the initial wave of Anglo migrants. According to Ursula Bielski, author of “Chicago Haunts,” the real cemetery was named after the first holder of the property title, Corintha Everden, who acquired the site in the first Illinois public land auction in 1835. The earliest recorded burials occurred about 1836, and the site today encompasses 82 lots and 200 graves, some of which were never sold or utilized. Burials, on the other hand, may date back to 1834, when German immigrant workmen died while building on the Illinois and Michigan Canal and were said to be put to rest at the site. The location is frequently alleged to have been a dumping ground for victims of Chicago’s organized crime groups (including Al Capone) in the 1920s and 1930s, although no proof of this has been proved. The most frequent reported occurrences at the location include floating rays of light above tombstones and near accidents with phantom vehicles. Haunting claims surged in the 1970s and 1980 and In the 1980s and 1990s, paranormal researchers James Houran, Timothy Harte, Michael Hollinshead, and Ursula Bielski conducted a series of tests in Bachelors Grove Cemetery. A photographic experiment published in the Journal of Perceptual and Motor Skills (1997) discovered that, while no unusual pictures were recorded from Bachelors Grove Cemetery, nearly half of the frames on both infrared and black and white films were unexposed. The findings are explored in terms of ambiguous events being viewed as significant as a result of paranormal circumstances.
