Resurrection Mary: the Queen of Chicago's Haunted Archer Avenue

Mary’s Increased Restlessness in the Mid-1970s

Reports of Resurrection Mary increased significantly during renovations of the cemetery in the mid- 1970s. 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 curls coming down from a high forehead. She was really pale like she had powdered her face and body." Dancing alone in 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.

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."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, as two strips of discolored metal remain 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 ineradicable scar on the face of the cemetery and its management. (Note, in the late summer of 2019, the two bars disappeared from the gate of Resurrection Cemetery. It is unknown at this time if they were removed by the Archdiocese or if they were stolen.)

As if this carnival weren't enough for the cemetery to bear, it was also around this time that Resurrection 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 some stories, the officer in question went on the nationally syndicated 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.

Paranormal Accounts Stabilizing in the mid-1980s

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!" disappearing without another sound.

Account of a Dancing Resurrection Mary at Christmastime

Also in the late 1980s, two teen-aged boys were driving along Archer Avenue 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 the same as the legendary hitchhiker, whose aloof sophistication seemed wholly unbefitting the wacky wayfarer of their own experience.

Who Has Resurrection Mary Become

What has happened to Resurrection Mary in these past decades? A ghosthunter'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 occur in December might seem to render this obscure lore somewhat more credible, although the timing would also undermine the connection to the 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.

Resurrection Mary’s Evolving “Personality”

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. With good reason.

One "lost" haunting, which is supposed to have occurred in the late 19th century at St. James-Sag Cemetery at the southern end of Archer Avenue, curiously parallels the Resurrection Mary story. In fact, the two legends share a great number of specific elements, including the singular image of a woman in white waiting for a ride in front of a dance hall on Archer Avenue.

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 of 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.'"

The Fortean Times’ Vanishing Hitchhiker

In a 1997 article for Fortean Times, a magazine devoted to the probing of baffling occurrences and related theories, Sean Tudor offered some further insights into the phenomenon of the so-called "road ghost" as he explored the phenomenon of the infamous phantom of Blue Bell Hill in Kent, England. As Tudor states at the outset of his analysis, "(I)t is to folklore that we must tum to gain any kind of understanding of what is really happening" in such cases. Indeed,

(t)he same PHH (Phantom Hitch-Hiker) script is repeated around the country and indeed the world with an identical pattern of events being reported over and again by reliable witnesses: of figures rushing into the paths of vehicles, and/or of disappearing hitch-hikers ... which suggests that it has less to do with any specific case and its accepted explanation ... but, at the same time, more than purely 'human' factors such as imagination and hoaxing.

In the case of Blue Bell Hill, one of the spirit's manifestations is that of a young woman in white, who has been known to appear in front of moving cars, staring calmly at their drivers while she is run over. Like Chicago researchers who trace their Resurrection Mary to any of a half dozen 1920s and '30s accident victims fitting her description, residents of the Kent region almost always tie their road ghost to a 1965 incident in which three young women were killed in a car crash on Blue Bell Hill just hours before one of the girls was to be married.

Highly skeptical of the connection, Tudor has his own theories concerning the "haunting" of Blue Bell Hill. One of the most intriguing is the relation of the story to that of the Cailleach of pre-Celtic mythology, an Earth mother or goddess who variously took the form of an old crone or a beautiful young woman. The Cailleach is known as a guardian of a particular sacred place, and it was Tudor's awareness of this mythology that allowed him to notice in his own research that great increases in road ghost sightings, including those at Blue Bell Hill, have occurred during times of environmental upheaval, especially during the construction of roads and highways.

With this in mind, Chicagoans might ponder the fact that the building of Archer Avenue over an old Indian road, not to mention the digging of the Illinois and Michigan Canal which it preceded, seemed to coincide with the beginning of that road's extraordinary supernatural history, a history which features one of the most famous of all road ghosts, the blonde-haired and beautiful young woman known as Resurrection Mary.

Another of Tudor's compelling explanations for the sighting of road ghosts goes back to the subjectivity of the witness himself. Referring to Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols, Tudor reminds us of Jung's theory that the unconscious typically manifests itself in the dream state, and often symbolically, as a figure of a woman or man.

The specific form taken depends on the gender of the dreamer. A woman's unconscious, then, usually resembles a man (animus); accordingly, in the dreams of men, the unconscious generally takes the shape of a woman or (anima). In light of the fact that the overwhelming majority of sightings of young and beautiful phantom females, including those of Resurrection Mary, are reported by men, it is almost easy to believe that the dreamlike state imposed by lonely late-night driving could be the culprit in so many of these cases.

FAQs About Resurrection Mary

Witness the Dancing Ghost of Chicago's Archer Avenue

Journey through the haunting legend of Resurrection Mary, Chicago's most famous phantom who has captivated locals and visitors for over 80 years. Experience the chilling tale of the young woman in white who vanishes into thin air along Archer Avenue, leaving bewildered drivers with unforgettable encounters.

Walk the very path where countless witnesses have reported dancing with a beautiful but eerily cold young woman at the Oh Henry Ballroom, only to watch her disappear at Resurrection Cemetery's gates. From mysterious handprints on bent cemetery bars to police encounters that cost careers, discover why this legendary spirit continues to fascinate ghost hunters and skeptics alike.

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Dive deeper into the mysterious world of hauntings with our curated collection of paranormal investigations and ghostly encounters. Read more stories like this in “The Original Chicago Hauntings Companion” by Ursula Bielski, a book of Chicago ghost stories written by our own American Ghost Walks team. Click here for more.

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