Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

Spooked

Forestter Cobalt didn't look like I expected. Rather than cadaverous, with a shaven head and clothes as black as his attitude, Forestter showed up at our hotel wearing a green plaid flannel shirt. In addition to gingery hair, he wore a goatee. He looked like a boy who'd grown up in the Rocky Mountain foothills, which he was. He didn't look like a guy who channels ghosts.

He drove his mom's car, recently inherited, learning his way around his chosen home of Chicago. My small band of cemetery explorers was at his disposal, since I couldn't find a map that reached from our hotel at O'Hare to Rosehill Cemetery.

Established in February 1859, Rosehill Cemetery buried its first denizen that same month. Its current occupants include numerous mayors of the City of Chicago, Civil War generals, and a U.S. Vice President. Others buried there include Oscar Mayer, Aaron Montgomery Ward, Richard Warren Sears, the first publisher of Popular Mechanics, the inventor of the duplicating machine, the founder of Goodrich Tires, the creator of Schwinn bicycles, the originator of Cracker Jack, and the fourteen-year-old victim of Leopold and Loeb.

The Rosehill Cemetery Company's promotional booklet, copyrighted in 1913, said that when the area was chosen to become a graveyard, white roses grew there in profusion. Hence, the name. Graveyards.com and other sources contradict that romantic little tale, stating the name came from a mapmaker's error. The area had originally been called Roe's Hill, after a nearby tavern-keeper (or maybe farmer -- there are several variations). Weighing in at three hundred and fifty acres, Rosehill remains the largest cemetery in Chicago.

Joining the exploration on the spur of the moment was Jude Feldman of Borderlands Books. She'd been trapped for three days in the Dealers Room at the World Horror Convention. Our excursion to the cemetery would provide the first daylight Jude had seen in days.

Forestter took surface streets away from the convention hotel, through Skokie, past the Indian neighborhood with restaurants more tempting than the Panda Express and Steak 'n Shake near the airport. On our journey, we passed another graveyard, but it looked relatively modern, maybe 1940s. As a group, we voted it too small to merit our attention.

Forestter wanted to take us in on Ravenswood Avenue, where Rosehill's old main entrance stands. On the way, we drove down Peterson Avenue past acres of graves. This was going to be great!

Turning right, we paralleled the train tracks. As the road dipped and the tracks crossed above it on an old steel overpass, we got a peek at Rosehill's "castellated Gothic" limestone gateway, designed by W. W. Boyington, architect of the Chicago Water Tower. At the turn of the last century, as many as forty thousand people a day strolled through that gate.

Overshadowed by the train bridge, the gateway lacks much of its romance, even if the train crossing bears the legend "Rosehill" in white letters. Forestter pointed out the old steps leading down from the platform, where once trains dropped off mourners. A steel plate, drifted with leaves and trash, blocked off the steps and prevented us from going up.

We stopped into the office to pick up a map for a self-guided walking tour. Just as I noticed where they were racked, the phone rang. I would have asked the receptionist what she recommended we see, but didn't want to interrupt her. We turned to go and came face to face with the old plan of the cemetery, a yellowed parchment map of Rosehill without a single grave marked on it. The receptionist covered the telephone to tell us that the map had just recently been discovered in the attic of one of the neighboring houses.

While she was free, I told her we wanted to see the May Chapel. It was locked, she said, only opened to the public on the first and third Saturdays of the month, when they held a tour. We came from California, I said, so the outside would have to be good enough. It hadn't occurred to me to arrange a special viewing. After reading Winter Laake's ghost story in Morbid Curiosity #4, I'd assumed the chapel was always locked. As the receptionist went back to her conversation, we slipped out the door.