The Real Bachelor's Grove - a documentary by Jimmy O'Connor. Narrated by world renown paranormal investigator Mr. Dale Kaczmarek with Edward Shanahan, Dr. Chuck Kennedy, Jason Sullivan. Film footage by: Karl Kochmann, Len Dorman and IPFeldspar. Music by Thomas Prislac Jr.

This film is about the Real Bachelor's Grove, the history, the stories, the legends that manifested from this location are forever burnt into the minds of the Chicago area. From the desecrations that took place along with the many ghosts and the souls of those departed. Find out how it all came to be and what could be in it's future. . Very informative about the history of the area and the history of reports of apparitions, phantom cars, a moving house and the Madonna of Bachelors Grove date back from as early as the 1950's. 

In the fall of 1976 a high-school teacher from nearby Bremen High School began a Bicentennial project dedicated to the study and research of Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery.  During that time a direct descendant, Clarence Fulton, still survived and spoke of their Sunday visits to the cemetery, which was more like a park than a cemetery.  The small lagoon served both as fishing and swimming hole for youngsters. 

The site for the existing cemetery was said to have been set-aside in 1864, however the first evidence of private ownership of the land was in 1835.  In 1864 Edward Everden sold this land to Frederick Schmidt but set aside one acre of land to be used as a graveyard.  It is uncertain how many people are actually buried in the cemetery because many of the tombstones are missing and historical records are considered sketchy at best.  Some local historians have been suggesting that the cemetery is actually called Batchelor Grove Cemetery because of the Batchelor family who settled here.  However this author could not find any evidence in over twenty years of research indicating any validity in that story.  But I suppose it could be possible.

Experiences of “vanishing houses”—usually believed to be evidence of time slips or “wrinkles in time”—have been told in many parts of the world and in many eras. Probably the most well known of these incidents became known as the Moberly-Jourdain incident, otherwise known as the Ghosts of Petit Trianon, which supposedly were experienced by Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain in Versailles, France, in the early twentieth century. During a visit to the Petit Trianon, a small house on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, the two women claimed to have been transported to the site the way it looked in the eighteenth century and to have even seen buildings, a bridge and other structures that they could not have known about but that had been demolished years before. They also claimed to have seen the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and other prominent eighteenth-century characters. During the experience, the women said they felt an overpowering sense of oppression and a sinister feeling from the people and structures they encountered. They also described the scenery and its inhabitants as “flat and lifeless.”

The pair became interested in the history of Versailles after their experience, and they soon returned to visit the Trianon gardens again, but they could not find the path they had walked. Nor could they locate the bridge they’d seen. Further, while the gardens had been nearly empty on their earlier visit, populated with just a few antiquely attired people, now they were filled with modern tourists. In 1911, the two women published their experiences in a book called An Adventure. Though the book was widely popular, the pair was roundly shamed by critics, including the illustrious Society for Psychical Research, which believed the two women had simply been mistaken about the preternatural aspect of what they had seen.

Rougham Green, in the English region of Suffolk, has for a century and a half hosted a phantom house. In 1860, a local farmer, Robert Palfrey, was baling hay on a summer evening when he felt a sudden chill on the warm night. He looked up to see a large, red brick house with lush gardens surrounding it, though no house existed in the area. Some years later, in 1912, Palfrey’s grandson James Cobbold was driving a pony trap with the village butcher, George Waylett, when again the temperature plummeted and they heard a whooshing noise. The animal reared, throwing Waylett to the ground. There, in front of the men and the pony, had appeared a massive Georgian house, surrounded by beautiful blooming gardens, though a moment before there had been only a farm field and no structures of any kind. Seconds later, the house became enshrouded in mist—and then  vanished again. The house would be seen again in 1926 when a young teacher and her pupil were walking through the area and came upon a huge house with a wall surrounding it and huge iron gates at the entrance. Returning home, the teacher—new to the area—inquired as to the residents of the grand home. She was informed that there was no such house in existence. Sure enough, when the pair returned to the site on another walk, they found the spot empty.

Even the Chicago area has vanishing houses outside of Bachelors Grove. In the northwest suburbs, Cuba Road is known as an extremely haunted tract that runs through old farms and country houses. A “vanishing house” that has been reported by travelers reportedly seems as real as can be but disappears in the rearview mirror or is gone upon a return visit.

Perhaps no vanishing house, however, is more well known in the annals of ghost lore than the “magic house” of Bachelors Grove.

Several years ago, Amelia Cotter, a dear friend of mine—also a longtime paranormal researcher and writer—had the experience of seeing the house, along with the group of ghost hunters accompanying her. To this day, the event keeps a dark hold on her, as she tells in this account:

In April 2009, I was at the cemetery after dark with a group of about eight people. After exploring quietly on our own, we were mysteriously drawn together near the entrance of the cemetery, where we made small talk until one of us noticed a round light glowing through the woods, in the direction of the path leading back to the road. We all observed this light, having not seen it earlier in the night. I stood wondering if the light was coming from a distant streetlight, a house on the other side of the woods, the moon or even an illuminated street sign. A few of us made similar remarks out loud as we then watched the light change shape.

