Episode 165: Resurrection Mary and the Legend of the White Woman

For ninety years, drivers on a dark stretch of Archer Avenue have been picking up the same girl. She is young, blonde, and dressed for a dance that ended decades ago. She is quiet. Her hands are cold. She asks to be taken home, and home is Resurrection Cemetery. At the gates she is gone—no door opened, no one in the road, sometimes only the feeling that the car just hit something that is no longer there. No grave fits her. The woman most often named died downtown, with dark hair. The girl who actually left the ballroom that night was twelve, and she is buried somewhere else. In 1976 a police officer answered a call about a woman locked inside the cemetery and found two bars bent apart, blackened with what looked like small hands. The cemetery said a truck did it. The marks stayed anyway, until the bars themselves were cut out. Richard Crowe spent a career collecting the rides and then was buried in the same ground. She is still the girl who never made it home, and Archer Avenue is still the road where someone stops.

Sources:

Hunting a ghost named Mary. (1985, October 31). Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/1985/10/31/hunting-a-ghost-named-mary/

Chicago History Museum. (2022, October 25). Resurrection Mary, the hitchhiking ghost of Archer Avenue. https://www.chicagohistory.org/resurrection-mary/

Deathly dancer. (1992, October 25). Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-10-25-9204060394-story.html

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