I Was A Teenage Ghost Hunter

I was 16 when the ghost hunters came to town. Start of fall, sophomore year. The year 2000.

I thought I was ready.

Some girls are sports girls. Some girls are horse girls. And some girls…are ghost girls.

Girls like me.

As a kid, I read any book about paranormal activity or with a ghost girl on the cover. I was obsessed with The Frighteners and lusted for Thackery Binx, the teenage boy cat from Hocus Pocus who very briefly appears as a human boy ghost at movie’s end. I even tricked classmates into thinking Ghostwriter, a friendly ghost from a PBS kids show, was communicating with me through a dollar store lanyard pen.

But for all the Ouija Board seances and Light As A Feather Stiff As A Boards, I had never been haunted myself.

Not for real.

Not until Real Scary Stories showed up.

“These are the real accounts of actual encounters with the bizarre and unknown. These are real scary stories.” —from the Real Scary Stories theme song/foreboding prose poem

The show featured teens all over America investigating their local lore, aided by a team of twentysomething producers. Real Scary Stories walked so Ghost Adventures could run. And of all the small towns in all Chicagoland, it walked into mine: Midlothian, Illinois.

The southwest suburbs of Chicago are filled with fields of dead and forest preserves. Some of our cemeteries are sprawling things named after saints. Some are small. Some sport massive mausoleums. Some have their own singular spirit. But only one is known for being America’s most haunted.

Bachelor’s Grove.

It’s home to The Woman in White, a Madonna that walks through the graveyard for her stolen child — or carrying a Ghost Baby. The Mobster, who appears in a yellow zoot suit and red light. The Two-Headed Man. The Black Dog. The Ghost Horse & Carriage. Orbs, fairy lights, mists. And of course, the Ghost House. A flickering farmhouse that appears at whim.

Most ghosts have a story to explain themselves. But in the grove, the tales contradict each other. Some have zero basis in truth. Some seem highly inspired by Jim Carrey’s yellow zoot suit classic, The Mask.

Bachelor’s Grove is a folklore junk drawer.

But why?

“If you’ve ever seen a really scary movie where the cemetery’s overgrown with weeds? THIS is that cemetery.” —Midlothian Park District Employee, Real Scary Stories

Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery was created in the 1800s for area loggers and white settlers. It became a mob dumping ground in the ‘30s. A lover’s lane in the ‘40s and ‘50s. A picnic spot in the ‘60s. And a sanctuary for Satan worshipers in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Chronic grave-robbing and vandalism obscure much of the true history of the graveyard, let alone whatever came before it. Here, the living did the dead so dirty, some families even moved their loved ones’ graves elsewhere. The two last official burials in Bachelor’s Grove took place in the ‘60s and ’80s. By the ‘90s, the grove was a rotten, forgotten thing.

It waited, in a state of disrepair and desecration, for three teenagers to turn up with their school’s AV equipment — and scream loud enough to wake the dead.

“Some people think in small towns, there’s really nothing going on. But we have this really haunted cemetery so close to us…and I think a video project is a good way to learn about it.” —teenage me, before crying so hard on camera that I had to sign a form stating I wouldn’t sue Real Scary Stories for defamation

Mark, Lisa and I were buddies, classmates, and the Blair Witch-tastic faces of the operation. Our beloved TV Production teacher thought if we could handle shooting the school announcements with a giant ’70s studio camera, we could handle getting camcorder footage of ghosts at a cemetery sleepover.

She was wrong.

“September 2000. Midlothian, Illinois. A high school junior and his friends plan to document their night in the local cemetery for their journalism class. But when they split up, getting the story is less important than getting out.” —Real Scary Stories

The plan for our episode was to spend the day interviewing locals about the grove, and then spend the night in the graveyard itself.

We held interviews over fried eggs and cigarettes in the diner. Quiet men spoke of The Woman in White. Sparkly-eyed women told of wild nights and fairy lights. People shared family trees and tried to tie the living to the dead. And one guy, we’ll call him Ghost Guy Steve, spoke of a “blue orb” experience so profound, he’d built his own EMF reader to take back for further investigation. It looked like a karaoke machine.

By the time we pulled up to the graveyard, the kids and I were buzzing with X-Files energy. Mark was the episode’s lead, and our skeptical Scully. Lisa and I were Mulder. She thought the crew might stage events to get good TV. I was willing to tolerate Ghost Hollywood tricks as long as we got real proof, too.

“You keep these rolling all night, ok?” One of the producers handed us our cameras and batteries as we trekked up the overgrown trail to the graveyard. Her hair was long and dark. She looked a bit like a ghost herself.

“They can try. Look at these levels!” Ghost Guy Steve, who had talked his way into coming along for a quick reading, said as he jabbed part of his EMF reader into the air. A dial on his machine hit the red. “Any electronics you have are gonna go crazy tonight. Ghosts are gonna suck ‘em dry.”

Mark and Lisa shot me a quick look. They knew what a scaredy cat I could be. I shuddered, but smiled.

We reached the cemetery gate — a torn chain-link fence — at the same time that a pack of true goths in faded black hoodies strolled out, rolling their eyes. The mall goths followed, their black tees still Hot-Topic crisp. They threw their jelly-braceleted hands up in outrage. They ditched youth group for THIS!?

Soon, even Ghost Guy Steve was told to go. The three of us were left alone with the producers…and whatever was behind the veil.