It took on the form of a rectangular window with a cross-patterned wooden pane. Its glow was soft and evoked a sensation of reading by candlelight or low light. This cosy image was offset by a deep feeling of menace, the feeling of being violated and looked into by whatever it was that was creating this “window.” The image developed further in my mind of a house around this window—an old-fashioned, classic-looking white house with a porch swing. Again, this normally benign image was extremely unsettling.

We decided to follow the light to see if we could find its origin. As if in a trance, we all got on the path and started walking away from the cemetery and toward the light. The light lost its window shape and became round again and seemed to move alongside us off in the distance. It danced up and down, getting higher and then lower and pulsating. It was thick enough for us to observe tree branches passing in front of it as it moved. For all our efforts to take photos, we could not capture it on film. None of us had video cameras and we just had regular digital cameras on us—the night was just meant to be an amateur outing for fun, and we weren’t at all expecting something like this to happen!

Before we knew it, we were back out on the road. We filed quietly into our van and didn’t speak of how strange it was that just moments earlier, we were totally fine exploring the cemetery, and now, all of a sudden, we had left. Like a deep-sea angler, this light had lured us out of the cemetery. It wasn’t until I got home that I “snapped out of it.” About two weeks later, we all got together again, and the others described a similar experience of realising later what had truly happened but not giving it a second thought at the time.

I was deeply disturbed by this experience and the images of the window and house, and I had a hard time talking about them for a long time. Every time I would think about them, I would feel like whatever “it” was that caused this to occur was in my thoughts again and, as bizarre as it might sound, was pleased with this effect it had on me. As someone who has studied and experienced the supernatural for years, I could not place this phantom house experience into any neat and clean paranormal category. I do not feel that what happened to us was associated with the good people buried at the cemetery, but rather something darker, perhaps a combination of something already on the land and drawn to the cemetery and the years of desecration and rituals that have taken place there.

I feel more empowered to talk about it now that several years have passed. I’ve visited Bachelors Grove several times since this happened, and I know it’s a very special place.

Amelia’s account introduces many common motifs of the widely experienced house of Bachelors Grove, which has been seen by what can only be estimated to be hundreds of visitors, based on the nearly sixty eyewitness accounts I myself have gathered the past thirty years without really even soliciting them. 

One is the style of the house. Every single account of the house describes it as a white farmhouse or farm-style house around one and a half stories tall—a simple frame house with a dormer or attic. 

A second detail—that of the cross-paned window—is common to most every sighting. The window is the focal point, and many witnesses have seen only a window and no house or have photographed only a window and no house. Particular to the window is a light burning inside. Witnesses insist this light is “glowing” or “flickering.” And some describe it as soft and golden and say that it is a natural firelight, not electric, although one woman who saw the house in the 1960s told Richard Crowe she’d thought it might have been light from a television set and remembered looking for cables that might have explained electricity in these isolated woods. 

The porch swing mentioned by Amelia, too, is almost always mentioned in descriptions of the house, and some accounts even talk about it “swinging gently.” 

The feeling that the house is “leading” one somewhere, “attracting” one to it, is also almost universally prevalent in accounts. Walking toward it only to have it “shrink” or “get smaller and smaller” before disappearing is, similarly, overwhelmingly experienced.

Lastly, and most chillingly, the feeling of menace or malevolence from the house and the impression that some intelligence is taking pleasure in frightening or unnerving the witness are emotional effects shared by a majority of experiencers and are reminiscent of the experiences of the women at Versailles so many years ago. 

It was commonly believed that no one had ever entered this magic house (or at least returned to tell about it). However, in 1997, soon after the publication of my first book, I gave a lecture at a library in the Bachelors Grove area and spoke to numerous patrons who had had experiences at the Grove earlier in their lives, including a man in his late seventies who had grown up exploring the woods surrounding Crestwood, his hometown. He told me that when he was a boy, he was playing in the woods near the cemetery with his friend sometime after 1940. This was a time by which the homes in the area had all been torn down. This particular afternoon, they had passed along the old turnpike and seen a house where a woman was waving to them from the porch. She was a grandmotherly woman, elderly but healthy looking, and she motioned for them to come closer. They walked up the front path, and when they got close enough to hear her, she said, “I just baked cookies. Come and have some!” Times being what they were, they went in and followed the woman through the modest farmhouse to the kitchen, where the smell of chocolate filled the cozy space. They sat with the woman and ate their fill of freshly baked cookies and drank coffee diluted with lots of milk and sugar. He did not recall what she talked about, if anything. When they finished, it was beginning to be sunset, so the boys said they had to go. 

