Archer Avenue

Now the ghost of Resurrection Mary, we don't exactly know who she is and she doesn't haunt this location.

She generally haunts the stretch of Archer Avenue in the Southwest suburbs near Resurrection Cemetery, where we believe these girls are buried.

Now, there are several candidates to be Resurrection Mary.

One of them is a young factory worker named Mary Brugove.

Yeah.

In the 1930s and has been appearing... ever since along that

stretch of Archer Avenue.

Have you gone looking? No, I mean, a lot of people did back in the day.

I know I keep saying it.

So this is along a road called Archer Avenue, southwest Chicago, near Willow Springs and Justice, Illinois.

I'm not familiar with Illinois very much.

So it seems that this is sort of an old story.

There's a few of them.

We did a Haunted Highways episode, you may recall, like touch on a few of those.

So drivers pick up this woman in white, like a young girl, and she's unusually quiet she says maybe she says she's cold she has to go to archer avenue and somewhere near what they call resurrection cemetery i guess that's a real place it seems like a crazy name but uh she just she the guy turns around or whoever's driving and she's gone she disappears whenever they pass a cemetery she disappears so So, the story became known as Resurrection Mary because of the cemetery.

I mean, it's one of those stories that's been told for a long time.

so besides that closer to home are there any other haunted places that were that your top 10 that we're missing that we should probably check out if we're not too too skinny

well if you're if you're in that area i mean are you familiar with um archer avenue and like resurrection cemetery oh

is it resurrection mary What is that

story? That's the classic Vanishing Hitchhiker story.

And, you know, the guy goes to this, this dance and meets a woman who is beautiful, but seems kind of distant.

And eventually she persuades him to drive her home.

And then she, He's driving home on Archer Avenue, and they reach the gates of Resurrection Cemetery, and she tells him to stop the car, and she gets out and runs into the cemetery and disappears.

There are other stories about a girl running in front of people's cars, and they stop and are panicked because they think they hit somebody, but then there's nobody around.

Drivers frequently pick her up, assuming she's a stranded pedestrian, only for her to vanish from the passenger seat once they reach her destination.

The same phenomenon surrounds Chicago's famous Resurrection Mary, who wanders Archer Avenue in a white party frock, continually trying to hitch a ride back to a dance that ended decades ago.

yeah

like was it she was super young right like i think she was like teenage

After midnight.

There is a stretch of Archer Avenue southwest of Chicago where, for generations, people have known the story before they ever drive the road at night.

It runs past Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, and farther southwest toward Willow Springs, where one of the area's most famous dance halls once stood.

Today the surroundings have changed considerably, but when the story began circulating in the 1930s, this was a different landscape.

The city thinned out along Archer Avenue, giving way to cemeteries, scattered buildings, stretches of open land, and long sections of road that could feel very isolated after dark.

Somewhere along that road, according to the legend, a young woman died.

No one has ever conclusively established her identity, which is important because Resurrection Mary's story has been retold so many times that legend and history have become intertwined.

The most familiar version says she was a young woman who loved to dance and had spent an evening at the O. Henry Ballroom in Willow Springs.

So it's an Irish place now that used to be an Italian place, but it used to be the roadhouse across the road from.

the Willowbrook Ballroom on Archer Avenue.

And it was built back in the early 30s by the same people that owned the Willowbrook Ballroom.

It was like an after-hours place.