We hovered close to the entrance, where most of the cemetery’s remaining gravestones stood. Broken stone had been eroded by time or disfigured by vandals. One of the goths had scrawled on one with Sharpie: “Suck Satan’s Dick!!”

The ink was still wet.

There was a large tree where the cemetery sloped down to a small pond — a lagoon that acted as a moat between the quick and the dead. The tree was surrounded by a family plot, the biggest stone in the broken bunch marked “Fulton.”

The Fulton Grave. Where The Woman was most often seen.

“Look!” I said, and pointed at a small purple flower on the headstone. Mark smirked. Lisa giggled. Even I rolled my eyes.

Ghost Hollywood was in full effect.

A twig snapped, and I jumped. The dark-haired producer appeared, smiling, and handed each of us a lantern and a walkie talkie. “We’re gonna head back to the van. See you in the morning!”

She left. Darkness finally fell.

Showtime.

Sorta. The scariest thing to happen for a while was me kicking my lantern over and burning a leaf.

But then, we decided to split up. Mark would poke around the woods, while Lisa and I would stake out The Mobster.

My skin shivered as I followed Lisa down the slope, through a curtain of weeping willow, to the lagoon. I squinted up through the tall grass at Mark. He was far back in the woods, his flashlight bobbing around the pitch black.

“Hey,” I said into my walkie.

“Hay’s for horses,” Mark said back.

Lisa rolled her eyes.

“I’m gonna—“ his walkie fuzzed out.

For a while, we watched the headlights over the road, across the lagoon, and let the night sink in.

“There’s headstones down there,” she said, nodding at the water. “People threw them in back in the day.”

I wondered how back in the day we were talking. Then my camera beeped. My battery was dead. Already? I tried my spares. Dead, too. I thought of Ghost Guy Steve.

And then, we heard it.

The sound was soft at first. The sound of someone running towards us.

Or was it the wind?

Then it grew. It wasn’t the sound of a person running. But a horse, at a gallop. Then another. And another. And then it was hundreds of them. Rushing past us, hell for leather.

Loud. Invisible. Fast.

And then, they were gone.

We looked at each other, shaking. Then the walkie crackled, and we jumped.

“Hey!’ Mark’s voice crackled over the walkie.

“Mark, can you see us?” Lisa asked.

“No?”

Lisa pointed towards the Fulton grave. The crew must have come back to film something with Mark. His figure was so blasted with light it looked like he was wearing white.

Lisa’s voice was scared in my ear.

“That doesn’t look like Mark.” It really didn’t. The light was so intense it just looked like…someone. In white. So bright that you couldn’t even make out a feature on their face.

“Can you wave?” I asked. My heart banged around my chest.

Slowly, the figure raised its hand over its head.

And waved.

I was so entranced that I didn’t notice the walkie had slipped until it clanked into the lantern at my feet. Lisa and I ducked to right it before it could start a fire.

“Hey!” Mark’s voice crackled in my hand. “Did I miss anything?”

I looked up to the Fulton Grave. It was pitch dark now. No figure, no light, just the afterimage of the it all. I blinked it away.

It had to have been Mark. He’d just had a flashlight on. Or a production light. Once we got there, we’d see. It was him. And we were fine.

The soft sound of hooves started again.

Maybe another stampede was coming.

We could be away from the pond and up to the grave in five minutes flat, running.

I’m not a runner.

But that night, I ran.

Lisa and I bolted up to the grave. But…Mark wasn’t there.

“Hey!” Mark called down to us from the far side of the cemetery. Huh? Our heads snapped in his direction.

“Sorry, I was trying to find the house back there,” He explained. What?

“Can I see your camera?”

“Sure — ”

I ran up and snatched it from him. I sped through the tape, looking for ghostly evidence on the display. All I found was Mark walking in the woods.

My hands were shaking.

“Were you here tonight?” I pointed to the Fulton grave. “At all?”

“No,” he answered.

Lisa swooned, but caught herself. Mark finally looked scared.

If he hadn’t waved…who had?

Lisa watched me stare at my dead camera. A lightbulb went off. “Don’t worry!” she said. She held up her camera. “I never stopped recording.”

That night, we turned in our kicked equipment and tapes. The crew barely believed us. But the truth would come out when they cut the episode. We would see it captured with our own eyes.

The whole ABC Family-watching world would.

But when the episode aired, there was no Woman in White. No phantom stampede. Just me, crying in the dark. And a shot of a woman in the graves, wearing a long white gown. Putting flowers on the gravestones.

She looked a lot like the dark-haired producer.

That night, I finally realized there are more ghost stories than the ones we keep telling. That so much came before. And so much had stuck around.

Was I haunted? Maybe not. But to this day, I remember the feeling. The sound.

Hundreds of horses racing over the earth.

Ghost Hollywood couldn’t fake that, could they?

But even if they did, they couldn’t figure out how to put it on TV.

LINK TO EPISODE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCywEZdd7qE&list=PLu4rBHPgIKqTksWKSvcCmVBg-PSLd6dK5&index=8

LARISSA ZAGERIS BIO:

Larissa Zageris is the author of My Lady’s Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel, For Your Consideration: Keanu Reeves, Taylor Swift: Girl Detective, and many comics, games, and scripts. She lives in Chicago and is working on her great American ghost novel.

http://www.larissazageris.com/

twitter: @larissa_z