The next day, thinking of cookies, the boys headed back to the house, hoping for another invitation. But the house was gone.

 Another story was told to me by a woman who had grown up in the area in the 1970s. She and two friends were walking down the old turnpike path near the creek one afternoon when they were startled to see a great gathering of people outside an old white farmhouse in a clearing in the woods. As she described it, there was a “long line of people, many of them dressed in long robe-like garments, standing quietly outside the door, as if queuing up for some event.” They thought maybe it was some sort of independent church or “some kind of hippie thing,” as it was the early ’70s. Readers may note that this was around the same time that reports of ritual activity began to circulate regarding the cemetery and surrounding woods, and robed figures—both preternatural and flesh-and-blood—were being seen with increasing frequency. When the young woman returned with friends a few weeks later, the house they had seen was gone. 

The late Richard T. Crowe, who grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, claimed to have collected dozens of drawings made by witnesses to the magic house, all showing a similar structure and style. A documentary he made featured interviews with two witnesses of the house who, as part of the program, showed similar drawings they had made of the house, allegedly with no previous knowledge of one another. Crowe also talked on the Eddie Schwartz radio show in 1976 about one witness who had seen the house and tried to get closer to it, knowing there was no house in the woods and realizing how unusual the situation was. He was running and had to push through some brambles and bushes, and he suddenly “found himself falling through the air. He had come upon the house, but it disappeared, and he ended up falling into the stone foundation of the house.” 

Some researchers have wondered if the house is the “ghost” of a home that once stood in the Grove—possibly even the phantom residue of one of the Schmidt family houses that stood off the turnpike road until the 1920s, when Margaretha Schmidt sold the property to the county. Certainly, the photographs of the Schmidt home or homes that have surfaced in recent years have fueled that theory, since witnesses have tended to describe a somewhat similar house. However, rarely is the magic house seen in this area. Most often, the house is seen either just past the cemetery and west of the old turnpike road or on the ravine of the creek by visitors walking between the cemetery and the creek near the quarry pond. As recently as 2015, the house was seen inside the cemetery itself by a driver passing over the quarry along 143 rd Street, the new turnpike road. She was driving home from work just before sundown and, as she always did, glanced over to catch a look at the cemetery, which can be seen from the road, across the quarry. Though she had made this gesture probably hundreds of times, this time she saw a white frame house standing inside the cemetery. When she made a U-turn, however, to come back around and verify what she had seen, the house was gone. 

In 2014, the house was actually photographed standing just past the tree line outside the cemetery gates, just south of “the Path.” Appearing to be a white frame house built on posts, the photograph—taken by Karl K—also captured the image of what appears to be a male figure walking across the path. 

In the 1960s, several witnesses saw the house in this same area. One such witness said she and her date were driving down the path toward the cemetery one stormy night and saw the house to the south of the path and a man with a lantern talking to the people in the car ahead of them, motioning for them to turn back and leave the area. When they returned some weeks later, the house was gone. 

Intriguingly, cooking smells have also been reported in these same areas, especially along the creek, where local residents Bill and Cheri Swinford smelled chocolate cookies or brownies baking one afternoon. On another occasion, a group of ghost hunters was at the “Keebler Tree” or “Holy Tree” using a spirit box (used to attempt electronic communication with entities) when they all began to smell Italian food cooking, including a strong odor of garlic. On yet another occasion, a visitor smelled barbecue cooking. Unlike normal cooking or baking smells, these smells are there one moment and gone the next. 

There were other houses here in the area, as we shall see, including two others whose inhabitants are now known, and both had strong ties to the cemetery. Of this, more later. 

Astonishingly, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had his own “vanishing” incident during the 1930s, when he traveled to the town of Ravenna, the former capital of the Western Roman Empire. Jung was quite taken with the history of a certain Roman princess and was very excited about visiting her tomb in town. After the visit, he and his travel companion went on to the Neonian Baptistery, an open building illuminated by four large clear paned windows. Finishing their visit, the pair returned to Switzerland. 

Twenty years later, Jung returned to Ravenna and experienced what he would describe as “among the most curious events of my life.” His impressions of the visit were described in Aniela Jaffe’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. Jung remembered the “strange mood” he fell under during his second visit to the tomb and, amazingly, recounted a “mild blue light” that filled the room of the baptistery when he again entered. He later reflected that, for some reason, he was not troubled by the fact of this light, though it had no apparent source. What was startling, however, was the fact that—where the four great windows had been—there were now four enormous mosaics depicting aquatic events in the life of the Church, including the parting of the Red Sea, the baptism of Jesus on the Jordan and others. Jung and his companion viewed these wondrous mosaics for some time before departing.

During his time in Ravenna and later, Jung attempted to purchase photographs of the mosaics from firms that specialized in architectural photographs of prominent buildings but discovered, to his shock, that the mosaics did not exist and never had. 

