Resurrection Mary

Ghosts rarely pair off at dances and let their escorts take them home. Resurrection Mary is an exception. She appears to "live" in the huge Polish cemetery in the western suburbs of Chicago called Resurrection Cemetery, and she has caused quite a number of hearts to flutter during the last 60 years.

According to Jerry Palus, she is a beautiful blonde Polish-American girl. The night he met her she was wearing a long white ball gown, and her hair was in ringlets. "It hung down around her head like Polish sausages," Jerry said. This was in 1939 at a dance at Liberty Grove. They danced together most of the evening. Her hand, Jerry said, was as cold as ice. So was the small of her back.

When the dancing stopped, he asked if he could drive her home, and was delighted when she agreed. She directed him to Archer Road. There she asked him to pull off by the side of the road, said she had to get out, and told him not to follow her. Then she skipped out of the car, darted across the street, and disappeared through the closed gates of Resurrection Cemetery.

Only then did Jerry begin to wonder about her ice-cold body. He had once been a funeral director and embalmer, and he suddenly realized that such cold flesh could not have belonged to a living girl.

Resurrection Mary is unusual in several ways. Ghosts are rarely seen by more than one person— almost never by two people at the same time. But late one night, Shawn and Geri Lape were driving down Archer, past the cemetery, when they saw a girl in a white dress running across the street. She seemed to be trying to slip through the heavy traffic, but she misjudged the speed of their car. Shawn jammed on the brakes as hard as he could—rubber screeched on the road—but the couple watched helplessly as the girl disappeared beneath their hood.

There was no crash or bump—just the awful silence that always follows an accident. All the traffic slowed to a halt. Shawn and Geri rushed out and looked, but there was no sign of any person under the car, nor beside the road—no sign of anything at all. The girl had vanished, leaving not a mark on the street, nor on the car.

Perhaps Mary lived before the age of the automobile, when crossing the road was less dangerous? Or perhaps she just likes to scare people; she certainly succeeded in scaring the Lapes.

Yet another strange feature of the Resurrection Mary story is that the beautiful blonde phantom evidently has phenomenal strength. Ask Police Sergeant Pat Homer. He went to the cemetery in his squad car in August 1976, in answer to a distress call about a blonde girl in a white dress who was reported to be locked inside. When he got there he could see no sign of the girl, but he noticed something that sent chills down his spine.

Hand prints had been pressed into the bronze bars of the cemetery gates—small hand prints, such as might have belonged to a young woman. But no human hands could possibly have made an impression on those bars. Pat Homer was left with the terrifying conclusion that here at last were physical traces of Resurrection Mary.