On Tuesday night, August 10, 1976, the Justice Police Department received a phone call from a man who stated that he was driving past the cemetery gates when he apparently saw a girl locked in after hours. It was going on 10:30 p.m. when a police officer responded to the call. Patrolman Pat Homa looked for the girl with his spotlight and then calling out on his loudspeaker but to no avail.
However, in shining his flashlight around the gates, he discovered that two of the bars had been pulled apart. Imbedded in the metal were the impressions of handprints. On the surface of the green patina of the bronze were scorch marks and within what looked like skin texture as though someone had seared the marks into the bars. He related this story on the paranormal television show "That's Incredible" and lost his job over it.
The marks looked like they had been made by human hands and crowds flocked to the main gates to gawk at the bars that Resurrection Mary had bent. In an effort for crowd control, the cemetery attempted to blowtorch the marks off but it had the opposite effect. Now the bars were blackened and could easily be seen from Archer, and consequently more people showed up than ever. Disgusted with the publicity, and with Halloween approaching, the cemetery hack sawed the bars and installed a fine wire mesh for security reasons until the bars could be straightened and replaced.
The cemetery denies this story emphatically. According to a cemetery worker, Chet Kowalkowski, as reported in a Chicago Tribune article, October 25, 1992, a front-end loader truck that backed into the gates while doing sewer work bent the bars. According to Kowalkowski, the grounds workers tried to restore the bars to their original position by heating them with a blowtorch and bending them. The imprint in the blackened metal, he said, was of a worker's glove. However, if that is true then why haven't the marks reverted back to their green colored state that is caused by the oxidation of the bronze when exposed to the elements? It has been over twenty years and to this day the area where the handprints were discovered is still a blackened area.
On August 12, 1976, just two days after the bars were discovered bent, a Cook County squad car investigating a CB radio emergency radio call about an apparent hit and run automobile victim arrived near the intersection of 76th Street and Roberts Road. What they found was a girl in her 1965 Ford Mustang, CB microphone still in her hands in tears. They asked the girl, where the body was that she had just reported on the side of the road? She pointed to an area marked by a depression in the soft, wet grass that evening and which appeared to conform to the shape of a human body. The girl said that just as the squad car turned off 79th Street to come in her direction, the body on the side of the road disappeared from sight!
A man going to work about 2:30 a.m. had just passed Chet's Melody Lounge on his way to Argo Cornstarch when he saw a body of a woman lying right in front of the gates. He stopped his pickup truck to look at the young lady. She was still alive, so he went straight to the police station, got an ambulance and came right back there. However, the body was gone! The impression where the body was lying was still there though.
On October 10, 1979 there was a massive blackout in and along Archer Avenuebut only in Justice. Commonwealth Edison and the police were riding around in the cemetery shining their lights into the mausoleum because it was determined that the blackout was centered at the mausoleum in the middle of the night. The Resurrection Mausoleum is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as having the largest stained glass windows of any mausoleum in the world! The windows measure 22,381 square feet in 2,448 panels completed in 1971. And it's also apparently haunted.
The taped organ music, alarm system and lights go on and off by themselves for no explainable reason. There were reports by construction workers building the structure that the large religious statues would always be found in a different location when crews arrived the next day for work. Some form of teleportation was taking place here.
YOU ARE READING
The Paranormal
Short StoryThese are some short scary stories I found and wrote myself. It starts out slow, but picks up very quickly. Later on I will be sure to keep you up at night. (This is horror if it gets changed to short story again.)