Jung’s travel companion was equally astounded to discover that what they had both seen was not really real and for years insisted that there must be some mistake, but there was not. There were, in fact, four clear windows in the baptistery and no mosaics of any kind. Nor had there ever been. 

Incredibly, Jung did discover that his revered princess, during a treacherous ocean crossing, had made a vow that if she survived she would build a church at Ravenna in thanksgiving and decorate it with artwork showing God’s power over the sea. Safely home, she kept her vow and built the Basilica of San Giovanni, adorned in mosaics, which was eventually obliterated by fire. 

Deeply puzzled and fascinated by his experience, Jung attempted to understand what had happened. After many considerations, he could only conclude that his unconscious mind may have created a vision, based on his “very strong kinship, culturally and spiritually, with the princess” and his “immersion in the total identification with the princess.” 

Could this be what happens at Bachelors Grove? Certainly, many visitors feel a “very strong kinship, culturally and spiritually,” with the history and people of the Grove. Are these appearances merely creative expressions of the viewer, powered by this strong kinship? Or are visitors tapping the psyches and realities of those long gone and actually seeing the world through their eyes?

And what about the blue light that accompanied Jung’s vision? Considering the famed blue lights that often preface apparitions of Bachelors Grove’s magic house, there may be much here to consider.

The team members walked through the cemetery in small groups, each holding a map and were told to record any changes in EMF and any psychic/anomalous experiences they may have had. The maps were compared, and several spots that overlapped showed in the comparisons.

The team members returned to those areas and did more in depth investigating, including taking many photographs.

It was upon development of these photos that the 'Lady in White' appeared, sitting on a headstone carved with a checker board pattern. No one was in the shot at the time the photos were taken, and no one in GRS was wearing the clothes seen on the figure in the photograph

The woman can be seen sitting, legs to the front, with her hands in her lap. She has long hair (many believe this to be brown, although it is only a black and white image) and a full length dress. Many believe the dress to be a burial shroud, while others believe it is just an old fashioned light coloured dress.

The loose parts of her dress and areas around her head appear to be semi transparent. Everyone in the team was understandably stunned, as were the media, who soon snapped up the story and put it into print.

It is considered one of the top ten ghost photos of all time.

Who is this mysterious figure and why can she be seen staring off into the cemetery?

The Ghosts of Bachelor's Grove

Bachelor's Grove is no stranger to experiences of a potentially paranormal kind. These stories date as far back as the 1950's, but with a location such as this, it would not be a surprise to find stories going back even further.

The tales take on many forms. The strangest concerns the road that leads to the cemetery itself. To access Bachelor's Grove you must travel along a dark, long dirt track chocked by trees encroaching along the path, in many places blotting out the sun as the ancient boughs join overhead.

It is apparently quite freaky in the daytime, let alone terrifying at night. Back in the 50's a story circulated that those who travelled the path would inexplicably see an old white farmhouse between the trunks and branches of the trees. Upon closer inspection, the house will have inexplicably disappeared. It is likely linked to the death of a farmer, who passed while ploughing the lands near the cemetery in 1870. He, his horse and the plough all fell into the nearby lagoon, drowning. Forest rangers have told tales how they have witnessed a farmer ploughing those fields, appearing and disappearing amongst the trees.

More modern stories concern strange lights in the cemetery. For the past forty-odd years it has been a place for adventurous (and no doubt horny) young people, wanting to hang out and 'try their luck'. It was also no doubt a place to venture on a dare, or just for thrills.

It was these young people who started to report the lights. White flashes have been seen amongst the now overgrown stones, and paths between graves. Stories of robed monks were shared, though these seemed to die out in the mid-80's.

In more recent times the stories evolved to include physical contact with unseen entities. The contact is always quite sudden and people claim the hands are clammy/sweaty, with the wetness lingering even as the shock of unexplainably being grabbed by an unseen force works its way throughout the body.

The White Lady's Identity?

However, the most famous ghost is The White Lady. She has been seen amongst the graves of Bachelor's Grove for decades. Many believe that her name is Mrs Rogers, a lady who buried in the cemetery next to her son. I can not find out why people believe the figure is Mrs Rogers, but the name seemed to have stuck.

The figure is also referred to as the 'Madonna of Bachelor's Grove', no doubt owing to the light coloured nature of her flowing dress.

Since 2004, the woman has been referred to by another name. Mid West Haunts has spent many years investigating the old cemetery, and on one of these occasions they snapped a photo of the lady in white. She is seen standing amongst the trees in the area of a headstone for the grave of Dora Newman. Since that time MWH has been referring to the Lady in White as Dora Newman, hopefully she now has the correct name!

Source: http://www.theparanormalguide.com/blog/the-lady-in-white-of-bachelors-grove